Bella Has Been Kidnapped

quotes

2011-10-05T01:59:00.000-04:00

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world.

For, indeed, that's all who ever have.

Margaret Mead

Have your housing rights been violated in TN?

2011-02-01T15:22:00.001-05:00

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2010	(202) 514-2007
WWW.JUSTICE.GOV	TDD (202) 514-1888

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT RESOLVES LAWSUIT ALLEGING DISABILITY-BASED HOUSING DISCRIMINATION AT 21 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING COMPLEXES IN TENNESSEE

WASHINGTON– The Justice Department today announced a settlement of its lawsuit alleging that the owners and developers involved in the design and construction of 21 multifamily housing complexes in Tennessee discriminated on the basis of disability. The complexes, which were built with the assistance of federal low-income housing tax credits, contain more than 800 units covered by the Fair Housing Act’s accessibility provisions along with areas of public accommodation covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Under the settlement, which must still be approved by the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Murphy Development LLC and 22 defendants will pay all costs related to making the complexes for which they were responsible accessible to persons with disabilities, pay up to $350,000 to compensate individuals harmed by the inaccessible housing, and pay $75,000 to the United States. The settlement requires all the defendants to be trained about the requirements of the Fair Housing Act and to provide periodic reports to the government that they are following the law.

Equal access to housing for persons with disabilities is an important right protected by both the Fair Housing Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act,” said Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. “This comprehensive settlement will ensure that equal housing opportunities required by law are provided in these 21 housing complexes. This will give persons with physical disabilities an equal opportunity to live in and visit these complexes, and provide compensation to those who have been harmed by the builders’ failure to provide accessible housing.”

The United States will work aggressively to guarantee that persons with disabilities have the accessible rental housing to which they are entitled,” said Ed Yarbrough, United States Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee. “The scope of this settlement and the many apartment complexes that it covers will benefit many Tennesseans with disabilities.”

The case began when the Tennessee Fair Housing Council, a private, nonprofit advocacy organization whose mission is to eliminate housing discrimination throughout Tennessee, provided the department with information several apartment complexes that were inaccessible to people with disabilities. The department conducted an independent investigation and filed this lawsuit in September 2008.

The defendants responsible for the payments and retrofits are Murphy Development LLC, Westland Development LLC, Meadow Creek LP, Miller Town LP, Swiss Ridge LP, 17th Street LP, Alta Vista LP, Forest View LP, Stonebridge LP, Spring Branch LLC, Delrose Court LP, River View Park LP, Sutherland View Apartments LP, Lyon’s Den LP, Dunhill LLC, Ashton View LLC, West Vista Ridge LLC, Cassell Ridge LP, Cassell View LP, Sutherland Park LP, Azalea Development LLC, The Highlands Apartments LP, and Beason Well LP. The defendants will retrofit the following complexes in Tennessee

17th Street Apartments, 2565 East 17th Avenue, Springfield
Ashton View Apartments, 169 Barkley Landing Drive, Morristown
Beason Well Apartments, 893 New Beason Well Road, Kingsport
Cassell Ridge Apartments, 1230 Cassell Valley Way, Knoxville
Cassell View Apartments, 1111 Elk Hill Way, Knoxville
Dunhill Apartments, 1036 Dunhill Way, Knoxville
Forest View Apartments, 119 Belinda Parkway, Mt. Juliet
The Highlands Apartments, 2001 South Lyerly Street, Chattanooga
Lake Side Apartments, 3940 Bell Road, Hermitage
Lyon’s Den Apartments, 3610 Lyon’s Way, Knoxville
Meadowcreek Apartments, 919 South Dickerson Road, Goodlettsville
Miller Town Apartments, 395 Jack Miller Boulevard, Clarksville
River View Park Apartments, 3300 Holston Hills Road, Knoxville
Spring Branch Apartments, 1830 Spring Branch Drive, Madison
Stonebridge Apartments, 100 Stonebridge Way, Columbia
Sutherland Park Apartments, 510 Vista Glen Way, Knoxville
Sutherland View Apartments, 3220 Atchley Ridge Way, Knoxville
Swiss Ridge Apartments, 455 Swiss Avenue, Nashville
Swiss View Apartments, 499 Swiss Avenue, Nashville
West Vista Ridge Apartments, 1201 Vista Ridge Way, Knoxville
White Oak Apartments, 114 Holt Spur Drive, Jamestown

The retrofitting includes modifying walkways to eliminate steps, excess slopes and level changes, providing accessible curb ramps, and providing accessible parking and routes to site amenities, such as clubhouses, pools, mailboxes and trash facilities. The settlement also provides for the replacement of inaccessible knob hardware on doors, the widening of inaccessible narrow doorways, and the reconfiguration of bathrooms and kitchens to accommodate persons who use wheelchairs.

Persons who believe they may have been harmed by the lack of accessible housing at one of the complexes involved in this matter should contact the Justice Department at 1-800-896-7743, and select menu option 2.

The federal Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability and familial status. Individuals who believe that they may have been victims of housing discrimination should call the Housing Discrimination Tip Line (1-800-896-7743) or e-mail the Justice Department at fairhousing@usdoj.gov. Such persons may also contact the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development at 1-800-669-9777.

Fair housing enforcement is a priority of the Civil Rights Division. More information about the Civil Rights Division and the laws it enforces is available at www.justice.gov/crt.

http://www.justice.gov/usao/tnm/press_releases/2010/2_25_10.html

mental patient tethered to wall sparks outcry

2011-01-22T20:11:00.002-05:00

So glad someone who worked at this place spoke out. See one person can make a difference.
(CNN) -- A Dutch documentary about a mentally ill and potentially dangerous 18-year-old has prompted lawmakers in the Netherlands -- amid national outrage -- to re-examine the permissible treatment of those in psychiatric care.
The documentary, which was produced by the Lutheran-run Evangelical Broadcasting Co. and aired on public television Tuesday, followed Brandon van Ingen, a patient at a mental hospital in Ermelo. Since 2007, van Ingen has spent part of his days tethered to a wall due to the danger he poses to others, according to State Secretary for Public Health Marlies Veldhuijzen van Zanten-Hyllner.
The program prompted widespread outrage across the country and sparked a national debate over the care of the mentally ill.
In response to the documentary, the country's political parties held emergency meetings Wednesday to discuss the treatment of psychiatric patients.
Van Zanten-Hyllner addressed those meetings, explaining that van Ingen's care was in line with rules for restraining mental health patients, but promised to examine whether a change is needed.
"The broadcast stirred me deeply," she wrote in a letter to parliament. "It is upsetting to see that such a young person, who has his life before him, has so little perspective for a better future."
Van Zanten-Hyllner noted that van Ingen, who apparently hears voices that tell him to do "bad and dangerous things," has his own apartment where he can move about freely when not in the presence of others.
The hospital is working on alternatives for van Ingen's care, van Zanten-Hyllner wrote, "and is undertaking constant efforts to improve the living situation."
Van Ingen's story was revealed to the program "Outspoken" by one of his caretakers at the hospital.
"I could no longer do these shifts," Iris Mourits said on the program. "Back-up shifts were OK, but being together with him in a room -- I think at some point he could sense that from the depths of my toes I could no longer see him on that leash."
Van Ingen's mother compared his care to that of a "caged animal."
"He feels like a dog on a line," she said.
Heerenloo hospital issued a statement Saturday assuring family members of those at the facility that van Ingen's case is an exceptional one and doesn't reflect the care the majority of patients receive.
Health care inspectors said Thursday that they would "investigate the cases in which freedom is taken away from patients similar to Brandon's situation."

Van Zanten-Hyllner said there are about 40 cases similar to van Ingen's in the Netherlands.

mental patient tethered to wall sparks outcry

2011-01-22T20:10:00.001-05:00

So glad someone who worked at this place spoke out. See one person can make a difference.

(CNN) -- A Dutch documentary about a mentally ill and potentially dangerous 18-year-old has prompted lawmakers in the Netherlands -- amid national outrage -- to re-examine the permissible treatment of those in psychiatric care.

The documentary, which was produced by the Lutheran-run Evangelical Broadcasting Co. and aired on public television Tuesday, followed Brandon van Ingen, a patient at a mental hospital in Ermelo. Since 2007, van Ingen has spent part of his days tethered to a wall due to the danger he poses to others, according to State Secretary for Public Health Marlies Veldhuijzen van Zanten-Hyllner.

The program prompted widespread outrage across the country and sparked a national debate over the care of the mentally ill.

In response to the documentary, the country's political parties held emergency meetings Wednesday to discuss the treatment of psychiatric patients.

Van Zanten-Hyllner addressed those meetings, explaining that van Ingen's care was in line with rules for restraining mental health patients, but promised to examine whether a change is needed.

"The broadcast stirred me deeply," she wrote in a letter to parliament. "It is upsetting to see that such a young person, who has his life before him, has so little perspective for a better future."

Van Zanten-Hyllner noted that van Ingen, who apparently hears voices that tell him to do "bad and dangerous things," has his own apartment where he can move about freely when not in the presence of others.

The hospital is working on alternatives for van Ingen's care, van Zanten-Hyllner wrote, "and is undertaking constant efforts to improve the living situation."

Van Ingen's story was revealed to the program "Outspoken" by one of his caretakers at the hospital.

"I could no longer do these shifts," Iris Mourits said on the program. "Back-up shifts were OK, but being together with him in a room -- I think at some point he could sense that from the depths of my toes I could no longer see him on that leash."

Van Ingen's mother compared his care to that of a "caged animal."

"He feels like a dog on a line," she said.

Heerenloo hospital issued a statement Saturday assuring family members of those at the facility that van Ingen's case is an exceptional one and doesn't reflect the care the majority of patients receive.

Health care inspectors said Thursday that they would "investigate the cases in which freedom is taken away from patients similar to Brandon's situation."

Van Zanten-Hyllner said there are about 40 cases similar to van Ingen's in the Netherlands.

CNN's Ben Brumfield contributed to this report.

20 Reasons Why She Stays

2010-10-03T12:12:00.001-04:00

A Guide for Those Who Want to Help Battered Women

by Susan G. S. McGee
(SusanGSMcGee@aol.com)

This article really should be entitled “Why Some Battered Women Sometimes Stay for Varying Periods of Time”.

I. This is the wrong question.

The questions we should be asking are: Why do assailants terrorize and torture their partners? Why is it that the vast majority of batterers are men and the vast majority of survivors are women?

It’s important to note that there are a few men battered by women. Women are battered by women, and men are battered by men, and people in transgender relationships batter and are battered. In fact, gay male battering may have the highest prevalence of all the different configurations. I use the term battered women to emphasize the role of sexism and the breadth and extent of male violence against women. In addition, for the purposes of this article men/boys and women/girls can include biologically-born, transgender, or man/boy-identified persons or women/girl identified persons. Why does the community allow battering to continue?

