| Blog and Media Roundup - Wednesday, August 14, 2013; News Roundup | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Aug 14 2013, 04:53 AM (310 Views) | |
| abb | Aug 14 2013, 04:53 AM Post #1 |
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Men wrongly held for murder get millions, but no apology, from the state Published: August 13, 2013 Updated 7 hours ago Editor's note: Experience the stories of Floyd Brown and Greg Taylor in the videos at the bottom of this story. By Mandy Locke and Joseph Neff — mlocke@newsobserver.com / jneff@newsobserver.com This summer, the state and its insurers will pay nearly $12.5 million for missteps that cost two men decades of freedom. Here’s what Floyd Brown and Greg Taylor won’t get from state leaders: an apology. This summer, the state Attorney General’s office and its insurers agreed to settle two civil lawsuits against the State Bureau of Investigation for mistakes its agents made in two murder investigations in the 1990s. Floyd Brown, an Anson County man with an IQ of 50, will receive $7.85 million for 14 years locked away in Dorothea Dix psychiatric hospital because he lacked the competency to stand trial for murder. Greg Taylor, a Wake County man exonerated in 2010 for the murder of a woman in Southeast Raleigh, will receive $4.625 million for the 17 years he spent in state prison. In both cases, misconduct of SBI agents helped keep the two men locked away for years. The state paid a $500,000 deductible in Brown’s case and $100,000 in Taylor’s. Insurers paid the rest. On Monday, as news of the settlements was announced, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper blamed the mistakes on outdated practices and procedures long since reformed. Asked Tuesday whether anyone from the state would apologize to the two innocent men, Cooper issued a statement that verged on an admission of wrongdoing but fell short of an apology. “It’s always wrong when innocent people are jailed for crimes they didn’t commit, no matter who is at fault,” Cooper said in the statement. “The SBI and Crime Lab have learned from these cases and made tremendous improvements to help prevent this and promote justice.” Mike Klinkosum, a Raleigh lawyer who helped free both Brown and Taylor, said Cooper’s statement is as close as the two will likely get to an apology. “Maybe I’ve been doing this so long, but no one will take responsibility and say, ‘I’m sorry,’ ” he said. “This is as good as it gets.” The money talks Donald Beskind, a veteran civil litigator and professor at Duke Law School, said apologies are rare in civil settlements and impossible in jury verdicts. “A jury can’t make someone say they are sorry or flog anyone,” Beskind said. “The only thing a jury can do is make someone write a check.” Civil lawsuits, Beskind said, offer a poor tool to force reform in agencies where employees have made mistakes. In 2009, the SBI and its insurers agreed to pay $3.9 million to Alan Gell, a former death row inmate imprisoned eight years for a murder he did not commit. Gell said he heard nothing, let alone words of apology, from officials involved in his case. “The million-dollar settlement was the apology,” Gell said. “The insurance companies don’t pay millions unless the state’s done wrong.” The only physical evidence linking Taylor to the murder of Jacquetta Thomas was a substance on his truck that the SBI agent Duane Deaver reported to be blood, despite performing more sophisticated tests that failed to confirm the substance was blood. Deaver has repeatedly said the practice was standard and widely accepted at the SBI through the 1990s. ‘Just sews things up’ An audit commissioned by Cooper after Taylor’s exoneration found more than 200 cases in which agents inaccurately reported the results of blood analysis. Deaver was fired after the audit and has since appealed his termination. Greg Taylor wasn’t holding his breath for an apology from the attorney general or anyone at the SBI. In a mediation meeting for the lawsuit this summer, Taylor got something close: An attorney for one of the companies that insured the SBI and other agencies told Taylor he was sorry for what he’d been through. The simple words meant a great deal to Taylor. “For me, the settlement just sews things up,” Taylor said. “I’m sure there are still some that still think I had something to do with the murder, and this is just one more thing to say otherwise.” Brown still grasping news Floyd Brown’s 1993 murder charge rested on an elaborate six-page confession that SBI agent Mark Isley said he wrote down verbatim in first-person narrative. In 2007, Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson freed Brown and dismissed the charges against him after doctors and psychologists said his mental limitations made it impossible for him to have offered such a detailed confession. During the civil litigation, Isley denied he did anything wrong. On Monday night, Brown struggled to grasp the news of the outcome of his lawsuit. Brown, 49, has the mental capacity of a 7-year-old. He likes fancy cars and fast food. His guardian, Bernice Harris, did her best to explain the settlement to Brown. “I told Floyd he’d never have to worry about having money in his pockets ever again,” she said. “He seemed to like that.” Locke: 919-829-8927 Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/08/13/3105467/men-wrongly-held-for-murder-get.html#storylink=cpy |
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| Quasimodo | Aug 14 2013, 08:13 AM Post #2 |
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Being in government, or in Duke Admin., means never having to say you're sorry... |
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| abb | Aug 14 2013, 03:07 PM Post #3 |
