Free Republic

In only the third such ruling in the nation, a Sacramento judge has found to be unconstitutional a statute that makes it a federal crime for someone to fail to register as a sex offender and relocate from one state to another. U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton found that, in enacting the 2006 Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act, "Congress overstepped its authority under the (Constitution's) commerce clause." Karlton made rulings this week in two prosecutions and threw them out, saying SORNA does not meet the U.S. Supreme Court's standard for congressional jurisdiction over interstate commerce. Federal prosecutors immediately...

A man who raped women as an on-duty Los Angeles police officer, threatening them with arrest and jail if they did not submit, was hired by Los Angeles County as an X-ray technologist after he got out of prison, even though the job would leave him working alone and unsupervised with female patients. His hiring at County-USC Medical Center a decade ago was not an oversight. The man -- whose actions cost the city of Los Angeles nearly $300,000 in settlements for his victims -- disclosed his criminal history in his county job application. Both the head of hospital human...

SALEM, Ore. — Twenty-five years later, Diane Downs still insists that she is innocent of shooting her children, one fatally, in a crime that riveted Oregonians and was recounted in an Ann Rule book and a TV movie starring Farrah Fawcett. Next Tuesday, she comes up for a parole hearing. Anticipating a crowd of reporters and others, the parole board has moved its hearing to a community college studio. Downs, now 53, was convicted in 1984. Suspicion turned to her shortly after she arrived at a Springfield hospital, her three children wounded and a bullet in her left arm, shouting,...

BOSTON (AP) - A Massachusetts judge was just doing her job when she freed a convicted killer now charged with murdering a newlywed couple, the chief judge of the state Superior Court said Monday in a case that has become enmeshed in the presidential campaign. Republican Rudy Giuliani has cited the case to criticize former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's record on crime. Romney, who appointed the judge, has called on her to resign. On Monday, Chief Justice Barbara Rouse said Judge Kathe Tuttman applied the law to the facts that were before her when she made the decision to free...

Government leaders target teacher sexual misconductBy Robert Tanner The Associated Press Saturday, November 3, 2007 The state government would open its now-secret books on teacher sexual misconduct in Maine. Missouri school districts would be barred from backroom deals that let misbehaving teachers quietly move on. New York would be able to swiftly remove convicted teachers’ licenses. Across the country, governors, legislative leaders and top education officials are pledging to close loopholes that have allowed teacher sexual misconduct to persist. In Congress, legislation that targets such misbehavior has gathered more sponsors. The efforts follow an Associated Press investigation last month that...

Mahamu Kanneh, 23, was indicted in December 2004 on nine counts of rape, sex abuse and child abuse related to allegations involving Kanneh's two nieces — one 7 at the time, and the other 18 months old. Last week, a Montgomery County, Md., judge dismissed the case on grounds that Kanneh's rights to a speedy trial were violated. The local prosecutor is appealing the decision.

FORT LAUDERDALE -- FORT LAUDERDALE Sexual offenders and predators would be banned from living in 90 percent of Fort Lauderdale, under a proposed law the city intends to pass later this year. Commissioners said Tuesday they plan to join the long list of municipalities — 25 in Broward so far — adopting their own restrictions about how close to schools, parks and day-care facilities sexual offenders can live. The ordinances are intended to be tougher than state law, to protect children from pedophiles living nearby. Fort Lauderdale's proposal would leave more places for offenders to live, compared with some Broward...

PHOENIX -- Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas on Friday opened two new fronts in his push to prod judges in the state's most populous county to enforce a voter-approval ban on bail for illegal immigrants accused of serious crime. Thomas filed a special-action appeal with the Arizona Supreme Court, asking the justices to overturn a Superior Court commissioner's decision to allow release of a kidnapping defendant who, the appeal said, acknowledged to police that he'd been smuggled into the United States. The commissioner applied too high of a legal standard when determining whether the defendant was an illegal immigrant, and...

MAGNOLIA, Texas -- An illegal immigrant confessed to sexually assaulting 13 children when police responded to an emergency medical call after he slit his wrist, police said. Mauricio Ojeda, 29, remained jailed Wednesday on a charge of indecency with a child after telling police about the assaults when they responded to the call at his house April 29. Magnolia Police Chief Ronald Cunningham said Ojeda had self-inflicted cuts on his wrist and no pulse when they arrived. Ojeda was revived by medical personnel and said he had been "a bad boy" and had assaulted 13 children who had lived in...

McLEAN, Va. (AP) - Court records show a former president of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is expected to plead guilty to charges stemming from child pornography possession case. A judge in Alexandria today scheduled a plea agreement hearing for 51-year-old Charles Rust-Tierney of Arlington. It was not clear what charges would be included in the plea agreement. A grand jury indicted Rust-Tierney earlier this month on one count each of receipt and possession of child pornography. According to federal sentencing guidelines, a conviction at trial on both counts could have resulted in a prison sentence...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A former New York Mets clubhouse employee pleaded guilty Friday to distributing steroids to major league players, and is cooperating with baseball's steroids investigation. Kirk Radomski, 37, admitted providing anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, Clenbuterol, amphetamines and other drugs to "dozens of current and former Major League Baseball players, and associates, on teams throughout Major League Baseball," San Francisco U.S. Attorney Scott Schools said in a statement. "The distribution of anabolic steroids to professional athletes cheats both the paying public and the clean athletes and is a serious crime," Schools said. "This investigation shows that distribution...