We routinely scrutinize and evaluate the survivor. We ask - what is she doing wrong? How can she change? What should she be doing? By doing so, we avoid looking at the behavior and intentions of the perpetrator of the violence. This error rests on the assumption that if we could change the survivor or force her to leave, the battering would end. This allows the assailant to continue his terrorism unchallenged, since the focus is not on what he
“Are Heterosexual Men Also Victims of Intimate Partner Abuse?” by Joanne Belknap and Heather Melton found at http://new.vawnet.org/category/Documents.php?docid=370&category_id=695 (Link checked 8/09) is doing but what his partner is or isn’t doing. Since violence and abuse in an intimate relationship is under the sole control of the assailant, by constant microscopic examination of the survivor, we miss how we can reduce or stop the violence. By our misplaced focus on survivor behavior, we also miss the ways our culture condones, supports and gives permission for battering.
Dynamics are the same regardless of the gender of the perpetrator or the survivor. Tactics sometimes differ.

People believe that if a battered woman REALLY, truly, honest to goodness wanted to leave she could just get up and go. (Therefore, if we can “get” her into shelter
Many people are unaware that most survivors who leave do so without ever entering a shelter. or convince her to leave we’ve done good. Our job is over). We overlook the environmental barriers
Environmental barriers are different from psychological/individual barriers. Environmental barriers include survivors not having access to: safe and affordable housing; quality affordable child care; transportation; effective police protection; legal representation; high quality legal representation; medical insurance/medications; credit repair; money; education and employment opportunities. If survivors leave, they may lose their health insurance, dental coverage, and eye coverage for themselves and their children. Barriers also include access to mental health and/or alcohol and other drug treatment if needed. that prevent women from leaving, ignore how the batterer is trapping her, and too often focus on psychological "characteristics" of survivors instead.

Further questions we should be asking are how do many, many women overcome incredible obstacles and achieve safety and non-violence for themselves and their children? Why do women/survivors leave? When do women leave? How can we be helpful to women in the process of leaving? Since women are usually murdered after they leave, how can we increase safety for women who do make the courageous decision to escape? Which specific counseling, advocacy and support methods are helpful to women and which are not? What does outstanding advocacy look like? How can we reach ALL survivors and get them the information and support they need? How can we mobilize the community to support survivors and to prevent domestic violence?

In our work in the community, we should be pushing for graduated, consistent consequences for batterers, including jail time (because if he’s in jail, he can’t assault her).
Of course, some batterers do harass their partners from jail or prison, influence or coerce others to control her on his behalf or even hire someone to kill her from jail or prison. In general, however, she is safer when he is locked up.
This paper is a work in progress. My consciousness is being raised about the prison industrial complex, and the problems in promoting incarceration for batterers. I do believe in communities confronting and controlling batterers without using the criminal justice system, but it takes a huge amount of time, effort, and communities who thoroughly understand domestic violence to work. Too often, the only recourse to restrain the batterer is the criminal justice and civil legal system.

And by the way, why doesn’t he leave?
Casey Gwinn, an attorney active in reforming the criminal justice system, often says in training that in hundreds of phone calls from police and prosecutors throughout the U.S., not one has said “what’s wrong with this guy? if she’s so awful, why doesn’t he leave her?” They all asked about the survivor’s behavior i.e. why doesn’t she leave…

II. There are incorrect assumptions underlying the question "Why does she stay"?

Many don’t stay. Many battered women do leave. Shelters are usually full. Some battered women stay only for a short period. Some battered women leave immediately after the first assault and never return. Almost all battered women try to leave at some point. Leaving is a process and it may take several times before the survivor is able to depart. Our communities are full of formerly battered women who are living safely and independently.
Because battering is dangerous, causes grave injuries and can end in death, we may ignore the fact that MOST battered women are NOT killed and MANY escape.

For battered women who leave the violence is often just beginning. Batterers oftentimes escalate their violence when a woman tries to leave, shows signs of independence or has left.

Although the concept of stalking is often associated with celebrities, survivors and their advocates knew about stalking long before it became a crime or attracted the attention of the media. Assailants often stalk their partner both during the relationship and after it ends. The batterer’s pursuit rarely ends until he has found a new victim, the victim relocates or the consequences for the stalking are too great.
The study “Stalking in America” found that 78% of stalking victims are female and 87% of stalking perpetrators are male. Only 23% of female victims are stalked by strangers. Women are significantly more likely than men (59% and 30% respectively) to be stalked by intimate partners, about half of whom stalk their partners while the relationship is intact. Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes, Stalking in America: Findings from the National Violence against Women Survey. April, 1998. National Institute of Justice, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. http://www.ncjrs.gov/app/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=169592 Link checked. 7/00. However, some assailants return years later to re-assault or to kill their partners. National expert Lydia Walker believes that assailants re-contact and harass all their prior victims as each of their relationships end.

In almost all of 50 domestic violence homicides that our shelter tracked in Michigan in 1993, the woman had left her assailant, was about to leave, or had given him good cause to believe that he had finally lost her. Assailants are most likely to kill their victims when they believe that she is actually going to leave them.

Separation Violence

Many, perhaps most, people believe that battered women will be safe once they separate from the batterer. They also believe that women are free to leave abusers at any time. However, leaving does not usually put an end to the violence. Batterers may, in fact, escalate their violence to coerce a battered woman into reconciliation or to retaliate for the battered women's perceived rejection or abandonment of the batterer. Assailants believe they are entitled to their relationship with battered women and that they "own" their female partners. They view women's departure as an ultimate betrayal that justifies and demand revenge. (Saunders & Browne, 1990; Dutton, 1988; Bernard et al., 1982)

A group of advocates and survivors started naming this concept “separation violence” in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

11. “Legal Images of Battered Women: Redefining the Issue of Separation.” by Martha R. Mahoney * Copyright (c) 1991 Michigan Law Review Michigan Law Review October, 1991 90 Mich. L. Rev. 1 http://www.lawsite.ca/51301/mahoney.htm. Link last checked 7/08

Evidence of the gravity of separation violence is overwhelming:

Up to 3/4 of domestic assaults reported to law enforcement agencies were inflicted after separation of the couples. (U.S. Dept. of Justice, 1983)

One study reveals that 73% of the battered women seeking emergency medical services sustained injuries after leaving the batterer. (Stark et al., 1981)

In another study in Philadelphia and Chicago, almost 1/4 of the women killed by their male partners were separated or divorced from the men who killed them. 28.6% of the women were attempting to end the relationship when they were killed. (Casanave and Zahn, 1986). In one study of spousal homicide, over half of the male defendants were separated from their victims (Bernard et al., 1982)

Women are most likely to be murdered when attempting to report abuse or to leave an abusive relationship. (Sonkin et al., 1985, Browne, 1987).

In his book on domestic violence homicides, Neal Websdale
If you’d like to look at Websdale’s work, check out http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_lethality.pdf (link checked 7/08) cites the following studies: “The extant research literature shows that women experience an increased risk of lethal violence when they leave intimate relationships with men. Wilson and Daly’s analysis of interspousal homicide from summary data in Canada (1974-90), New South Wales (1968-86) and Chicago (1965-90) reveals that wives experienced a ‘substantially elevated’ risk of lethal victimization when estranged form and no longer living with their husbands. These researchers comment that among married, cohabiting Canadian spouses between 1977 and 1983 ‘a man was almost four times as likely to kill his wife as to be killed by her; among estranged couple, he was more than nine times as likely to kill her as she him.’ According to Wilson and Daly the significantly increased risk was not due to an escalation of the violence that was already present in these marital relationships. Rather, they point out that batterers warned their wives that if they left they would be killed; they then followed through on those threats.

Easteal also reports that it was more likely that the batterer would kill himself after killing his partner if they were separated before the killing, although she contends that the length of the separation does not seem to be important. For Easteal, in cases of homicide-suicide, it is the inability of the offender to conceive of himself as an entity separate from his partner that propels him toward killing.”

“Because leaving may be dangerous (from the point that the batterer learns that the relationship may end through years after separation)
Lydia Walker, national expert on domestic violence, believes that survivors are in most danger of homicide or an assault in the first year after separation, and after the batterer leaves subsequent victims. NOTE: LYDIA Walker, not Lenore. http://www.lydiawalker.net/ (link checked 8/09) does not mean that battered women should stay. Cohabiting with the batterer is highly dangerous. Violence may increase in frequency and severity over time, and never disappears without intervention. A batterer may engage in preemptive strikes, fearing loss of ownership or anticipating separation even before the battered woman reaches such a decision. Although leaving may pose additional hazards, at least in the short run, the research data and our experience as advocates for battered women demonstrates that ultimately a battered woman can best achieve safety and freedom apart from the batterer. Leaving will require strategic planning and legal intervention to avert separation violence and to safeguard survivors and their children.” (Revised and reprinted from Confronting Domestic Violence: Effective Police Response by Barbara J. Hart, Jane Stuehling, Micki Reese and Edmund Stubbing. Published by the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence, 1990. Quoted with permission.)

Some of my earliest experiences as a shelter worker included the following:

In the Jones case, (not the real name) Joe Jones, a psychiatrist under contract at Community Mental Health, was convicted of felonious assault for hitting his soon to be ex-wife over the head seven times with a claw hammer. She had been separated form him for a year, was in counseling, and had a restraining order. The divorce was final one week after the assault took place. Carlos Warrington was convicted of second degree murder for smashing his three year old son's head in with a furniture table leg. The jury decided that he had meant to kill his (soon to be ex wife,) but killed his son instead when she escaped. She had left him, had her own apartment and had a restraining order. Sharon White was killed by her former boyfriend Lyle Taylor. He had been arrested four times for domestic assault, and convicted. Unfortunately, the two felonies were plea bargained to misdemeanors. Greta Haaken, age 13, was murdered by a boy with whom she had broken off a dating relationship. He had confessed to choking her into unconsciousness the week before, but had not yet been arrested. Holly Jones was murdered when her assailant received an eviction notice for her apartment

III. Some battered women are held prisoner in their own homes. Assailants use psychological terrorism and brainwashing techniques to keep them in the violent relationship.

Take a look at the "Stockholm Syndrome", often used as an explanatory model by law enforcement. The hostages identify with, become attached to, and take the side of their captors. Studies have found that members of the following groups have suffered from the “Stockholm Syndrome” -- concentration camp survivors; prisoners of war; physically and/or emotionally abused children; battered women; civilians in Chinese Communist prisons; cult members; women and youth trapped in prostitution, women and youth trafficked internationally.
See the excellent article by Dee L. R. Graham and Edna I. Rawlings in Dating Violence: Young Women in Danger, edited by Barrie Levy, New Leaf, Seal Press, 1998 for a description of this syndrome. The Stockholm Syndrome is valuable in describing the systematic methods used to break down the victims' will to resist and bring them under control. It is also valuable in explaining how the responses of those who are victimized ---- which may seem incomprehensible -- become easily understandable survival reactions in life-threatening, abusive situations.

Emotional abuse occurs in virtually all relationships where physical violence exists. The assailant will use extremely derogatory, often sexually explicit epithets tailored to the vulnerabilities of the survivor. He will employ knowledge gained in an intimate relationship to attack the woman's spirit and sense of her own value. This constant barrage of verbal abuse wears down the woman's resistance, making it more difficult for her to leave.

Psychological terrorism goes far beyond name-calling and vicious verbal attacks. It may involve withholding food and water, sleep deprivation, withholding medication, administering drugs and medication, total isolation, degradation, “gaslighting,”
“To gaslight” crept into English from the movie directed by George Kukor and starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. It means to manipulate someone into believing they are going crazy. He “loses his watch” (having planted it in her purse,) and she believes she took it without realizing she had done so. He turns the gaslight down in her room, and when she complains about it, he tells her she’s imagining it. Russian Roulette, demonstrations that the batterer is “all powerful,” occasional reinforcements for compliant behavior, and frustrating any attempts at non-compliance.