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http://thefire.org/article/16122.html High School Sexual Harassment Case Illuminates Key Points About 'Blueprint' August 14, 2013 by Susan Kruth On July 9, a federal district court in Pennsylvania granted a high school history teacher’s motion for summary judgment over a student’s claim that his manner of teaching “Twentieth Century History” amounted to sexual harassment. The case, Young v. Pleasant Valley School District, reaffirms the importance of allowing open discussion on topics that some students might find offensive or uncomfortable to hear, particularly in the school setting. FIRE has emphasized this principle countless times, most recently in light of the Departments of Education (ED) and Justice’s (DOJ’s) “blueprint” for campus sexual harassment policies. In Young, plaintiff M. Young alleged that her teacher, defendant Bruce Smith, “created a sexually hostile classroom environment that deprived M. Young of the equal protection of the laws in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment ...” (slip op. at 4–5). Smith’s classes included discussions about historical figures’ sex lives, an inquiry as to whether male students found murder victim Sharon Tate attractive, and remarks about Smith’s sexual past, for example, delivered via “a combination of lecture, powerpoint, and video and audio clips.” While M. Young conceded that many students were drawn to Smith’s class because of its “unorthodox” nature, she claimed that Smith’s comments and visual aids created a hostile environment for her. The court held that “no reasonable person who experienced Smith’s questionable classroom speech ... could have considered it so sexually hostile or abusive that she was disadvantaged ... in her ability to benefit from the edifying aspects of a semester in his Twentieth Century History course” (slip op. at 33). The holding again illustrates a disconnect between settled First Amendment law in the school context and the problem of schools curtailing protected speech via harassment policies—a problem that will be exacerbated on college campuses by implementation of ED and DOJ’s blueprint, in which the federal agencies defined sexual harassment as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” including “verbal conduct” (i.e. speech). On its face, the blueprint’s definition of sexual harassment encompasses the kind of speech M. Young found objectionable; Smith’s speech was “verbal conduct” of a “sexual nature,” and the plaintiff student found it unwelcome. The court in Young, though, held that Smith’s speech was an acceptable part of his lesson plan and did not create an objectively hostile environment. And the court reached this conclusion despite the fact that speech is normally less protected in the high school context than it is in the college setting. This result illustrates just how far removed from the First Amendment ED and DOJ’s mandate is. The blueprint requires reporting of, allows punishment for, and attaches stigma to, the sort of speech that this case found not to be harassment even between a teacher and a minor-student. In ruling for Smith, Judge Matthew W. Brann makes several points that are relevant to analyzing the federal blueprint. First, he notes the context of the speech and how that informs whether a reasonable person would experience Smith’s class as a hostile environment. The topic of twentieth century history necessarily involves “complex, and at times uncomfortable, questions of race, religion, violence, and also sex and sexuality” (slip op. at 35) (citation omitted). Discussion of such questions must be protected in order to ensure the strength of education generally. Judge Brann even cites ED’s Office for Civil Rights’ 2001 Revised Sexual Harassment Guidance for the idea that anti-discrimination laws must be applied “so as to protect academic freedom and [the] free speech rights” of students and teachers. On college campuses, deemed by the Supreme Court to be “peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas,’” and especially among young adult peers, this interest in promoting frank discourse on difficult topics is even more compelling. Second, in finding that “a reasonable person in M. Young’s shoes would not find Smith’s questionable speech so sexually hostile or abusive that she was disadvantaged … in her ability to benefit” from the course, Judge Brann relies in part on the fact that “in all but one instance, M. Young was never the target of Smith’s comments” (slip op. at 55). Rather, Smith directed his speech at the entire class. In contrast, ED and DOJ’s blueprint contains no such requirement that the allegedly harassing conduct be targeted at the complaining individual. Judge Brann explains why this factor should be a serious consideration in drawing the line between actionable harassment and protected speech: [c]ourts generally take the view that statements either not addressed to the plaintiff individually, or not about the plaintiff, are less significant contributors to a hostile environment. ... Discounting the offensiveness of speech that is not targeted makes sense because the Supreme Court in Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc., 510 U.S. 17 (1993), referred to a continuum of defendants’[] behavior ranging in seriousness from that which is “physically threatening or humiliating” to “a mere offensive utterance,” and speech that is not targeted is, without more, the latter. Id. at 22. [...] “Harassment law generally targets conduct, and it sweeps in speech as harassment only when consistent with the First Amendment.” … When speech is directed at an audience and does not single out audience members, it is least likely to be offensive because of its non-expressive aspects (if any), and most likely to be offensive because of its message. [Citation omitted, slip op. at 57–58.] A school may prohibit or punish speech when it contributes to a discriminatory pattern of conduct but not simply for its message. When a prohibition on harassment reaches beyond speech that amounts to discriminatory conduct, it becomes in effect a “general civility code” (slip op. at 7). The ruling also contains a cautionary tale for readers who are still skeptical that policies modeled after the blueprint might be used to punish college professors’ classroom discussions. Judge Brann cites Cohen v. San Bernardino Valley College, 92 F.3d 968 (9th Cir. 1996), in which a student claimed that her English professor’s classroom speech violated the college’s sexual harassment policy. That policy’s language was similar to that of ED and DOJ’s blueprint; it prohibited “verbal, written, or physical conduct of a sexual nature ... [that] has the purpose or effect of ... creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive learning environment.” A federal district court held that the professor’s First Amendment rights were not violated when the school punished Cohen under the policy for offenses such as “assigning provocative essays” and “discuss[ing] subjects such as obscenity, cannibalism, and consensual sex with children in a ‘devil’s advocate’ style.