"Lookism" is a crime most foul in a perfect world devised by radical feminists, though most women will usually overlook the crime when a good-looking man gives them a respectful once-over. But researchers in England, source of our common law, have identified a real crime: Jurors are more likely to convict "ugly" defendants than "attractive" defendants. The investigators are from Bath Spa University in Bath, the lovely Somerset resort where Beau Nash set down rules of polite society and where Chaucer set his morality tale of a witch who gave an errant knight his choice of a wife "foul and...

Saddam Hussein’s trial for crimes against humanity began before the Iraqi Special Tribunal on October 19, 2005. On November 5, 2006, the former Iraqi dictator was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Hussein’s appeal was rejected on December 26, 2006 and he was ordered executed within 30 days. On December 30, 2006, Hussein was hanged. The Iraqis bungled the hanging, but justice was carried out in less than 15 months.Compare Hussein’s trial – and remember, he had the blood of tens of thousands of people on his hands – with the trial of GA rape suspect, Brian Nichols,...

The national media won't tell you, but in Miami right now, a man named John Couey is on trial for brutally killing a 9-year-old girl named Jessica Lunsford. Couey, a convicted sex offender, kidnapped Jessica out of her modest Florida home, brought her to a trailer, sexually abused her, and then buried her alive. When authorities found her body, she was clutching a stuffed dolphin. Because of that heinous act, the state of Florida passed "Jessica's Law," which mandates that a first-time conviction for felony sexual battery on a child will result in a 25-years-to-life prison sentence. No plea bargain,...

LONG BEACH – Angering one victim's family, a judge yesterday sentenced four black youths to probation with 60 days of home detention in the racially motivated Halloween beatings of three white women. The sentences by Juvenile Court Judge Gibson Lee touched off another series of bitter words in a case that seems to spark outrage at every step. For the past few months, it has tested the harmony of this coastal city of 475,000, which touts its diversity. “The juvenile system is a joke,” said Barbara Schneider, as her 19-year-old daughter, Laura, sobbed on her shoulder. Her comments outside court...

Vic Toews' unfinished business National Post: EDITORIAL Published: Friday, December 29, 2006 Almost one year ago, our votes piled up in such a way that we elected a Conservative government with a short leash attached to its neck. The 39th Parliament has been able to pass a few useful measures, but in a splintered House of Commons, the government's agenda remains trapped within narrow limits in many areas. Unfortunately for Canadians, one of these areas is criminal justice, one of the Conservatives' strongest electoral suits. In the past, Canadians have tolerated, rather than celebrated, the lax policies of Liberal...

For Fredy Lopez-Gamez, American justice has been a revolving door. In September, after four arrests in Colorado Springs, he was finally deported by the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to his native Mexico, a free ride home that didn’t keep him away for long. Within two months, police say, he was back, masterminding the brazen kidnapping of a prominent local businessman on Nov. 25. Three days after the kidnapping, a prior felony drug case that could have netted Lopez-Gamez four to 12 years in prison was dropped. Prosecutors thought he was still in Mexico, and a judge ordered...

THERE WAS an average of about one murder a day in Philadelphia last year, the most homicides in about seven years. One of the reasons, according to the mayor and police commissioner, is that guns are too easy to obtain in Philadelphia. If easy access to guns were responsible for homicides, then gun clubs would be the most dangerous places on the planet. But it isn't - and they aren't. In 1998, the city was also trying to solve the homicide problem. The city brain trust created a Youth Violence Task Force that included such liberal luminaries as Temple law...

WASHINGTON - Put this in your pipe and smoke it: A University of Massachusetts professor says the medical marijuana grown by the federal government isn't very good. He wants a permit to cultivate his own pot, saying it will be better for research. Lyle Craker, a horticulturist who heads the school's medicinal plant program, is challenging the government's 36-year-old monopoly on research marijuana. Craker's suit claims government-grown marijuana lacks the potency medical researchers need to make important breakthroughs. "The government's marijuana just isn't strong enough," said Richard Doblin, a Craker supporter who heads the Massachusetts-based Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies....

It is fashionable among death-penalty opponents to claim that life in prison without the possibility of parole amounts to worse punishment than the death penalty. For example, Bill Kurtis, host of A&E's "Investigative Reports" who has written a book advocating abolition of the death penalty, asserts that: "Life without parole is bad. Worse than [executing] somebody." If death-penalty opponents truly believe this, then why would the supporters of Tookie Williams be so avidly advocating the commutation of his death sentence to life without parole? It's hard to believe they wish to inflict harsher punishment on Williams. Isn't this proof that,...