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Blog and Media Roundup - Sunday, November 7, 2010; News Roundup
Topic Started: Nov 7 2010, 04:47 AM (345 Views)
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http://www.hometownannapolis.com/news/col/2010/11/07-28/Eric-Hartley-Is-there-a-sports-crime-correlation.html

Eric Hartley: Is there a sports-crime correlation?
By ERIC HARTLEY, Staff Writer
Capital Gazette Communications
Published 11/07/10

In a startling number of the most violent crimes involving teenagers recently, there's one common thread.

Two lacrosse players accused of throwing rocks at people. A North County High football captain arrested in a robbery while already facing assault charges. An Annapolis High multisport athlete charged with two sexual assaults. A South River High football player charged with beating a younger student over an iPod (along with another suspect who is not apparently an athlete).

Is this coincidence or something more troubling?

First, some context: About one-third of the 23,000 students in county public high schools played organized sports last year, a schools spokesman said.

The most popular sports are lacrosse and football, each with more than 1,100 kids participating. It's no surprise, then, that many students who get in trouble would happen to be athletes. Correlation is not causation.

Study after study has shown athletes have better grades and lower rates of discipline than nonathletes, said Greg LeGrand, supervisor of athletics for county schools.

"It does seem like we are always constantly fighting this misperception," he said.

One review showed the 1,700 county ninth-graders who played sports had a grade-point average of 3.08, vs. 2.18 for the 4,500 who didn't.

Still, you can't help but notice the apparent connection between violent sports and violence. When's the last time you heard of a tennis player or cross-country runner charged with felony assault?

Any time there's an incident, especially a pattern at one school or on a particular team, "It brings up some flags for me," LeGrand said.

And it should cause such questions, though they don't have easy answers. What it shouldn't cause are unfair and broad conclusions about athletes.

"There is that stereotypical approach to these cases: He's a jock, and therefore he's more likely to be involved in violent acts," said Peter O'Neill, the attorney for Wade Korvin, one of the lacrosse players charged in the rock throwings.

O'Neill, who's been a lawyer in the county for 25 years, said he's noticed cases involving athletes or kids from wealthier areas attract more media coverage. That's probably inevitable. Athletes, especially stars, are minor local celebrities.

Kristin Fleckenstein, a spokeswoman for the State's Attorney's Office, said the level of violence involving ever-younger children, including middle-schoolers, is alarming. But there's no evidence of a disproportionate number of athletes committing those crimes.

"Obviously we have many more cases that don't involve athletes," she said.

As Fleckenstein noted, common sense suggests kids involved in structured after-school activities, including sports, are less likely to find other ways to get in trouble.

LeGrand said sports keep a lot of kids engaged in school when they might otherwise drift or even drop out.

The Capital and other media face criticism for headlines like "Prosecutors do about-face, charge lacrosse players as adults." People wonder, how is sports relevant to the crime?

Their athletic feats are a part of who they are. If an arrested student is a National Honor Society member, a debate champion or a collector of exotic snakes, that's news, too.

The flip side is the Duke lacrosse case, in which three athletes were charged with raping a stripper. The story line was irresistible to parachute journalists: a tale of privileged white athletes from a private school taking advantage of a black woman from a poor part of Durham, N.C.

Except it was nothing of the sort.

The woman lied and the men were completely innocent, but a prosecutor facing re-election pushed charges against them for political gain, as investigations by state officials later found.

Remember that the next time you read about a student-athlete's arrest.
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http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-15/1289111424171890.xml&coll=1

Glover case echoes era of Algiers seven
Lessons of 30 years ago were never learned, some say
Sunday, November 07, 2010
By Brendan McCarthy Staff writer

Thirty years ago this week, a single gunshot changed New Orleans' relationship with its police force.

A young white cop, Gregory Neupert, took a fatal bullet to the neck. In short order, four black citizens were killed in a hail of police gunfire. The chief of police was eventually forced out amid a racially tinged uproar. The mayor felt the wrath of an outraged citizenry.

The violent police response to Neupert's killing led to the federal indictment of seven officers in one of the earliest, wide-ranging civil rights probes of the New Orleans Police Department. Three of the so-called Algiers Seven were eventually convicted in an exhaustive trial that relied on the testimony of a fellow cop who broke ranks. Although four citizens were dead, the conviction centered on the beating and abuse of other citizens, not the killings.

This week, another dark chapter in the history of the NOPD begins, one with haunting parallels to the Neupert case. Starting Monday, a new group of officers will be tried in federal court for numerous alleged civil rights violations in Algiers. Prosecutors say that, in the days after Hurricane Katrina, one officer shot Henry Glover; other officers burnt his body to bits of bones and beat his companions; and others helped cover the whole matter up.