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed that decision, holding that the policy was “simply too vague as applied to Cohen.” But Cohen illustrates that the risk the blueprint poses to college professors’ speech is real and significant. Unfortunately, Cohen is not the only example of sexual harassment policies wielded against protected classroom speech. The cases of Appalachian State University professor Jammie Price and University of Denver professor Arthur Gilbert—both of whom were punished for their classroom speech—demonstrate this as well. In fact, the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Women in the Academic Profession recognized these potential repercussions of the blueprint in its letter to ED and DOJ sent in June. Young serves as a reminder of the important speech that could be chilled or punished under sexual harassment policies that are modeled after ED and DOJ’s blueprint. Honest conversations about history, society, the arts, and our own values cannot be censored based on what any one individual finds subjectively objectionable. That’s true even in a high school classroom full of teenagers, but it is especially so on a campus full of adults. Thanks to Professor Eugene Volokh for alerting FIRE about this case. |
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| abb | Aug 14 2013, 06:44 PM Post #4 |
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http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/13/the-gruesome-story-of-a-murdered-tennessee-couple-you-may-have-never-heard-about-but-that-you-will-never-forget/ he Gruesome Story of a Murdered Tennessee Couple You May Have Never Heard – But That You Will Never Forget Aug. 13, 2013 10:37pm Jason Howerton After a radio caller made him aware of the extremely disturbing story of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian in Knoxville, Tenn., Glenn Beck researched the case and was horrified at what he found. Though the details are hard to hear, Beck told the couple’s story in excruciating detail during his show on TheBlaze TV Tuesday. The killings occurred in 2007; however, Beck says the media failed to give the case adequate coverage due to special interests or negligence. Newsom, 23, was a standout baseball player who was working as a carpenter. Christian was a 21-year-old student at the University of Tennessee. The happy couple had been dating for a couple months. On January 6, 2007, the couple made plans to watch a movie at a friend’s apartment, but they never made it. They would never be seen alive again. When Christian didn’t show up for work the next morning, family members immediately grew worried and reported them missing, Beck explained. “It turns out that the couple had made it to dinner, but when they arrived at the apartment complex where Christian’s best friends lived, they were carjacked by multiple assailants,” he said. “What followed was one of the most heinous, gruesome, senseless hate crimes, ever.” It was at this point in the program that Beck advised parents to have their children leave the room or pause the show and watch it at a later time due to the graphic details of the story. Newsom was gagged with a sock in his mouth, his ankles were bound with his own belt, his hands were tied behind his back, his face was covered with a bandana and his head covered with a sweatshirt that his five assailants had tied around his neck with shoestrings. He was then violently raped with an object and beaten. “One can only imagine the horror Christopher experienced as he was then forced to walk barefoot to the nearby railroad tracks, where he was shot in the neck in the back,” Beck said solemnly. “But the shots didn’t kill him — he fell to the ground and was paralyzed.” “That’s when the assailants stood over him, placed the gun against his head and fired, killing him execution style,” he added. Newsom was shot a total of three times. But not even that was enough. The attackers then poured gasoline on his body and set him on fire. Unfortunately, the horror of this tragic story is not over. Beck went on to speak of what also happened to Christian on that night. The woman was forced into a back room of the house where she was hog-tied with a strips of fabric from a bedding set. She was brutally raped “in every possible way imaginable” for several hours as the assailants beat her viciously with several objects, including a broken chair leg. By the time Christian was taken into the living room, the five attackers realized they had left their DNA on their victim. In an attempt to cover their tracks, they poured bleach down her throat and on her body before they wrapped her body in black garbage bags and covered her head in a plastic grocery bag. “She was then placed in a garbage can in the kitchen of the house — all of this while she was still alive,” Beck noted. “Channon Christian’s last minutes on earth were spent slowly suffocating in a garbage can after she had been savagely beaten and raped for hours,” he added. Beck slammed “so-called” civil rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson for failing to demand justice in the brutal case. He criticized the media just as harshly for failing to give the story the coverage it deserved. The Horrific Story of Murdered Tennessee Couple Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian The faces of evil (TheBlaze TV) Meanwhile, the pursuit of justice for the family of the victims has also been elusive. All five suspects in the case had been charged and convicted for the crime when it was discovered that the judge had a drug addiction, allowing the killers to take advantage of the justice system. “All but one has been repeatedly pursuing retrials and appeals,” Beck explained. “The lone female attacker had her sentence reduced by a third.” Beck continued: “This miscarriage of justice is forcing the family to live this horror over and over and over again each time they are dragged back into a court battle.” Real “social justice,” the host added, will only be achieved when justice is truly blind. The five attackers are Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas, Vanessa Coleman and Eric Boyd. All of the previous state convictions, except for Coleman’s, were allowed to stand and the defendants remain in prison pending appeals. Coleman had her sentence reduced by a third after a retrial. Listen to the Newsom and Christian families speak out: |
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