CRIMINAL JURISDICTION

Criminal Law Blog by Defense Lawyer John Floyd and Mr. Billy Sinclair

March 14, 2010

BAD MOON ON THE RISE

Filed under: Anti-Terrorism Lawyer — Tags: , , , , — johntfloyd @ 3:52 pm

Keep America Safe: Right Wing Fanatics Attack Lawyers, Constitution, and Fundamental Right to Legal Representation

By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

Every major movement or cause throughout this nation’s history which sought constitutional protections for those the government had denied, from racial minorities ostracized by segregationists laws to those persecuted for their religious beliefs, was led by lawyers. Our fundamental notions of social justice, which are grounded in this nation’s Bill of Rights and in Federal and state constitutions form the original colonies, exist because of the courage of lawyers to form, frame and preserve those notions. Lawyers have always borne the brunt of criticism from political conservatives who really believe in many respects that our government should be run as a totalitarian state like fascism. We saw this tragic reality when the Klu Klux Klan was once one of the most powerful political forces in this country, when McCarthyism’s “guilt by association” became the rule of law, and when segregationists labeled civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King “agents of communism.” It was lawyers who led the way in bringing about an end to the underlying fanatical political ideology that created and sustained the government-sponsored repression of social justice during each of these dark moments in our nation’s history.

This repressive McCarthyism-like political ideology has once again reared its ugly head. This time the charge is being led by a conservative political group called Keep America Safe. The target of the group’s anti-Democratic efforts are lawyers who represent suspected terrorists, and in particular government lawyers who, as the New York Times reported in a March 9, 2010 article by John Schwartz, “worked in the past on behalf of detained terrorism suspects.”

Keep America Safe is led by Liz Cheney, the daughter of former White House Vice-President Dick Cheney who has repeatedly expressed his disdain for anyone who believes terror suspects enjoy “rights.” Keep America Safe earlier this month released a video that questioned the loyalty of a number of U.S. Justice Department lawyers in the Obama administration who have represented Guantanamo Bay prison detainees before the courts.

The Keep America Safe video is so far out there in McCarthyism’s lunatic right fringe that even some traditional mainstream conservative political groups, like the Federalist Society, have rebuked it on the fundamental constitutional principle that even the most unpopular individual charged with an offense against the laws of this country has a right to a lawyer. Perhaps Liz Cheney was buoyed by the recent stunning upset election of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown who made the “war on terror” the central feature of his campaign with rhetoric like the government should not be “wasting” money providing lawyers to terrorists. We suspect Ms. Cheney and Keep America Safe wanted to curry favor with those elements of the Tea Party movement who regularly show up at rallies dressed in revolutionary war garb waving signs proclaiming the government has been taken over by socialists.

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March 9, 2010

TEXAS DEATH PENALTY PROCEDURE UNCONSTITUTIONAL?

Filed under: Death Penalty Crimes Lawyer — Tags: , , , , — johntfloyd @ 12:37 am

Judge Acknowledges Innocent People Have Likely been Executed

Harris County Criminal District Court Judge Kevin Fine on Thursday, March 4, 2010, created a tsunami of controversy in the Texas legal community when he reportedly made a comment that he was declaring the state’s death penalty unconstitutional. The comment was made during a hearing on a motion filed by defense attorneys in the case of John Edward Green Jr. who is facing a capital murder charge. What Judge Fine actually did was to declare Article 37.071 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure unconstitutional which is the statute that outlines the procedures for imposing the death sentence in this state.

“Are you willing to have your brother, your father, your mother be the sacrificial lamb, to be the innocent person executed so that we can have a death penalty, so that we can execute those who are deserving of the death penalty?” Judge Fine mused from the bench. “I don’t think society’s mindset is that way now.”

The reaction to Judge Fine’s comment/ruling was immediate and volatile. Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos issued a statement respectfully disagreeing with the ruling: “We respectfully, but vigorously, disagree with the trial judge’s ruling, as it has no basis in law or fact. Words are inadequate to describe the Office’s disappointment and dismay with the ruling; sadly it will delay justice for the victims and their families. We will pursue all [appeal] remedies.”

But Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Attorney General Greg Abbott were not so understanding in their reactions to Judge Fine’s ruling. Abbott called the decision “an act of unabashed judicial activism.”

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March 5, 2010

BIG BROTHER’S WATCHING!