Rape,
“Marital Rape: New Research and Directions” by Raquel Kennedy Bergen With contributions from Elizabeth Barnhill, VAWnet: (February 2006) at http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_MaritalRapeRevised.pdf sexual abuse and sexual humiliation are routine in battering relationships. This is another tactic habitually practiced by hostage takers and those who run concentration camps. Because sexuality is such a potentially intimate and sacred experience, sexual abuse and domination are particularly degrading to the spirit and weaken the capacity to resist.

Torture and murder of pets - particularly those special to the woman or to children - is also common. The assailant often deliberately destroys property (particularly pictures or objects belonging to the survivor’s family) that has immense intrinsic value to his victim. Again, the assailant wields these weapons to demonstrate his control and her powerlessness. (See also Judith Hermann's outstanding book Trauma and Recovery for further information about trauma victims.) In her book Getting Free Ginny NiCarthy includes a chart and several pages of description that compares survivors of domestic violence to victims of brainwashing.
I highly recommend Ginny NiCarthy’s work. Please check out her website at http://www.ginnynicarthy.org/. The chart referenced is based on Biderman’s Chart of Coercion originally published by Amnesty International in their 1973 Report on Torture. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Diana E. H. Russell compared it to battering in her landmark book Rape in Marriage. (Indiana University Press; Rev 1990) Ginny NiCarthy devotes several pages to it in Getting Free: You Can End Abuse and Take Back Your Life (New Leaf, 2004). A shelter in Northhampton, Massachusetts adapted it to battering relationships, as did Ann Jones in her tremendous book Next Time She’ll Be Dead: Battering and How to Stop It. (Beacon Press, revised 2000). I’ve also done a powerpoint based on this chart (available upon request.) The similarities between Amnesty International’s work and the Power and Control Wheel (developed by advocates and survivors and focusing solely on intimate partner violence) are striking, given that they were developed independently of each other.

Extortion. When I can’t really understand what’s holding a survivor in a battering relationship, I often find that the assailant is holding damaging information over her head. This extortion takes all kinds of forms. He can threaten to report wrongdoing or criminal behavior to child welfare, welfare, the Internal Revenue Service or the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He will threaten a police report. Sometimes her behavior is not criminal at all, but would humiliate or embarrass her. Assailants have been known to videotape sex acts, particularly those that are especially problematic for the survivor and threaten to mail copies to parents, friends, employers, etc. He might threaten to disclose an abortion, or an episode of infidelity, etc. If he or she is in a same gender relationship, s/he might threaten to “out” their partner/spouse.

IV. Some battered women stay because they believe that counseling or therapy will help their batterers stop being violent.

Professionals may refer women to couples or marital counseling. Alternatively, they may suggest therapy or anger management for the assailant. Unfortunately, when the assailant enters counseling, this bolsters the woman's hope that the relationship can be salvaged, and she may stay or return. If he can be cured, she reasons (and her reasoning is supported by the therapist who is doing the counseling, who she sees as the expert), then the violence will end and their relationship can resume. This applies to pro-feminist high quality batterer intervention programs as well as to non-feminist psychotherapeutic practices.

A 2001 review of research published on VAWnet states “Referral of a batterer to a BIP
BIP is a commonly used abbreviation for batterers intervention program. All KINDS of amazing research about the effectiveness of batterers’ intervention programs AND other issues about domestic violence can be found on these two sites: http://www.mincava.umn.edu/ (link checked 8/09) and http://www.vawnet.org/ (link checked 8/09). is one of the strongest predictors that a woman will leave shelter and return to the batterer.”
Larry Bennett and Oliver Williams. “In Brief: Controversies and Recent Studies of Batterer Intervention Program Effectiveness”. August, 2001. VAWnet, Applied Research Forum, National Electronic Network on Violence against Women. http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_bip.pdf (link checked 7/09)

I have found no research indicating that traditional therapy works for batterers.
Lundy Bancroft delineates five ways in which therapy differs from a high quality abuser program i.e. that therapy will give unconditional support to feelings, and will not address what Bancroft calls the central causes of abusiveness – entitlement, coercive control, disrespect, superiority, selfishness or victim blaming. Bancroft, Lundy Why Does He DO That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. New York: Berkley Books, 2002, p. 356. Anger management classes are worse than useless for assailants. They are based on the thoroughly discredited idea that batterers lose their temper and strike out. Assailants’ violence is planned (instrumental,) not impulsive. The anger assumption leads to a lot of terrible public and program policy that is designed to placate and avoid making the batterer angry rather than holding him accountable.

Research is mixed and not yet extensive enough to really reach any conclusions regarding the effectiveness of specially tailored batterers’ intervention programs.
Bennett and Williams in the VAWnet article referenced in footnote 19 state: “While nearly 50 empirical studies have been published on batterer program outcomes, in only four of these studies were batterers randomly assigned to a BIP or a no-treatment control group. Experimental research is difficult and expensive, and at present inconclusive.” There is some evidence that indicates that bips may be effective for a relatively small number of batterers in a high quality program backed up by sanctions from the criminal justice system.
A report issued in June of 2003 by the Department of Justice. National Institute of Justice. Shelly Jackson, Lynette Feder, David R. Forde; Robert C. Davis, Christopher D. Maxwell, and Bruce G. Taylor. “Batterer Intervention Programs: Where Do We Go From Here? Here are its findings. “Two evaluations of programs in Broward County, Florida, and Brooklyn, New York, based on more rigorous experimental designs, claim that they have little or no effect…..In the Broward County study, no significant differences were found between batterers in the treatment and control groups on reoffense rates or attitudes toward domestic violence. In the Brooklyn study, the results were more complicated: Men who completed an 8-week treatment program showed no differences from the control group, but men who had completed a 26-week

program had significantly fewer official complaints lodged against them than the

control group. No difference was found among the three groups in attitudes toward domestic violence.”

Supporters of survivors in close knit communities, particularly those experiencing oppression, have traditionally employed strategies to restrain assailants who are also part of those communities. This may involve confrontation of the assailant, ostracism, or other community sanctions.
Much is often made of how “traditional” communities often made up of disenfranchised groups have a culture that is permissive of violence. It’s crucial to look at how such communities also have traditions of resistance to domestic violence.

Most experts believe that a man must be violence free for two to three years before marriage counseling is safe or appropriate. (Ellen Pence, one of the founders of the Duluth project, quoted in the February 16, 1992 New York Times article "When Men Hit Women" by Jan Hoffman)

Professionals
In this article, the term professional refers to any person whose job description includes helping, interacting with or serving battered women. So shelter workers, advocates, police, counselors, nurses, advocates for the homeless, etc. are all included., therefore, must be very careful in referring an assailant to counseling. They may unwittingly keep a woman in a violent relationship by fostering erroneous beliefs in the positive outcomes of therapy, anger management or specialized batterers intervention programs. They must diligently inform both parties of the facts about the effectiveness of counseling for assailants.

No one really wants to be the person who brings the survivor the bad news that her spouse, or boyfriend, is not going to end his violence and that there is little hope for a non-violent relationship. However, this information must be communicated, and it must be done compassionately and carefully. Most battered women do NOT get this information and therefore are not ABLE to make better informed choices.
If the batterers intervention program is housed within the same organization that runs the shelter and advocacy services, the survivor may assume that the organization believes that her assailant can and will be helped by the bip. Accurate information is therefore even more important.

Assailants can seem romantic and charming. They can choose to behave very well, and will do so until that tactic no longer effectively controls their partners (or is convincing to professionals.) Then, they use a variety of coercive methods up to and including physical force to get what they want and bring their partners back under control. Their ability to mask their abusive behavior at certain times also keeps hope alive for the survivor.

V. Some battered women stay because they hope he will change and become non-violent.

Battered women (sometimes) stay for varying lengths of time because they very much hope their assailant will change his behavior. All survivors want the violence to end; many do not want the relationship to end. The assailant usually tells his partner that he will change, that the violence was a one time event, and this bolsters her hope.

Cycle of Violence Theory.

Lenore Walker developed a theory of describing what happens in a battering relationship. She observed three phases in battering relationships. PHASE I is the tension building phase. It involves a gradual escalation of tension. The abuser instigates minor incidents of physical, sexual or emotional abuse. This stage may last anywhere from minutes to days, weeks or month. PHASE II is the acute battering incident. The assailant attacks his partner. The violence may last for hours, days, or even longer. PHASE III. This has been named the "loving, contrition phase", the "honeymoon" phase or the "respite" phase. The batterer cries, pleads, buys presents, sends flowers, and swears to change. He apologizes and pleads with the woman not to leave. He may enter therapy briefly during this phase. Sometimes the woman perceives this phase as a sign that the assailant is changing his behavior, and stays in the relationship. Unfortunately, the cycle starts right up again at some future time.

In her 1984 study, Walker found that 65% of all women report a tension-building phase, and 58% report a "loving, contrition" phase. Therefore, although this theory is helpful in describing some battered women's experiences, it cannot be applied across the board

Battered women and advocates have objected to the names for PHASE III. The ostensibly better behavior of the batterer in the respite phase is just another means of control. He is afraid she will leave so he uses different tactics to keep her in the relationship. The theory seems to mistakenly promote the idea that batterers are tense, and their tension “erupts”, that they have a "short fuse" and "explode" rather than plan their controlling behavior.

VI. Some battered women are forced to stay because they can't afford justice.

Getting a civil protection order
Civil protection orders are known as protection orders, personal protection orders, restraining orders, or temporary restraining orders in different parts of the U.S. They differ in definition from state to state and in Indian country. may require getting a lawyer -- which usually requires money. The assailant may challenge the protection order, and the survivor may need to retain counsel to represent her. Legal aid offices may not necessarily handle divorce, and many do not have the resources to handle divorce and custody
“Child Custody and Visitation Decisions in Domestic Violence Cases: Legal Trends, Risk Factors, and Safety Concerns” (Revised 2007) by Daniel G. Saunders in consultation with Karen Oehme. http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_CustodyRevised.pdf (link checked 8/09) cases when domestic violence is involved. Major cuts to legal services have hindered even the limited options for legal redress that battered women formerly had. A woman often cannot afford as skilled an attorney as her spouse/partner. The assailant may have told her that he will hire an attorney who will take her children from her if she leaves him. Too often, this threat becomes reality.

When a survivor is charged with a crime, s/he oftentimes cannot afford quality legal representation. She may be assigned an attorney by the court who knows nothing about domestic violence or worse accepts the assailants’ version of the crime.
Many high priced attorneys fit into this category, too. However, when you have money you’re more able to pick and choose.

    Many battered women are incorrectly arrested for domestic violence. Their assailant may set her up by scratching or cutting himself and claiming she did it. Most often, s/he has acted in self-defense (brandished a knife to prevent a beating or scratched or clawed at him to prevent strangulation). S/he is quite likely to admit this action, whereas batterers routinely deny the violence. Too many law enforcement officials (police and prosecutors
The term prosecutor is used in some states in the U.S. In other parts of the U.S. the term District Attorney, (D.A.) is used, and in Canada, the term is Crown Attorney.) are not adequately trained or knowledgeable about self-defense and domestic violence. Survivors may also have retaliated against their abuser, or engaged in force pre-emptively to avoid an assault.