The Glover killing, like that of Neupert, occurred in an environment of fear and anger. Stories of rampant violence and roving gangs had swept New Orleans. At least one of the tales was true: About 48 hours before Glover was shot, an NOPD officer was shot in the head in Algiers by an alleged looter.

In this week's trial, too, there will be finger-pointing, officers testifying against colleagues. Given that the five accused cops in the Glover are all white and their alleged victims all black, the trial will have strong racial overtones. While only five officers are being tried, the practices of the entire department will be under the microscope. The picture won't be flattering.

The Neupert case laid out a clear blueprint of what was wrong with the NOPD of 1980 -- a tolerance of corruption, a lax attitude toward use of force, failures in leadership. The cases now on the federal docket, including the Glover case and the Danziger Bridge case, make plain that those problems have not gone away.

Looking back, some of those involved in the Algiers Seven case see it as the wake-up call that was never answered.

'Repeated cycles of abuse'

For those the case touched, the emotions and passions of that period remain strong. All said the incident forever altered their views on New Orleans, on justice, on life. Many thought at the time that the incident would be the impetus for major reform in the police force.

It wasn't.

"I think we have forgotten the lessons of Algiers," said Morris Reed, a former NOPD officer who worked on the investigation as a federal prosecutor. "There's always been a knee-jerk reaction to incidents like this. Police try to contain it, defend it, deny it -- rather than admit they made mistakes. We needed to have moved forward and taken steps to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Just in the past year, 20 New Orleans police officers have been charged with civil rights abuses and cover-ups. And like in 1980, the prosecutions are being led by the U.S. Department of Justice's civil rights division, working with the local U.S. attorney's office.

Mary Howell, a local civil rights attorney who represented abused citizens in the old Algiers case, as well as dozens of other civil rights cases, said the same problems keep surfacing because they've never been adequately addressed.

"I look at this like domestic violence: There are these repeated cycles of abuse," said Howell, who blames slippages in accountability and supervision. "There will be periods of lull, where everyone thinks things are all right now, but really it is just pushed beneath the surface. Then there is a terrible event and everyone thinks: 'Oh, how could this happen?' "

Michael Johnson, a career Justice prosecutor who recently retired, recalled that the New Orleans Police Department already had a reputation when he signed on to the Algiers Seven case.

"Several things within the NOPD had put them on the radar screen before (the 1980 killings)," said Johnson, then one of just 12 people on the Justice Department's civil rights squad that covered abuses across the country.

With such limited resources, the Justice Department at the time realized it couldn't go after every officer who committed a civil rights violation. The idea was to use prosecutions as a tool to stimulate the community to better police itself.

"The notion that 12 of us in the country are going to solve issues of civil rights and police misconduct -- that's like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound," Johnson said. "Unless a local community stands up and demands something different, there isn't necessarily the resources on a federal level. ... It was a catalyst, whether the community used it that way or not."

West Bank battleground

Long before a bullet tore through Neupert's neck, before the Algiers neighborhood became a battleground, tiny sparks of unrest acted as tinder.

In 1978, the city's first African-American mayor, Ernest "Dutch" Morial, took office and made strides to reform a police force widely viewed as corrupt.

Morial appointed Jim Parsons, a white Alabama native with a Ph.D. and a reputation as a thinking-man's police chief, to lead the NOPD. Within the next year, a majority-white police force, angry over salary and benefits, went on strike for weeks. Racial tensions on the force simmered.

Then on the night of Nov. 9, 1980, an officer found Neupert, a well-liked novice cop, lying in a ditch alongside his police car in Algiers. He clutched a police radio in one hand and a flashlight in the other. The death hit the NOPD hard, its rank-and-file erupting in sorrow and, soon, anger.

Reports quickly emanated from the Fischer public housing complex that young black men were being beaten, marched around at gunpoint, forced to undergo aggressive interrogation bordering on torture. There were tales of mock executions, bags over heads and hardbound city directories being slammed into faces.

Raymond Ferdinand, a 38-year-old Fischer resident and alleged police informant, was fatally shot during one of the roundups. Police said he drew a knife when officers tried to handcuff him. An officer shot him twice.

Five days after the Neupert killing, a group of homicide and robbery detectives joined members of the NOPD's Felony Action Squad -- the department's most proactive group of officers, not unlike the tactical unit under scrutiny in contemporary federal probes -- in conducting simultaneous raids on two Algiers homes. Two supposed witnesses had allegedly fingered James Billy Jr., 26, and Reginald Miles, 28.

In one house, police opened fire on Miles and his girlfriend, Sherry Singleton, 26. Police said Miles drew a gun on them and that Singleton's gun jammed as she tried to fire. She was found naked in the bathtub with several gunshots to her body.

Blocks away, Billy died in a hail of bullets after he allegedly shot at police.