Filed under: Drug Defense Attorney — Tags: , , , , — johntfloyd @ 3:02 am

Law Enforcement Seeks Cell Phone Surveillance in Continued War on Crime; But Who’s Watching Them?  …Federal Judges

In an article titled “The Snitch In Your Pocket,” Newsweek Magazine (March 1, 2010) reported that in recent years Federal prosecutors have been “seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records, internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers’ cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact.” The prosecutors justified their pursuit of this individualized personal information “to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials” through their cell phones.

These Federal prosecutors have been using the Stored Communications Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d), to get Federal magistrates to issue what’s called “2703(d)” orders which allows prosecutors intrusive access into the private lives of this nation’s citizens. Federal prosecutors prefer using the Stored Communications Act over the more stringent Pen Registers Act, 18 U.S.C. § 3121, which requires them to support their court order requests with an affidavit articulating the probable cause necessary for law enforcement officials to install any sort of tracking device on cell phones.

But Newsweek reported that “the FBI and other law enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing ‘probable cause,’ according to law enforcement officials, court records and telecommunication executives.”

While these Orwellian law enforcement types have historically gone after private information such as e-mails, bank records, and credit card transactions, they have more recently made “cell-phone tracking” their sport of choice in the individual privacy snooping game. Cell-phone tracking allows these “covert operations” specialists to track the movements of not only those they suspect of criminal wrongdoing but also of those who may simply pose a non-criminal point of interest to them. Jack Killorin, who heads a Federal task force in Atlanta, told Newsweek that “cell-phone records have helped his agents crack many cases, such as the brutal slaying of a DeKalb County sheriff; agents got the cell-phone records of key suspects—and then showed that they were all within a one-mile area of the murder at the time it occurred, he said. In the fall of 2008, Killorin says, his agents were able to follow a Mexican drug cartel truck carrying 2,200 kilograms of cocaine by watching the real time as the driver’s cell phone ‘shook hands’ with each cell-phone tower it passed on the highway. ‘It’s a tremendous investigative tool,’ says Killorin. And not that unusual: ‘This is pretty workday stuff for us.”

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February 26, 2010

PROBLEMS WITH POSITIVE IDENTIFICATIONS

Filed under: Houston Criminal Lawyer — Tags: , , , , , — johntfloyd @ 3:57 pm

Leading Cause of Wrongful Convictions: Mistaken Identification by Eyewitnesses

By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

There have been 251 innocent people exonerated in this country by DNA evidence over the last two decades. The most disturbing aspect of this phenomenon of “convicting the innocent” is that more than 75 percent of those convictions involved mistaken identifications (according to the New York-based Innocence Project)—one or more witnesses pointing a finger of guilt at the wrong person. What is even more disturbing is that at least one-third of these mistaken identification cases involved two or more witnesses.

The lesson in these shocking figures is that what people see, or believe they saw, is not always reliable. This is especially true when the witness identification procedure is corrupted by rogue cops deliberately trying to frame innocent individuals. That’s what happened to Donald Wayne Good who, on June 18, 1983, was arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment in Irving, Texas for an aggravated rape, aggravated robbery, and burglary of a habitation for which he did not commit.

Beyond a doubt someone did break into the home of “Jane Doe,” bound her and her eight-year-old daughter, and forced Doe into a bedroom in the home where he raped the mother. The local Irving Police Department arrived after and processed the crime scene. The rape victim was taken to a local hospital where a “rape kit” examination was performed. After this examination was conducted, the victim met with investigators at which time she described her attacker as a white male in his mid-20s, six feet tall, weighing 190 pounds, clean shaven, with a dark tanned medium or large build, and blondish-brown hair. Based on this description, a police sketched artist prepared a “composite sketch” which was distributed throughout the Irving Police Department.

This is where Irving police detective Fred Curtis came into the picture. One of the detectives assigned to the Doe rape investigation, Curtis had been investigating a number of other “unsolved daytime burglaries” in the area. Curtis believed Good, who had been arrested three days (and subsequently released) before the Doe rape for bond forfeiture of a previous DWI arrest, was involved in the daytime burglaries. The detective called Good into his office to interview him about the string of burglaries. The interrogation didn’t go well for Curtis because Good refused to cooperate with the investigation. At this point in the interrogation the detective snatched up the composite sketch of the Doe rapist he had just received and told Good he looked “somewhat similar” to the rapist. And the detective then threatened Good by telling the suspect that he could “fix it” to make sure Good looked just like the Doe rapist if he didn’t cooperate. Good still refused to cooperate.