    Other survivors have been coerced into crime by their assailants.
Please read Compelled to Crime: The Gender Entrapment of Battered, Black Women by Beth Richie.

Without adequate legal representation, battered women often just plead guilty or no contest.

VII. Battered women stay for their children.

Battered women fear that their partner will get custody of the children.
In the anthology Listen to the Thunder: Advocates Talk about the Battered Women’s Movement, (1995) there is an article by Janet Freeman that illustrates this point. The article is entitled “From Pillar to Post: One Woman’s Experience of Battering and the Systems That ‘Help,’” and chronicles how a survivor’s children were ordered returned to their extremely abusive father. Some studies indicate that contrary to popular belief, the majority of the times that men contest custody, men are awarded custody. Any advocate for survivors will have several reports to transmit of batterers getting custody of their children.
Liss, Marsha B. and Geraldine Butts Stahly. “Domestic Violence and Child Custody.” In Marsali Hansen and Michele Harway (eds.), Battering and Family Therapy. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993

Sometimes survivors sacrifice themselves for their children particularly if the batterer is not beating or raping the children. They stay so that their children can have a father, or so that their children will be able to go to good schools, live in a safe neighborhood and have financial security. Women may not want to see their children have to leave their home, their neighborhood and their schools (this is especially true for older children).

I’ve heard many well-intentioned people say “well, if it were me, I’d take the kids and disappear.” First, it is increasingly difficult to disappear in the age of the internet and the web. Second, too many survivors have been “advised” to take the children and go to another state or county only to find that the batterer has gotten custody of the children in their absence, AND to find themselves charged, or convicted of parental kidnapping. Going “underground” is excruciatingly difficult. The survivor has to find a way to support herself and her children without revealing her whereabouts. She has to cut herself off from her community, her friends, her supportive family, etc. She will always be on the run.

Advocates, community based organizations and all those who consider themselves allies of survivors must work to ensure that batterers do not get custody of their children, and that survivors have the right to live in their own communities with their children free of torment, stalking and abuse.

VIII. Some battered women stay because there is no place for them to go.

Shelters do not exist everywhere. They are often full. Their funding is in constant danger
Witness the recent cut (2009) of California State funding for domestic violence programs., and they are vulnerable to attacks from groups that decide they are destroying the family" or are "anti male".

Housing is a major roadblock. Most women cannot find or afford safe housing.
“Housing and Battered Women” by Amy Correia and Jen Rubin (November 2001) does an excellent job of describing these barriers. The article can be found on the net at http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/BCS2_IS.pdf (link checked 7/09) They become stuck in emergency shelters, unable to find a place to live. Women who are NOT battered but who have children face discrimination in the rental market. Landlords are often reluctant to rent to formerly battered women, believing that their assailant will show up and cause property damage or physical harm. The assailant often deliberately sabotages his partner's credit rating (or prevents her from establishing one at all) so as to keep her from renting or buying a new domicile.
See the fact sheet “Domestic Violence and Homelessness” at http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/domestic.pdf (link checked 7/09)

IX. Some battered women stay because they are not given accurate information about battering.

They are told (by professionals, family, friends and the batterer) that alcohol or other drugs cause battering. They are told that they are codependent, that they enable his behavior, and if they would change, then their assailants would. Women then endlessly attempt to modify their behavior only to watch the violence worsen. They are then told that they are not trying hard enough or that they are resistant. They are sent to mediation or couples counseling, and told that if this does not work out, it is their fault.

Some people tell survivors, if it were me, “I’d kill him.”
I’ve probably heard this at least 100 times in my career. At first glance, this comment seems supportive, indicating contempt and anger towards the batterer. But upon more intense scrutiny, it is actually very judgmental. The person making the comment is saying “if she were a truly STRONG woman, she wouldn’t that that kind of treatment. She’d stand up for herself!” This comment is really equivalent to “why doesn’t she just leave?” I wonder how many people who make that statement have ever killed anyone or seriously contemplated the gravity of the decision to take another person’s life.

In the first month of my work (November, 1987) as an advocate for survivors, a battered woman told me that the sexual violence and physical abuse was so horrendous that she thought she must either kill herself or him. Then she said “I heard about your shelter (indicating that now she had another choice).

Survivors who DO kill their assailants do so because they are desperate and see NO other means of escape.
Angela Browne identifies the following factors causing survivors to kill their assailants -- frequency of violent incidents, severity of injuries, man’s threats to kill, woman’s threats of suicide, man’s drug use, man’s frequency of intoxication, and forced sexual acts. Browne, Angela. When Battered Women Kill. New York: Free Press, 1987. The presence of weapons in the home and the abuser’s threats to harm children in the home are cited as additional risk factors. Foster, Lynne A., Christine Mann Veale, and Catherine Ingram Fogel. “Factors Present When Battered Women Kill.” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 10:273-284. 1989. Research now indicates that since the establishment of shelters and laws providing some protection for survivors, fewer assailants have been killed by survivors.

Another piece of misinformation about battering is the Burning Bed myth.
1984 movie starring Farrah Fawcett Majors as Francine Hughes, which told the true story of Ms. Hughes killing her assailant. This otherwise excellent movie inadvertently promulgates the idea that battered women who kill their assailants get off. (And fuels the right wing myth that women are killing men and getting away with it due to the takeover of the criminal justice system by radical feminists). In fact, most women who kill their assailants go to prison, oftentimes for longer periods than male batterers who kill their female partners.
Sue Osthoff, the director of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women reports that the vast majority of women accused of killing their abusive partners (72 percent to 80 percent) are convicted or accept a plea, and many receive long, harsh sentences. Osthoff, Sue. “Restoring Justice: Clemency for Battered Women.” Response 14:2-3. 1991. The Clearinghouse has long been the leader in work on behalf of battered women accused of crimes. http://www.ncdbw.org/ (link checked. 8/09).

Ewing’s 1990 data on 100 cases in which battered women killed their assailant revealed that despite generally abundant evidence that they were severely abused by the men they killed, many if not most of these women are convicted because the circumstances surrounding their homicidal acts do not meet the requirements of current self-defense law….” “Psychological Self-Defense: A Proposed Justification for Battered Women Who Kill.” Law and Human Behavior 14:579-594.

Many survivors who DO kill their assailants are haunted by guilt and remorse for the rest of their lives.

And finally, what if the woman has children? The children’s lives will be forever shadowed by the knowledge that their mother killed their father because of his despicable violence. This once again underlines the responsibility of the community to create options so that survivors have choices to survive without resorting to homicide or suicide.
Stark and Flitcraft find that ongoing assault by male partners “may be the single most important context for female suicide attempts…” Evan Stark and Anne Flitcraft. Women at Risk: Domestic Violence and Women’s Health. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 1996.

X. Some battered women stay because they believe what most people in our society think about battered women. They may believe that:

    battered women imagine, exaggerate, deliberately fabricate, or initiate the violence.
    battered women somehow provoke or are to blame for the violence.
    all battered women come from poor, uneducated, or minority backgrounds.
    their partner just has a problem controlling his anger, or that stress, alcohol or unemployment problems have caused the battering.

If those that the woman goes to for help (family, friends or professionals) believe these myths, they might (for example) suggest to the woman that she help her partner reduce his stress or find a job or stop making him angry. If the woman believes she is provoking his violence, she will work on pacifying him. These strategies will not work, the violence will continue, the woman will stay in the relationship longer, and it will be harder for her to escape.

XI. Some battered women stay (for varying lengths of time) because their assailants deliberately and systematically isolate them form support.

People who are in trouble need support. They need the aid of family, friends, co-workers and professionals to weather the crisis and make the best decisions for themselves. Assailants commonly force their partner to account for every minute of their time. One assailant marked the tires of his girlfriend's car to monitor her use of it. Another nailed the windows shut and put a lock on the outside of the door. Many take car keys, disable cars, sabotage the computer, read her email, unplug or break telephones, steal cell phones, or routinely drain the battery of a car.

Assailants methodically drive friends and family away. Sometimes this is accomplished through overt threats or physical attacks; sometimes they make life thoroughly unpleasant for anyone with the temerity to be around them. Many assailants act extremely jealous and are very possessive. They constantly accuse their partners of affairs and sexual advances. They demand that their partner speak to no one, and enforce this by accusing them of infidelity every time they do so. They monitor her every move and monopolize her attention (sometimes by texting her every half hour or every fifteen minutes).

Survivors may be reluctant to leave their domestic or farm animals to the assailant who may hurt, torture or kill animals in order to prove what disgusting violence he is capable of, as well as to erode the survivor’s resistance through instilling despair. (If he can do this to a kitten, what will he do to me?)
Fact sheet on the relationship of domestic violence to animal abuse. http://www.hsus.org/hsus_field/first_strike_the_connection_between_animal_cruelty_and_human_violence/animal_cruelty_and_family_violence_making_the_connection/animal_crueltydomestic_violence_fact_sheet.html (link checked 7/08)

Friends and family who believe myths about battering and who do not support survivors also help keep women in battering situations.

Geography can also be isolating. Women in rural areas may not be able to drive hours to the nearest shelter or police station.
Rural Womyn Zone. http://www.ruralwomyn.net/domvio.html (link checked 7/09)

XII. Some battered women stay because they believe in love and they still love their partners.

This is often one of the hardest phenomena for people who have not been battered to understand. However, many people have been in difficult relationships or jobs they that knew they should leave, but either couldn't, or needed time to be able to depart. Love is glorified in our culture. Popular songs and movies perpetually buttress the idea that love is the most important thing in life, and that people should do anything for love. This is particularly reinforced for women.

Women may love their partners, and at the same time hate and resist their violent and abusive actions. A helpful comment when working with survivors is to point out that the woman does not have to stop loving her assailant in order to leave. Some women may be troubled about making it on their own, and about being lonely. When they leave, they may endure feelings of grief and loss. Frequently, leaving a batterer means abandoning a circle of friends, family, a neighborhood and a community. American Indian
Sometimes referred to as Native American or native people or by tribal affiliation. women in the U.S. who live on sovereign tribal lands may need their community for survival.
Mending the Sacred Hoop is one of many excellent resource for American Indian and Alaskan Native survivors. http://www.msh-ta.org/ (link checked 7/09) Some women have to change their names and disappear in order to live without an assailant's constant harassment. It is hard for women to live by themselves without any of their customary supports.

XIII. Some battered women stay because they believe what their assailant is telling them, such as:

    "You're crazy and stupid. No one will believe you."
    "You're the one that's sick. You need help. You're hysterical."
    "I know the judge; he won't put me in jail."
    "The police will never arrest me."
    "It's not serious. You're not really battered."
    "If you leave, I'll get custody because you'll have abandoned me and the kids."
    "If you leave, I'll find you and kill you. I'll kill your family, your kids, and your pets. You'll never escape me."