The neighborhood howled; the mayor demanded calm; and the NOPD higher-ups stood by the officers involved. But soon, the circumstances would unravel.

Initially "we thought it was a good deal, that the NOPD had done the right thing and found the right people," said Cliff Anderson, an FBI agent who worked the case. But then the complaints started rolling in. Civil rights leaders cried foul, catching the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. The FBI opened an investigation and Anderson and colleagues canvassed the housing development.

"There were many, many potential accounts of abuse we found," Anderson said. "Many of these people, they had backgrounds that might make them less credible. Nonetheless, we found that police went out there and conducted not just interrogations, but beatings."

When FBI agents confronted the cops involved, the reaction was largely the same. "A lot of them said they stood by the police report," Anderson said.

Anderson teamed up with Johnson and Reed. A break in the case came when a scared man, Oris Buckner, the lone black NOPD officer at one of the fatal raids, spoke up.

"He said these people were murdered, that they didn't have guns," Reed said.

Testimony was key

Over the next three years, investigations probed the deaths and alleged beatings. Two young men, Johnny Brownlee and Robert "Pee Wee" Davis, came forward, saying that police beat them and coerced them into identifying Miles and Billy as Neupert's killers. Those accounts became the basis for the warrant police used to conduct the raids.

A state grand jury eventually declined to indict officers in the deaths of Billy, Miles and Singleton. But a federal grand jury handed up a lengthy indictment for conspiracy to violate the civil rights of people police questioned in the Neupert investigation, including Brownlee and Davis. The indictment did not charge anyone in the deaths of Ferdinand, Singleton, Miles or Billy.

A local federal judge tossed out the charges against the officers on grounds of prosecutorial misconduct, but the government successfully appealed the ruling. The case had gotten so much publicity that, at the request of the defense, the trial was moved to Dallas, where it began in March 1983.

Lawyers in the Glover case, although they have griped about pretrial publicity, haven't sought a change of venue, likely because of the pro-law-enforcement bent of jurors in the Eastern District of Louisiana. Another factor, attorneys and criminal justice observers posited, is that a local jury will be more apt to cut the accused officers slack for the conditions they worked under post-Katrina.

A key figure in the Algiers Seven trial was Buckner, who admitted he took part in some civilian beatings at the behest of his colleagues. Buckner was granted immunity for his testimony.

At this juncture, it is not known whether Buckner has a counterpart in the Glover case.

Buckner "owned up to what he had done and participated in," Johnson said. "In terms of the actual prosecution of the case, absent significant cooperation, we never could have secured convictions."

Homicide detectives Dale Bonura, John McKenzie and Stephen Farrar ended up in prison. Four other officers were acquitted. More than $2.8 million would be paid by the city in settlements with plaintiffs who claimed they were held against their will, brutalized or traumatized by violence done to their loved ones.

'Code of silence'

The case, especially the sight of an NOPD officer testifying against his colleagues, dealt a blow to police morale, said Gus Krinke, the former president of the local Fraternal Order of Police lodge."It's an old cliche. This guy was grabbing the brass ring. You catch that ring, you get a free ride," Krinke said.

Krinke, who retired in 1996, noted that Buckner's testimony was a benchmark of sorts.

"The days of the thin blue line are no longer there," he said. He points to the current federal probes of the NOPD as evidence. "It's quite clear, especially in this latest investigation, the days of the code of silence are gone," he said.

Parsons, who resigned as police chief amid political pressure weeks after the Neupert killing, said that even in retirement, he still thinks about the case. He says now that he shouldn't have allowed a crew of his most aggressive cops to conduct raids in the wake of the Neupert killing. It was asking for trouble.

Parsons said he believes the police shot the right suspects, but he acknowledges he can't prove it. And one of the killings bothers him to this day: that of Sherry Singleton, who was shot by police while naked in the tub. "That one never sat right with me," he said.

Kem Landry, the mother of James Billy's child, said she has reconciled with the bloodshed of 30 years ago.

"You have to learn to love your neighbor," she said. "It's hard to do, but you must."

Landry, 52, who received a $50,000 settlement from the city and now lives in Houma, peppers her speech with bits of Scripture. Every once in a while, she'll dream of Billy, who tells her to stay strong.

"We as humans have a tendency to forget the past," she said. "I want people to remember, but I know we are all human."

Reed, the gung-ho federal prosecutor, later became a criminal court judge and now handles civil litigation. He remains proud of the federal case, but he regrets that charges were never brought against the officers who committed the killings. Though evidence was hard to come by, Reed said he believes a case could have been made.

Anderson, the retired FBI civil rights squad leader, acknowledges the verdicts weren't all in the government's favor, but he remains proud of the three convictions. He said the case shone a bright light on an incident of injustice at the NOPD.