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February 24, 2010

A TIP OF THE HAT FOR A JOB WELL DONE

Filed under: Homicide Crimes Lawyer — Tags: , , , , — johntfloyd @ 1:18 pm

Court Recommends New Trial for Man Sentenced to Life in Prison for Capital Murder After Finding State’s Expert Testimony Incompetent

By: Houston Criminal Lawyer John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

We have blogged rather extensively about the “convict at any costs” agenda which has ruled the Harris County District Attorney’s Office for the past three decades. “Convict at any costs” means the frequent use of fabricated forensic evidence, knowingly allowing perjured testimony into a criminal trial, withholding exculpatory evidence from defendants (particularly those known to be innocent), and injecting race in its death penalty decision-making.

These experiences with the Harris County District Attorney’s Office do not give rise to much hope that a District Attorney could be an example of courage. But that is precisely what we found in the recent actions of former Montgomery County District Attorney Michael McDougal, who lost his bid for re-election to Brett Ligon. Nearly 12 years ago McDougal’s office prosecuted Neil Hampton Robbins for capital murder in connection with the death of Robbins’ former girlfriend’s 17-month-old daughter, Tristen Rivet. Robbins was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the toddler’s death.

Robbins’ conviction was based in large part of the testimony then Harris County Medical Examiner, Dr. Patricia Moore. We have also blogged in the past about Dr. Moore’s history of providing false or discredited testimony in child death cases. http://www.johntfloyd.com/comments/september09/17.htm On January 22, 2010, the proverbial chickens came home to roost in the Neil Robbins case. Montgomery County District Court Judge K. Michael Mayes ruled that Dr. Moore had given inept testimony during Robbins’ May 1998 murder trial. Judge Mayes’ concluded the former medical examiner was too incompetent “to offer objective and pathologically sound opinions on the cause and manner of [the] death [of Tristen Rivet].”

In May of 2007 Dr. Moore tried to clean up the testimony she had given in the Robbins case by reviewing her findings that Tristen Rivet’s death was a homicide. Based on unidentified information she said she had not reviewed in her original examination of Rivet’s body (after which she found the toddler’s death was a homicide caused by a compressed skull), Dr. Moore changed her “cause of death” finding from homicide to “undetermined.”

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February 18, 2010

AN ELECTION TORPEDOES THE CONSTITUTION

Filed under: Anti-Terrorism Lawyer — johntfloyd @ 6:01 pm

Politics of Terror Threaten Constitution

By:  Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

The recent election of Republican Senator Scott Brown in Massachusetts has effectively torpedoed the constitutional right to silence by any “terror suspect” arrested on American soil. Elected to replace the legendary liberal Senator Ted Kennedy, who died of brain cancer last August, Brown used the “politics of terror” to seal his stunning upset victory over Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley. Brown accused the Obama administration of being “soft on terror” with its decisions to close Guantanamo Bay and to prosecute “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and co-conspirators in a New York federal civilian court rather than before a military tribunal.

These two decisions have drawn the political ire of Republicans across the country, as well as many conservative-moderate Democrats, including New York’s senior senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer who, along with New York’s Republican Mayor Michael Blumberg, have lobbied the Obama administration to move the KSM trial out of New York and into some more remote region of the country. Scott Brown effectively manipulated this political unrest to rise from the depths of a “long shot candidate” into the “winner’s circle”—a political victory that simultaneously resurrected the Republican Party from the ashes of political demise and put the Obama administration in the cross hairs of a deepening political crisis.

Then the Christmas Day bombing attempt of a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit by a Nigerian native named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab stunned the nation. Abdulmutallab was seized, taken into custody by the FBI, and underwent some custodial interrogation before he was advised of his Miranda right to remain silent and given counsel. The FBI did not contact any of the nation’s intelligence agencies prior to interrogating or advising Abdulmutallab of his Miranda rights. The law enforcement interrogation effectively ceased after the terror suspect was advised of his right to silence and counsel appointed to represent him.

Republicans, and Scott Brown in particular, seized upon the Justice Department’s handling of the “Christmas Day bombing case” as further evidence of the Obama administration’s “soft on terror” policies first scorned by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Brown, who by Christmas Day has already surged almost even with Coakley in the polls, used the Abdulmutallab case to rally angry Massachusetts voters even more, telling them that their tax dollars should not be used to pay for “lawyers for terrorists.” He reiterated these campaign views on January 20, 2010 in his U.S. Senate seat victory speech.