Assailants deliberately supply their partners with false information in order to keep them in the relationship.
Even worse, the assailant may be telling the truth. The police MAY never arrest him; he might in fact know the judge, etc. They may sabotage their partner's attempt to use the civil or criminal justice system by giving spurious information about the process. At the same time, assailants often play on their partners concern for their well being. A common ploy is to tell their partner that if they are prosecuted they will spend long years in prison. (In fact, convictions are rare. They are almost always for misdemeanors. Assailants are more likely to be sentenced to counseling than to jail).

Many assailants tell their partners that shelters are lesbian recruiting stations, that all the staff are lesbians, that she will be attacked by lesbians if she goes to the shelter, and if she leaves him, she will become a lesbian. Battered women who believe this are sometimes reluctant to seek shelter.
If you haven’t read it, go to SuzannePharr.org and read her out of print classic Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism. A brilliant analysis inspired and based on Ms. Pharr’s work in the battered women’s movement.

When no one believes a battered woman, when her assailant isn't arrested, when she is criticized and scrutinized, when he gets custody of the children, and when he tracks her down and tries to kill her, she believes what he says. Why? Because his predictions too often turn out to be true.

Institutions, professionals and citizens must work to undercut assailants’ control of survivors by making his predictions false.

XIV. Some battered women stay because they are addicted and their addiction prevents them from taking action on their own behalf. Some battered women stay because their assailant encourages or coerces them into using alcohol or other drugs, and/or sabotages their recovery.

When a woman has an alcohol or other drug problem, it is extraordinarily difficult for her to leave the battering relationship.
Please see the article “Substance Abuse and Intimate Partner Violence” by Larry Bennett and Patricia Bland, http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_SubstanceRevised.pdf (link checked 7/08) Some women may be consuming alcohol or other drugs to numb the psychic, emotional or physical pain caused by the violence. The assailant often promotes consumption. It makes the woman less able to act on her own behalf, and it gives the assailant a handy tool for discrediting and blaming her.
Doctors may prescribe tranquilizers for a battered woman's "nerves". Few women know or are told that minor tranquilizers can be seriously and quickly addictive.
If a woman is in recovery, the assailant may prevent her from going to meetings, or to treatment. He may physically force her to use, or threaten her with physical violence if she does not.

XV. Some battered women are trapped in battering relationships because of sexism (unequal treatment of women).

Women do not have economic resources equal to or approaching men. Barbara Hart: "The most likely predictor of whether a battered woman will permanently separate from her abuser is whether she has the economic resources to survive without him.” The poverty rate
“Welfare and Domestic Violence Against Women: Lessons from Research” by Eleanor Lyon, 2002 http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_VAWReligion.pdf (link checked 7/08) in female-headed households is much greater than that of married families. Nearly one half of all female headed households with children live in poverty, as compared with only 8% of male headed households. The majority of African American and Latina female-headed households live at or below the poverty level, and nearly 60% of all African American children under the age of 14 live in a female-headed household.

Many battered women cannot find a job. Her assailant may have systematically damaged her employment record by harassing her at the work place or by causing excessive lateness and absenteeism.

Indigent battered women may only be able to find a job at an hourly wage. If she has children, this wage will not be sufficient to support her children. If she does not receive public assistance, she probably will not be able to afford medical insurance for herself or her children.

Child care is a serious problem for women entering the work force. It costs a lot of money. Women worry about the risk of leaving their children for long periods of time, and it is sometimes difficult to find quality care.

XVI. Some battered women stay because institutions are helpless or
unwilling to offer them protection or assistance.

I have used some examples of the helplessness of institutions. There are
many other examples. In every institution, there are those who are allies to battered women/survivors and actively search for ways to be helpful. There are heroes in every system. Others are well intentioned, but have no training or knowledge about domestic violence. Others are actively hostile to survivors, or are themselves assailants.

This analysis of institutional practice is not meant to blame the people in the institutions, or in any particular agency, but rather is designed to look at how:

1) almost everyone in our society believes incorrect information about battering, survivors, and assailants;

2) institutional policies and practices reflect that misinformation;

3) those policies help to keep survivors in abusive relationships, and

4) we can begin the process of exploring how to create new policies which will undercut the assailant's control of his partner.

The Legal System

Assailants are still not routinely arrested in many parts of the United States.

Police still tell survivors that they must have a protection order before an arrest can be made (in jurisdictions where this is not true). This builds in a “free assault” system, since an arrest is not made until after a protection order is issued.

Personal protection orders are often not enforced. Many police believe that a survivor can “nullify” a protection order if s/he “invites” an assailant to her home or workplace.

Female survivors of domestic violence are often arrested when they are in fact acting in self defense.

Cases where a crime would in other circumstances (stranger assault) be charged as a felony are charged as a misdemeanor (because they are "domestics" and not as important.)

Courts do not make sure that battered women are notified of their court date. Then, when she doesn't show up, they blame her for dropping the charges.

Some courts issue bench warrants and threaten to jail the woman for contempt if she determines she cannot continue with prosecution, ignoring the terrorism her batterer is exercising over her.

Some d.a.s/prosecutors will drop charges when the survivor calls them on the telephone to ask them to do so, ignoring the possibility that the woman is being coerced into the phone call, (or in some cases, that it is not the survivor on the phone at all).

A battered woman may see the prosecutor/d.a./crown attorney for only two or three minutes immediately before her court case, making it very difficult for the prosecutor to gather enough information to proceed in the most effective manner.

Some judges deny battered women custody even when the children have been abused by the batterer. There is a fallacious assumption that the woman will return to her abuser or will become involved with another batterer. Often judges are so impressed that a father wants custody of their children, they fail to consider the effects of domestic violence on the children.

Courts often believe that the woman is making up, or exaggerating the violence. They often believe the assailant's story, and go to great lengths to empathize with his problems.
See “Myths That Place Children at Risk during Custody Litigation” by S. J. Dallam and J. L. Silberg published in Sexual Assault Review 9(3), 33-47. On the web at http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/res/cust_myths.html (link checked 7/09)

Religious Institutions

Clergy have tremendous influence in women's lives, and there are those who have been very helpful to survivors of violence. For example, the Rev. Dr. Marie Fortune has written a number of different articles and books for women of faith.
More information on the organization that Rev. Dr. Fortune helped found as well as resources for women of faith and those who wish to help them can be found at the FaithTrust Institute’s web site at http://www.faithtrustinstitute.org. (link checked 7/09)
“Violence Against Women and the Role of Religion.” Rev. Dr. Marie M. Fortune and Rabbi Cindy G. Enger (2005) http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_VAWReligion.pdf (link checked 8/09)Too often, however, people in religious institutions have helped to keep the battered woman in the relationship. In an article "Women Who Have Ended Abuse" (Horton, Wilkins, and Wright), the authors tabulated reports from clergy whose responses served to keep
women in the abusive relationship.

One minister suggested sex to wear the assailant out; another that the survivor cook meals that were more appetizing. Some women were told to pray, sing hymns to raise their spirits, go to services and read Scriptures. Some were told that battering was their cross to bear, and that it was God's will. Some were told that divorce was against God's law. Others were told not to provoke him or that they needed to forgive and forget. One woman I spoke to told me her minister told her to pray to be a better wife, and then her husband would not beat her.

If battered women get the message that they are at fault, they will focus their attention on changing and staying in the relationship.

If a survivor believes that her church, coven, mosque, temple, lodge or other religious institution supports the batterer or puts preservation of the family above her safety, she is more likely to stay. If her Imam, priest, rabbi, minister, spiritual guide, high priest or priestess, or any other spiritual or religious leader supports her, she is more likely to act on her own behalf. Survivors who leave often cite the constant, persistent, emotional, spiritual, and pragmatic assistance from their community of faith as a major reason they were able to leave.

Psychiatrists, Therapists, Mental Health Workers, Health Care Professionals.

These professionals may not have adequate tools, time and/or training to assess domestic violence. Studies have indicated that up to one quarter of all women entering hospital emergency rooms have been battered, yet most emergency rooms identify only a small fraction of those women. Some professionals do not even ask the questions -- are you battered? or is there violence in your relationship?
These are not recommended screening questions. It’s more effective to say something such as “All people in relationships fight. What happens when you and your partner (boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, spouse – use the term the person you are speaking to uses) fight? Have you ever been shoved, pushed, slapped, kicked, hit, punched or restrained? Has anyone done something sexual to you that you didn’t want? They may not interview the partners separately. Battered women may not identify their experiences as "battering", or they may not label forced sexual intercourse by spouse as "rape".

Some professionals may misdiagnose battered women as mentally ill. Others may believe that violence is caused by alcohol or other drug use. Some report being afraid of the assailant, and therefore unwilling to counsel the survivor. Some see battering as a dysfunctional relationship, and may do couples counseling with the two people. Professionals may not be aware of, or they may not routinely refer to, their local domestic violence program for counseling, shelter, and advocacy. These issues prevent battered women from getting the help they need to leave their assailants. Mental health professionals working with survivors who ARE mentally ill may apply time tested policies such as involving the family member in medication decisions and monitoring, or will work at cementing and respecting partner bonds. This works well except if the spouse or partner is a batterer. Then the professional inadvertently colludes with the batterers’ abuse.

Physicians working with a survivor who has an opoid
Opiod dependency as in hooked on vicodin, Tylenol 3, morphine, Demerol, darvon, darvocette, etc. dependency may ask the spouse/partner to administer pain-killing drugs, particularly when the survivor has overdosed on the medication previously. The batterer may then use the medication to strengthen his control over his partner.

XVII. Some battered women stay because they believe what women have been
taught to believe about both women's roles and men's roles (gender socialization).

It is my hypothesis that gender stereotyping and enforced adherence to it play a major role in battering.

Certainly, girls are taught to be passive, to smile, to be nice, to be accommodating, to take care of others and to be sensitive to others needs. Beyond "teaching", our culture actively punishes girls who violate those rules. Such punishment includes social ostracism, ridicule, poor grades in school, and oftentimes sexual harassment, assault, and physical violence. Girls soon learn the price of speaking out, independence and autonomy. Individual females may have these lessons mitigated or more strictly enforced by their own particular family members, extended family, neighborhood, school and teachers, but the overall cultural message remains constant. Those who are singled out for encouragement and special treatment are often brainwashed into seeing themselves as different, better, singular, and are taught to treat other women with (at best) tolerance and (at worst) contempt.

Usually, (in discussions of gender stereotyping) the issue is raised that men are taught to be tough, not to cry, not to be verbal and not to discuss their emotions. However, I this is not the aspect of gender stereotyping that contributes to battering. Batterers express emotions of anger, pain, grief and loss very well. They do cry. Many are highly articulate, persuasive and skilled at identifying and expressing their feelings.

The facet of gender roles that directly contributes to domestic violence is the concept of entitlement. Men are taught entitlement. Men are trained to believe that they are entitled to the attention and services of women. This includes: listening to them talk; supporting them emotionally; enhancing their status with other men; fulfilling their sexual needs; and caring for their children. Some men are more up to date --- they demand intellectual stimulation as well. If they are more traditional, they expect cooked meals, clean clothes and houses, too. When men don't get these services, some may try negotiation, some pressure, and some may leave their partners. Some men choose to use violence to obtain those services.