"It allowed me to think we really accomplished something," Anderson said.

Michael Johnson, too, remains proud of a case that was a challenge from the start.

"It's reflective of our society, then and now, that we are very reticent to call what police officers sometimes do improper," Johnson said. "These are incredibly difficult cases to win. The conviction of a police officer on wrongdoing is the exception, not the rule."

Others prefer not to talk of the events in Algiers. Johnny Brownlee is one of them. Oris Buckner, who was an outcast for years while working in the bowels of the NOPD after his testimony, is reluctant to talk. So are the indicted officers, many of whom did not return calls seeking comment.

Thirty years later, the investigation into the killing of Gregory Neupert, whose death was overshadowed by the ugly events that followed, remains open.

. . . . . . .

Brendan McCarthy can be reached at bmccarthy@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3301.
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Quasimodo

http://markphialas.blogspot.com/

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2010
A happy evening in Tar Heel Country

...

The major theme of the University of North Carolina football team's 2010 story has – at last – shifted from remorse to resilience.

Last Thursday, UNC chancellor Holden Thorp endorsed Butch Davis in a manner that allowed observers to feel, perhaps, a corner has been turned in this NCAA investigation/academic scandal saga that began in July.

(snip)

It has been an unfortunate span of time since July, and through it all, Butch Davis has handled himself with patience and resolve. While many in the media called for his head on a spit, Davis kept his team focused on the issues that they could control, such as playing as well as they could in each game.

Player suspensions, the NCAA investigation, the shameless, self-serving witch hunt of virtually every major newspaper in the state of North Carolina, including the Daily Tar Heel, kept providing challenges for Butch and the team. I say shameless because of the lack of due process, and the manner in which the media behaved reminded me of the Duke lacrosse team's situation – a truly shameless asterisk in the realm of justice.


(snip)

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jarms

Quasimodo
Nov 7 2010, 02:12 PM
http://markphialas.blogspot.com/

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2010
A happy evening in Tar Heel Country

...

The major theme of the University of North Carolina football team's 2010 story has – at last – shifted from remorse to resilience.

Last Thursday, UNC chancellor Holden Thorp endorsed Butch Davis in a manner that allowed observers to feel, perhaps, a corner has been turned in this NCAA investigation/academic scandal saga that began in July.

(snip)

It has been an unfortunate span of time since July, and through it all, Butch Davis has handled himself with patience and resolve. While many in the media called for his head on a spit, Davis kept his team focused on the issues that they could control, such as playing as well as they could in each game.

Player suspensions, the NCAA investigation, the shameless, self-serving witch hunt of virtually every major newspaper in the state of North Carolina, including the Daily Tar Heel, kept providing challenges for Butch and the team. I say shameless because of the lack of due process, and the manner in which the media behaved reminded me of the Duke lacrosse team's situation – a truly shameless asterisk in the realm of justice.


(snip)

The difference, of course, is that something DID happen in the NCAA case involving UNC football.....
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A good thing about Italian law.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/08/amanda-knox-slander-italian-police

What if Ms Mangum had been prosecuted for slandering a number of real lacrosse players along with imagined players?
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Assistant to The Devil Himself
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101108/ap_on_re_us/us_home_invasion

NEW HAVEN, Conn. – A Connecticut man was condemned to death Monday for a night of terror inside a suburban home in which a woman was strangled and her two daughters tied to their beds, doused in gasoline and left to die in a fire.

Jurors in New Haven Superior Court voted unanimously to send Steven Hayes to death row after deliberating over the span of four days. The judge will impose the sentence.

Hayes' attorneys had tried to persuade jurors to spare him the death penalty by portraying him as a clumsy, drug-addicted thief who never committed violence until the 2007 home invasion with a fellow paroled burglar. They called the co-defendant, Joshua Komisarjevsky, the mastermind and said he escalated the violence. They also said Hayes was remorseful and actually wanted a death sentence.

But prosecutors said both men were equally responsible and that the crime cried out for the death penalty, saying the family was tormented for seven hours before they were killed.

Hayes looked straight ahead and had no obvious reaction as the jury's sentence was announced. He will join nine other men on Connecticut's death row. The state has only executed one man since 1960, so Hayes will likely spend years, if not decades, in prison.

Komisarjevsky will be tried next year.

Authorities said Hayes and Komisarjevsky broke into the house, beat Dr. William Petit, and forced his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, to withdraw money from a bank while the rest of her family remained under hostage at home. Hayes then sexually assaulted and strangled her, authorities said. Komisarjevsky, who will be tried next year, is charged with sexually assaulting their 11-year-old daughter, Michaela.

Michaela and her 17-year-old sister, Hayley, were tied to their beds and doused in gasoline before the men set the house on fire, according to testimony. The girls died of smoke inhalation.

...
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