“I believe that our Constitution and laws exist to protect this nation,” Brown said. “They do not grant rights and privileges to enemies in wartime. In dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.”

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February 15, 2010

RELEASED SEX OFFENDERS – A GROWING UNDERCLASS

Filed under: Child Abuse Crimes Lawyer, Sexual Assault Crime Attorney — Tags: , , — johntfloyd @ 11:17 am

By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair

In 1994 the United States Congress passed the Jacob Wetterling Crimes Against Children and Sexually Violent Offender Registration Act which required all states to create programs mandating that certain kinds of sex offenders register with state or local authorities. Congress added teeth to the Act by threatening the states with a ten percent loss of federal anti-crime funding for failure to comply.

Child protection advocates like Marc Klaas, whose daughter (Polly) was brutally raped and murdered in the 1990s by a released sex offender who is currently on California’s death row, offer these reasons for sex offender registration laws:

  • Sex offenders pose a high risk of re-offending after release from custody;
  • Protecting the public from sex offenders is a primary governmental interest;
  • The privacy interests of persons convicted of sex offenses are less important than the government’s interest in public safety; and
  • Release of certain information about offenders to public agencies and the general public will assist in protecting the public safety.

Two years later, in 1996, Congress amended the Jacob Wetterling Act with Megan’s Law which mandated “community notification” when a sex offender moves into a given neighborhood. The notification laws make public virtually all private information about sex offenders. Klaas defends “notification” laws on these grounds:

  • Assists law enforcement in investigations;
  • Establishes legal grounds to hold known offenders;
  • Deters sex offenders from committing new offenses;
  • Offers citizens information they can use to protect children from victimization.

Then in 2006 President George W. Bush signed into law the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act. This Act requires the U.S. Justice Department to create a national sex offender database accessible to the public through the Internet allowing nationwide searches about registered sex offenders.

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February 11, 2010

MICHAEL JACKSONS DOCTOR CHARGED WITH INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER

Filed under: Drug Defense Attorney — Tags: , , , , — johntfloyd @ 7:06 pm

By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair.

How do you save someone determined to destroy himself?

That question will surely be in the mind of most jurors who will ultimately decide the personal and professional fate of Dr. Conrad Murray, a Houston cardiologist, who was formally charged on February 8, 2010 with involuntary manslaughter in Los Angeles in connection with Michael Jackson’s death. Murray was the superstar’s personal physician last June when he administered the powerful anesthetic propofol and two sedatives to help Jackson, a renowned insomniac, get some sleep. The sleep aids put the pop singer to sleep permanently.

Michael Jackson was an exceedingly complex individual. His life was a tragic chronicle of drug use and abuse. He did things to his own life (and to the lives of others) that would have destroyed most other mere mortals. Despite a host of admirable personal qualities and an immeasurable amount of professional talent, he was a living portrait of self-destruction. He had been warned on several occasions about the dangers of using propofol. It is one of the most powerful and dangerous drugs that can be administered to the human body outside a very tightly-controlled medical environment. Jackson was still willing to risk his life on a regular basis by taking the drug because it helped him sleep when, in actuality, it didn’t help him sleep; it simply rendered him unconscious.

Dr. Conrad Murray was born to a poor single mother nearly 57 years ago in Grenada, a small Caribbean island made famous by former President Ronald Reagan’s military invasion of it in 1983 called Operation Urgent Fury. He lived with his grandparents on the island until he was seven when his mother returned and took him with her to Trinidad where she had gone shortly after the boy’s birth in search of work. Despite being reared in a drug-infested and crime-plagued area of Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital, young Murray resisted all the temptations of crime and drugs to become well-known as an honest and responsible person in the neighborhood.

Citing the British tabloid, The Daily Mall, the Houston Chronicle reported recently that as a young boy Murray went into a store where he found a woman had left her bag. He took the bag and after he got home, the young boy found it contained $3100. He searched for and found the owner of the bag and returned the money to her, according former neighbor Krishndath Saroop. Murray went on to graduate from high school on the small island after which he worked hard at a number of jobs, including an elementary school teacher, before saving enough money to pay for his education in the United States.

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