Men have the vast pool (ocean?) of sexism to dip into. Every batterer has images and arguments about the inferiority of women ready to his hand. Every batterer can use arguments from the Bible or the Quran
These two sacred texts are used as examples for brevity. There are many different interpretations of all holy texts – some that seem to support sexism and some that do not. that justify his control of and dominance towards women. Every batterer has the range of insults and put downs tailored specifically towards women at his behest. Every batterer can point to a man who has gotten away with murdering his wife and many do – often posting newspaper clippings or reading aloud from egregious cases where men are acquitted after torturing, beating or killing their partners. If it were not for the history of men’s ownership and control of women, the current unequal status of women, batterers would not have the kind of power they do over their partners.

Many men (and women) do not even realize the extent to which we have all
been socialized to accept our differential status. Some men are struggling conscientiously to divest themselves of the benefits that they accrue just by being men. Gender roles are so pervasive and so insidious that men (and women) don't even realize how seriously they affect and inform our behavior. Those men who have chosen non-violence, who are actively working on equal relationships with women, and who are challenging men's entitlement should be welcomed as allies. They must take a greater role in challenging other men's violence and sexism.

Women are indoctrinated with the notion that women are only valuable if they: a) are with a man, b) are married c) are in a relationship with a man d) want to be in a relationship with a man and e) have or want to have children.

In addition, family looms large in our culture(s). The threat of losing a family presages major grief and loss. Women are taught to believe that they are responsible for their family, and charged with its health and well-being. Society teaches women to be nurturing, caring, and self-sacrificing. Women are taught to put their partners and children's welfare above their own.

These beliefs work against women who become trapped by violent men. When
women do what they have been taught to do (stand by their man; take care
of their kids), they are blamed for staying. They are labeled masochistic or codependent.

XVIII. Some battered women stay because in addition to being women and
being battered, they are from another disenfranchised population.

Women of color face additional barriers due to racism.
Allan G. Johnson in his book Privilege, Power and Difference, McGraw-Hill, 2001 says it would be more helpful to analyze not IF racism has affected a specific interaction but HOW it has affected it, i.e. assume that racism is always present – which of course it is.
An incredibly good manual is “DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AWARENESS:

Action for Social Change” at http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/ActionForSocialChange.pdf (link checked 8/09) There is more discrimination in housing. Women of color make even less money than white women, and so have a more difficult time finding the economic means to live independently. Women of color are less likely to be believed when they report rape and battering. If their assailant is white, they have even less hope for belief, a police report, an arrest and a conviction than do white battered women. Women of color may be concerned that their assailant may be brutalized by a racist criminal justice system.

Native American (Indian) women may live on reservations where there is a chronic lack of resources. Tribal orders of protection may not be respected by state or county courts outside of Indian country. Alaskan native women may be physically unable to leave because they will not survive in the cold.

Rural women may have to travel hours to reach a shelter or another place of safety and may be concerned about leaving farm animals.

Lesbians and gay men face additional danger from their assailants than do heterosexual survivors. If her or his assailant threatens to expose their sexual orientation, the survivor could lose his or her job, housing, children or family. Lesbians and bisexual women may have particular confidentiality concerns if their local shelter is staffed in part by women who are part of or in touch with the local lesbian/bisexual community. They may fear their assailant posing as a survivor and getting services. If a survivor has heard that her/his relationship is inherently “sick”, “unnatural”, s/he may be reluctant to disclose problems of abuse in the relationship.

Trans individuals face enormous obstacles.
I STRONGLY recommend a wonderful handbook called “Transitioning Our Shelters: A Guide to Making Homeless Shelters Safe for Transgender People" published by the National Coalition for the Homeless and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. It was written in 2003 by Lisa Mottet and John M. Ohle and is available online at http://www.thetaskforce.org/reports_and_research/trans_homeless link checked last 1/5/09 They often lose their job while transitioning from one gender to another. Some shelters have policies that bar them from entering.
Please see a recently issued (9/08) report from Equality Virginia Education Fund

“Unfortunately, support groups and other conventional victim services have historically not been readily available to GLBT survivors of sexual assault. The “State of Violence” study found that less than five of the 59 sexual assault crisis centers and domestic violence programs in Virginia had knowingly served any GLBT people in the twelve months prior to the interview. Only a third of the 29 GLBT organizations interviewed provided materials on sexual and intimate partner violence for community members to utilize.” to find a full copy of the State of

Violence Report, visit http://www.equalityvirginia.org/avp (link checked 8/09)or call 804.643.4816. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people never know when they will encounter a fairly tolerant helper or when they will encounter mild prejudice or vehement bigotry.
Some resources include: “Relationship Violence in Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/ Transgender/Queer [LGBTQ] Communities Moving Beyond a Gender-Based Framework” by Janice Ristock, Ph.D. and Norma Timbang. Online at http://www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/lgbtqviolence/lgbtqviolence.html (link checked 8/09)

and Domestic Violence in Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Bisexual Communities Participant Manual July 2001 online at http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/LGTBManual-Participant.pdf. (Link checked 8/09)

People who are intersex may be highly reluctant to talk about abuse, particularly sexual abuse, because of the widespread ignorance about this issue.
Some good websites to start the learning process are: Intersex Peer Support - Bodies Like Ours - http://www.bodieslikeours.org/forums/ Intersex Society of North America, http://www.isna.org/ and Intersex Initiative http://www.ipdx.org/ (links checked 5/09)

A person with a disability
An excellent article is “Abuse and Women with Disabilities” by Margaret Nosek & Carol Howland http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_disab.pdf (link checked 7/09) has formidable obstacles to overcome. An assailant may deliberately disfigure,
In some Asian countries, throwing acid in a woman’s face is a common form of violence against women and girls, and it is of course not unknown elsewhere. (For example, In 1959, American attorney Burt Pugach hired a man to throw lye in the face of his ex-girlfriend Linda Riss.) Many assailants say “I’ll cut you so bad that no one will ever want to look at you again.” scar, or knockout a survivor’s teeth.
Dental work may be too expensive to acquire. If the survivor is disfigured, she may then face additional barriers in finding work.
Some survivors have found help at programs such as “Give Back a Smile” sponsored by the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry. http://www.aacd.com/aacdcf.html (link checked 8/09) Closed head/traumatic brain injuries may be a direct result an assailant banging a survivor’s head against the wall, hitting her with a blunt object, strangling her or throwing her down the stairs (all common forms of physical abuse).
Pamphlet on domestic violence and traumatic brain injury can be found at http://www.biav.net/docs/domesticviolence.pdf (link checked 8/09).

Sometimes, her assailant is her personal care attendant, and she is dependent upon him for food, clothing, mobility, and medical care. If a batterer takes away a person’s telecommunications device for the deaf (t.d.d), that survivor may not be able to call for help. Places where the survivor goes for counseling or refuge may not be accessible to her.

Elderly women may have more serious barriers than younger women for some
of the same reasons.
Bonnie Brandl and Loree Cook-Daniels have authored an overview of these issues in the article “Domestic Abuse in Later Life” December 2002. www.ncall.us/docs/AR_later-life.pdf

(link checked 8/09) In addition, most people erroneously assume that all people abused in later life are hurt by stressed caregivers. Older women may be especially concerned about losing their home, income from social security or health insurance if they leave their abusive spouses.

Young women, particularly adolescents, may not be able to get access to services because of their age. Their relationships may not be taken seriously because of their youth. The law may not protect unmarried girls and women to the same extent it protects married girls and women.

Women who do not speak English, who do not speak English well, and/or are struggling with immigration issues find it particularly hard to leave.
There have been many changes in the status of immigrants who have been battered. A place to seek information is at the Family Violence Fund’s web page. http://endabuse.org/section/programs/immigrant_women (link checked 8/09). There may be a lack of resources or advocacy for those not speaking English. Immigrant women
“Immigrant Victims of Domestic Violence: Cultural Challenges and Available Legal Protections” by Sudha Shetty and Janice Kaguyutan (February 2002) http://new.vawnet.org/Assoc_Files_VAWnet/AR_immigrant.pdf (link checked 8/09). may also be struggling with issues of dislocation, war and/or oppression in their country of origin, social upheaval, and acculturation. Those helpers who understand domestic violence may not understand immigrant issues, particularly the legal ones – and vice versa.

A batterer may hammer on issues of racism and marginalization, telling her that she would betray her community, culture, race, country or ethnicity by telling others about the abuse. He may remind her that he will be punished more severely than an assailant from the dominant culture will. He’ll talk about how shameful her plight is and underline traditions of not going outside the group for help. He’ll invoke community traditions about the value of family and the necessity to keep the family together. He may emphasize that the community is extremely valuable because of the support it offers them in the face of discrimination.

’People who face discrimination daily have their energy siphoned off by bigotry" --energy that is desperately needed for the daunting task of leaving a batterer.” It is utterly exhausting being Black in America” says children’s advocate Marian Wright Edelman “physically, mentally and emotionally…There is no respite from your badge of color.”

XIX. Some battered women stay because of what the media says about
domestic violence and battered women.

The media does an abysmal job of covering domestic violence. Language
such as "love triangle", "domestic squabble" and "estranged" husband reinforces the outmoded idea that battering is trivial, uncommon and really just a byproduct of a messy relationship.

When batterers murder their partners, these crimes are usually written about
as unintentional "crimes of passion" caused by the man's intense love for the woman and his inability to live without her, rather than his ultimate expression of vengeance, power and control over her, and his absolute belief that she is not entitled to live apart from him.

The media is one of the prime purveyors of the new (or revived) mythology about women that women are conniving, manipulative, vengeful liars. In the media mind, women feverishly search the newspapers for information about new laws. They are just waiting (like giant black widow spiders) for men to make a wrong move. They will then seize the chance to make a false police report and get revenge (for what? is my question. What is it about this fantasy that makes me wonder that too many men think women have something to seek revenge for?)

There has been a lot of discussion about how men feel "unsafe". They don't want to touch their children, or say the wrong thing, or "go too far" on a date for fear of being falsely accused of crimes against women and children. But there is no empirical evidence that women are making false reports.
An outstanding, carefully researched and documented examination of false allegations is discussed in “ Successfully Investigating Acquaintance Sexual

Assault: A National Training Manual for Law Enforcement available online at http://www.mincava.umn.edu/documents/acquaintsa/participant/allegations.pdf (line checked 8/09). All the research demonstrates the opposite. It is, in fact, women who are unsafe and becoming less safe. If women are raped or battered, many people jump to the conclusion (because of the media
blitzes) that women are lying. So a man can rape and batter with impunity, and then claim that the woman was trying to get back at him. Rather than "male bashing", we are seeing a campaign of discredit, bigotry and hatred towards women.

XX. Some battered women stay because they are afraid that if they try to
leave they or their children will die.

They should fear death. Battered women are in real danger.

So should battered women stay? No.
I have to qualify this statement. Only a survivor can know if leaving is the best decision. She may have information we do not have -- it may be safer for her to stay. Or she may have exhausted every possible option - legal and extra legal -- to protect her children only to see them returned to the batterer. Only she can decide if by staying she will be able to partially protect or mitigate an assailant’s physical or sexual abuse, or neglect of her children. Many thanks to Ginny NiCarthy for challenging me on this issue. The community, professionals, family, employers, friends and other individuals must help battered women leave safely.

Finally, I can only offer my salute, recognition, and awe to those survivors who leave their batterers daily and whose resistance to violence will always be an inspiration to me.

c. Susan McGee, 1995. Revised, 2004, 2005, 2009.
Permission to reprint and circulate is freely given if no changes are made and attribution is made. I greatly appreciate corrections, feedback, thoughts and ideas. Please contact me at SusanGSMcGee@aol.com

Public corruption: submit an FBI Tip online or call the FBI Local Corruption Hotline

THE 10 MOST IMPORTANT THINGS ARE...

2010-07-19T15:37:00.002-04:00

The 10 Most Important Things Are…

LOVE

The Special Feeling That Makes You Feel
All Warm And Wonderful.

RESPECT

Treating Others As Well
As You Would Like To Be Treated.

APPRECIATION

To Be Grateful For All The Good Things
Life Has To Offer.

HAPPINESS

The Full Enjoyment Of Each Moment.
A Smiling Face.

FORGIVENESS

The Ability To Let Things Be
Without Anger.

SHARING

The Joy Of Giving
Without Thought Of Receiving.

HONESTY

The Quality Of Always
Telling The Truth.

INTEGRITY

The Purity Of Doing What’s Right,
No Matter What.

COMPASSION

The Essence Of Feeling Another’s Pain,
While Easing Their Hurt.

PEACE

The Reward For Living
The 10 Most Important Things.

Author Unknown – Submitted By: Linda S.

Family sues police in death of girl, 7

2010-05-19T03:28:00.001-04:00

DETROIT - The family of a 7-year-old girl slain by a police bullet during a raid on their home filed state and federal lawsuits Tuesday against the department, claiming police knew there were children in the home but conducted the raid with guns drawn anyway.

Geoffrey Fieger, the attorney for the family of Aiyana Jones, said Detroit police had no legitimate reason to throw a flash grenade into the home of Aiyana Jones early Sunday. He said police, who were looking for a murder suspect, had the home under surveillance for hours.

"Certainly, they were aware children were living the home," Fieger said at a news conference at his offices in the Detroit suburb of Southfield. He said the other children were ages 3 months, 2 and 4 years.

There were children's toys strewn about the family's front yard on Monday.

The federal lawsuit claims police violated Aiyana Jones' constitutional rights and seeks an unspecified cash award of more than $75,000. A four-count lawsuit filed in state court seeks damages of more than $25,000. The amounts the family is seeking in both lawsuits are likely much higher.

Police said officers threw a flash grenade through the first-floor window of the family's home early Sunday, and that an officer's gun discharged, killing the girl, during a confrontation inside the home with her grandmother. They later found the target of the raid, a 34-year-old man, in the apartment upstairs.

Fieger said he viewed three or four minutes of video footage of the raid, and that it shows the officer fired into the home from the family's porch after lobbing a flash grenade through a window. He said police are trying to cover-up what happened.

Fieger declined to say what footage he viewed, but a camera crew for the A&E reality series "The First 48" captured footage of the raid, network spokesman Dan Silberman said. The spokesman declined to comment about the case and denied a request by The Associated Press to view the footage.

'There are children in the house'
Aiyana's cousin, Mark Robinson, said he was walking the family's dogs when police grabbed him and threw him to the ground.

"I told them, 'There are children in the house. There are children in the house,'" Robinson told reporters at the news conference Tuesday.

The case has been handed over to the Michigan State Police to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Police have not identified the officer whose gun fired the shot that killed Aiyana. Detroit Assistant Police Chief Ralph Godbee said he is a 14-year veteran with six to seven years on the Special Response Team and that he has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

The officer was cleared following a nonfatal shooting last summer in which police returned fire after being were fired upon by someone barricaded in a house, Godbee said.

The Detroit police department has been under two court-ordered consent decrees since 2003 aimed at, among other things, correcting how and when its officers use force on suspects.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/?&&id=37209647&ns=us_news-crime_and_courts&vv=750

Do Family Courts Judges actually dispense justice or dispense with it? Hmmm, you be the judge!

2010-03-31T18:35:00.001-04:00

Hey readers, I have found some great new blogs. This article is from one of them.

Please go check out his blog @ http://noethics.net

The innumerable, and in many instances, heartbreaking horror stories I've unfortunately received over the years from every corner of the country clearly indicates that the two most abusive court divisions in the good old U.S. of A are Family and Probate Courts (dedicated to stealing from the dead). At the end of this article are the names of a few of the Judicial Misfits that have cheerfully caused great harm to one or more parents, grandparents and most importantly the children they were sworn to protect. Obviously, there’s many, many more.

finish reading at http://noethics.net

To clear up some misconceptions about Class Action Lawsuits

2010-03-28T18:57:00.001-04:00

Generated from local file. Cache size:400 (not visible in beta/prod)

Class Action Lawsuits

Class Action - in law, a device that permits one or more persons to sue or be sued as representative of a large group of people interested in the matter at issue. The court in whose jurisdiction a suit is brought typically has wide discretion in determining that a class will be so represented. Certain requirements must be met, e.g., the class must be so large or dispersed that actual joinder of all individuals would be impractical; there must be questions of law and fact common to all members, and these must outweigh any individual questions; and the named parties must adequately represent the interests of their class. Certain forms of notice to members of the class, e.g., by newspaper or broadcast publication or by mail, are also required. In most types of suit, all members of the class are bound by the decision, unless a member of the class opted out of the action at the beginning of the lawsuit. An absentee member may be able to contest the outcome on the basis that due process of law was not adhered to.

In the United States, federal and most state courts allow class action suits. Such suits have figured prominently in civil-rights litigation and in other cases brought to further social and economic reform. In recent decades they have been employed notably by groups of consumers and others seeking to affix liability for harm caused by various products, especially through manufacturers' negligence. Major litigation against the producers of the Dalkon shield (an intrauterine device; see birth control), of Agent Orange (a herbicide used as a defoliant in the Vietnam War), and of asbestos insulation has involved class action suits. In the 1980s and 90s such suits have been under attack, along with negligence litigation in general. Among the types of class action the more conservative, business-oriented Congress elected in 1994 has tried to curb are those brought by shareholders against corporate leaders felt to have fraudulently misrepresented the condition of their companies in order to attract buyers of stock.

See study by S. Yeazell (1987).

http://www.questia.com/library/class_action_lawsuits.jsp

Lawmakers should look into state's collusion in organizing babysitters

2010-03-22T15:28:00.000-04:00

Lawmakers should get to bottom of the murky dealings under which a state-sponsored council helped unionize home-based child care providers throughout Michigan and continues to operate despite the Legislature's attempt to abolish it by stripping its funding.

Taxpayers deserve better answers than the vague ones that have been offered so far by the administration of Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

The Legislature last year ended payments to the Michigan Home Based Child Care Council, a liaison between the state's Department of Human Services and a controversial labor union that, under questionable circumstances, came to represent people who receive government subsidies for providing day care in their homes for children of low-income working parents.

Lawmakers recently learned that Human Services officials have defied them by shifting money within the department to keep the council's $200,000 contract intact.

A Human Services spokesman said this was done because the department has a contractual obligation to fund the council through the end of this year. The spokesman also claimed that the Legislature's action, taken as part of its approval of the department's budget for 2010, did not include a specific prohibition against further payments to the council from other funds.

That tortured explanation shouldn't fly. Nor should the bigger question of how 40,000 home-based day care providers came to be represented by a new union, affiliated with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and United Auto Workers (UAW), when many of those providers weren't aware the union was being formed and weren't given a chance to vote on it. Not to mention that they are private business people, and not employees of the state.

Many of the providers object to having a union forced on them and having mandatory dues deducted from payments they receive through the Department of Human Services. Lawsuits challenging the setup have been filed in state and federal courts.

The process that led to union involvement in child care in Michigan is as suspicious as it is bureaucratically dense.

The Michigan Home Based Child Care Council was created in September 2006 through an agreement between the Human Services department and Mott Community College in Flint, which has training programs for child care providers. The council's job was to develop child care policies, but it also -- somehow -- became the intermediary between the department and a new AFSCME- and UAW-affiliated union called Child Care Providers Together Michigan.

In December 2006, AFSCME announced that the state had certified that a majority of home-based child care providers had chosen union affiliation. AFSCME said its drive to unionize child care providers encompassed eight other states, including neighboring Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank involved in one of the lawsuits, reports that the Michigan union was certified after somewhat more than 5,000 day care providers voted in favor of it. That doesn't seem to meet the standard for approval of a 40,000-member union. And forcing union dues on care providers never given a chance to vote and who consider themselves self-employed is patently unfair.

Lawmakers are right to call a halt to funding. Human Services officials have a lot more explaining to do.

Technorati Tags: Human Services,Michigan,family,corruption,child care,day care

From The Detroit News: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100322/OPINION01/3220302/1008/Forced-unionization--Lawmakers-should-look-into-state-s-collusion-in-organizing-babysitters#ixzz0iw2HnQOs

Web Links on CPS - Stop CPS Legal Kidnapping's MySpace Blog |

2010-03-20T22:48:00.000-04:00

Web Links on CPS - Stop CPS Legal Kidnapping's MySpace Blog |

Be Inspired

2010-03-13T02:56:00.000-05:00

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Kerr v. Osborne, Substanial Evidence To Support Custody, Reasonable Time To Vacate Agreed Order

2010-03-03T03:21:00.000-05:00

Kerr v. Osborne, Substanial Evidence To Support Custody, Reasonable Time To Vacate Agreed Order

more lies and failures of social workers

2010-02-10T01:46:00.001-05:00

Posted on Thu, Feb. 4, 2010

Kelly defense: Victimized by their own staff

By Nathan Gorenstein

Inquirer Staff Writer

Two top managers at the social-service agency that was caring for 14-year-old Danieal Kelly before her death were victimized by their own staff, who lied about how often they made required home visits, defense attorneys said yesterday.

In opening statements at the federal trial of the two managers and two staff caseworkers, defense attorneys also attempted to diffuse what lawyer William Brennan called "the elephant in the room" - Kelly's death by starvation in 2006 while the agency, MultiEthnic Behavioral Health Inc., was responsible for her well-being.

"This is a fraud case. This is not a murder case," said Brennan, who represents a worker charged with participating in the fraud.

The now-defunct agency was supposed to provide care for Kelly, who had cerebral palsy, and other at-risk children using federal funding funneled through the city's Department of Human Services.

But prosecutors charge that the defendants instead billed the city for services MultiEthnic never provided - including home visits that never happened.

William Cannon, the attorney for Mickal Kamuvaka, 60, who ran MultiEthnic when the city contracted it to monitor 500 homes, conceded that the agency was not always well-managed, but said Kamuvaka had been at the mercy of her employees. "She had to rely on their integrity," he said.

The defense attorneys said federal prosecutors had to prove the four intended to lie and defraud the government.

"Did he intend to lie? If he didn't intend to lie, he's innocent," said William R. Spade Jr., the attorney for MultiEthnic social worker Julius Juma Murray, 52, who was handling Kelly's case when she died.

Cannon said Kelly's mother had kept her covered with blankets up to her chin when workers from MultiEthnic visited. While she was underweight, Kelly also "was beset with medical problems," he said, and there was "no medical record to show she ever weighed more than" the 42 pounds recorded at her death.

Kelly and her family were considered at-risk, and DHS ordered twice-weekly home visits to ensure she was safe and getting services she needed. When she died, her body was covered with bedsores, some of which were maggot-infested and bone-deep.

From July 2000 through December 2006, the city paid MultiEthnic about $3.7 million for services.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Vineet Gauri told the jury that the defendants had been "social workers" employed to provide assistance for the city's least fortunate, but that "they chose not to be that safety net."

Gauri said Kamuvaka had "spearheaded the fraud," assisted by a second agency manager, Solomon Manamela, who on one occasion reported he was doing agency work when, in fact, he was out of the country.

Clients were supposed to sign a form every time a social worker visited, but Gauri said Murray and fellow caseworker Mariam Coulibaly had clients sign a "stack" of forms in advance.

Each of the defense lawyers made a point of introducing his client and offering details of the defendant's life: Kamuvaka was born in the Central African Republic, earned a degree in social work and psychology in 1976, received a doctorate in social work from Cornell University, and was one of the founders of MultiEthnic.

Manamela, 52, is from South Africa and, during apartheid, fled to Tanzania. "He has spent his life helping troubled children," said his attorney, Paul J. Hetznecker.

At MultiEthnic, Manamela "put his trust in the . . . workers" he supervised, and "they violated Mr. Manamela's trust in them," said the lawyer.

But, like Cannon, Hetznecker conceded that "there was a lot of mismanagement there."

Spade said Murray was born in Sierra Leone, received an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Maryland, and chose to do social work.

"The mother of the girl was hiding what was going on," Spade said, referring to Kelly's mother, Andrea, who pleaded guilty last year in the Court of Common Pleas to third-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 to 40 years.

Coulibaly, 40, was born in Mali and holds a nursing degree. Five other MultiEthnic employees also charged by the U.S. Attorney's Office have pleaded guilty.

Contact staff writer Nathan Gorenstein at 215-854-2797 or ngorenstein@phillynews.com.

WomensLaw.org: Obama's 2011 Budget Makes Domestic Violence a Priority

2010-02-04T02:50:00.000-05:00

Shortly after Obama took office, he appointed Lynn Rosenthal as the White House Adviser on Violence Against Women, a new position created to work with the president and vice president on domestic violence and sexual assault issues. Since June, Rosenthal has worked with numerous federal agencies in the White House to make sure the needs of domestic violence and sexual assault victims are being met through funding, advocacy, program implementation and general advancement of services across the country.

One week after his State of the Union address on January 27, 2010, President Obama released the FY 2011 budget.

Parts of the $730 million total allotted funds for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault include:

Emergency shelter, transitional housing, and other local services: $100 million increase from the Crime Victims Fund, a fund comprised of penalties, bail money and other criminal fines.

Shelters and other services: $140 million

National Domestic Violence Hotline and Teen Dating Violence Helpline: $4.5 million

Sexual Assault Service Program, providing services to victims of sexual assault: $30 million

Legal assistance for victims, including services which help victims obtain protective orders and other protections: $50 million

STOP grants, aimed at working towards preventative programs: $188 million

Read more about Lynn Rosenthal and the work she is doing here: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/lynn-rosenthal-on-how-the-white-house-combats-violence-against-women.

HHS Budget Makes Smart Investments, Protects the Health and Safety of America’s Families

2010-02-03T21:45:00.001-05:00

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today highlighted critical investments in President Obama’s 2011 HHS budget that will protect the health and safety of America’s families.

“Under this budget, we will provide the health and human services that Americans depend on more effectively, slashing waste and focusing programs on results. And we’ll make many of the necessary investments our country has been putting off for years, including investments in fighting health care fraud, strengthening our public health infrastructure, and getting serious about health and wellness,” said Sebelius. “This budget is a big step toward a healthier, stronger America.”

The President’s budget helps build the foundation for health insurance reform. The budget strengthens the health care system and improves access to care by investing $995 million to address the shortage of health care providers in underserved areas, increasing funding to expand services at Health Centers by $290 million and allocating nearly $80 million for work to spread the adoption and use of health information technology.

The budget also makes landmark investments to fight health care fraud and requests $1.7 billion for fraud fighting at HHS, including $561 million in Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control (HCFAC) discretionary funding, an increase of $250 million over the FY 2010 enacted level. Estimates indicate that these investments will generate $9.9 billion in savings from increased recoveries and prevention efforts. In addition, the Budget proposes legislative and administrative changes that will save $14.7 billion in Medicare and Medicaid over ten years.

To support families with young children, the budget invests a total of $6.6 billion in the Child Care and Development Fund, an increase of $1.6 billion, and invests in reforms to make Head Start and Early Head Start stronger. And because many families are caring for young children and elderly relatives, the budget provides an additional $102.5 million for a new Caregiver initiative that will increase services including training for caregivers and assistance for elderly individuals and their families so seniors can remain in their homes longer.

The budget also helps protect families from disease and illness and improves public health, by investing $1.4 billion to transform the food safety system and help prevent food borne illness. Other important investments to stop diseases before they start include $954 million to help prevent smoking and tobacco use and $20 million for a new initiative in CDC to help prevent chronic disease.

Additionally, the budget builds on the President’s commitment to invest in science and research by increasing funding for the National Institutes of Health by $1 billion to support innovative projects from basic to clinical research.

“There is no question that the hard-working people of this country have been tested over the last few years,” added Sebelius. “In his State of the Union Address, President Obama urged Americans to rise to the challenges posed by our current difficulties, and pledged that as a country we would face these challenges together. I believe this budget lives up to that commitment.”

Overall, President Obama’s budget includes a total of $911 billion for HHS in Fiscal Year 2011. For more information on the budget, visit www.hhs.gov/budget. Highlights from the budget are included below:

REDUCING HEALTH FRAUD

Enhancing Medicare and Medicaid Program Integrity: Reducing fraud, waste, and abuse in government spending is a top priority for the President. The Budget includes $561 million in discretionary resources, an increase of $250 million, to strengthen Medicare and Medicaid program integrity activities, with a particular emphasis on fighting health care fraud in the field, increasing Medicaid audits, and strengthening program oversight while reducing costs.

This investment, as part of a multi-year effort, will augment existing resources for combating health care fraud and abuse and save $9.9 billion over ten years. The additional funding will better equip the Federal government to minimize inappropriate payments, pinpoint potential weaknesses in program integrity oversight, target emerging fraud schemes by provider and type of service, and establish safeguards to correct programmatic vulnerabilities.

The Budget also includes a set of new program integrity proposals that will give HHS the necessary tools to fight fraud by enhancing provider enrollment scrutiny, increasing claims oversight, improving Medicare’s data analysis capabilities, and reducing over-utilization of Medicaid prescription drugs. These proposals will save approximately $14.7 billion over 10 years.

IMPROVING QUALITY OF AND ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE

Health Insurance Reform: Congress is focused on health insurance reform to provide security and stability for Americans with health insurance and expand coverage to those Americans who do not have insurance. These reforms will improve the quality of care, lower costs for families and businesses, and help reduce the Nation’s deficit.

Strengthening the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS): The Budget includes $3.6 billion, an increase of $186 million. The request is necessary to meet current administrative workload demands from recent legislative requirements and continuous beneficiary growth. The request provides targeted investments to revamp information technology (IT) systems and optimize staffing levels so that CMS can meet the future challenges of the Medicare and Medicaid programs and can be an active purchaser of high quality and efficient care.

Specifically, $110 million of CMS’ increase is for a new, comprehensive Health Care Data Improvement Initiative to transform CMS’s data environment from one focused primarily on claims processing to one also focused on state-of-the art data analysis and information sharing. These changes are vital to modernizing the Medicare and Medicaid programs by making CMS a leader in value based purchasing, improving systems security, and increasing analytic capabilities and data sharing with key stakeholders.

TBI, state auditors investigating County Clerk employee for embezzlement

2009-12-08T06:29:00.000-05:00

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, the district attorney’s office and the state Comptroller’s office are investigating the disappearance of thousands of dollars from the Dickson County Clerk’s office.

County Clerk Phil Simons told the county commission at a called budget committee meeting last night that between $14,000-$15,000 had been taken from the Dickson satellite office through an elaborate scheme in which the books appeared to balance at the end of each day.

The situation came to light in mid-September when the deputy clerk who allegedly took the money was off work and another deputy worked at that desk where paperwork was found, leading to the discovery of the alleged theft, Simons said.

He said the employee allegedly manipulated reports through failure to record or voiding cash transactions, then using other peoples’ checks to pay the fees that had been paid in cash.

Simons said as soon as he discovered the alleged theft he went to county attorneys and they notified the district attorney's office.

The DA contacted the TBI and an auditor from the state Comptroller's Office.
He said the stolen cash came from automobile registration renewals, business licenses, registrations and other fees that the employee allegedly pocketed.

The investigation is still ongoing and Simons did not identify the employee. However, he said the employee was terminated by mail on the grounds of employee misconduct after walking out of the office following an interview by the TBI and the Comptroller’s Office of Audit.

“There was no admission of guilt and no confession,” Simons said.

When asked why the employee was fired without admitting to the theft and the investigation is incomplete, he said that’s why she was fired for employee misconduct.

“It’s very broad,” he said.

Simons said the county would have to cover the missing money until the case is prosecuted but that either the county's insurance or a blanket bond, which covers all employees who handle money, will reimburse the county.

Simons said there are normally 10 employees working the Dickson office and he doesn’t plan to fill the position vacated by the former employee.

“I have some other ideas in mind,” he said. “But we have nine other people that we don’t have a problem with. I trust everybody until it’s proven otherwise.”

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20091202/DICKSON01/91202049/TBI-state-auditors-investigating-County-Clerk-employee-for-embezzlement

WAY TO GO K.T. Now Just Keep Working That :)

Sheriff Taylor's sticking to his Taser - policy

2009-12-04T08:01:00.001-05:00

Department policy says 'use of the Taser on young children is discouraged,

except in extreme situations.'
By NICK BONHAM
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN
December 04, 2009 01:24 am

Days after a deputy stunned an "out of control" 10-year-old, Sheriff Kirk Taylor said his office has no plans of altering its Taser policy in regard to the device's use on children.

"It's not black and white. Every scenario is different. The threat is different. (Using a Taser), that discretion needs to be left to the officer and then it needs to be scrutinized, and trust me, it's been scrutinized," Taylor said at a press conference Thursday.

The Pueblo County Sheriff Department's policy says "use of the Taser on elderly persons and young children is discouraged, except in the most extreme situations."

The boy was stunned and arrested Monday after Deputies Mark Myers and Randy Mondragon were sent to the boy's Pueblo West foster home.

The call was in regard to a "out of control" juvenile who was destroying property and threatening his foster father, Daniel Biby, with a pipe, a stick and throwing landscape timbers at him. The boy, who Taylor said has a violent history and record of running away, fled from officers holding a 2-foot-long pipe.

The boy ran to a neighbor's house where he cornered himself between a camper trailer and a pontoon boat that were backed against a fence.

Taylor said the area in which the child was in was no wider than 3 feet.

The boy ignored commands to drop the pipe and was stunned with a Taser by Myers. Mondragon then apprehended the child, who was later booked into Pueblo Youth Center on suspicion of menacing with a deadly weapon.

Neither the boy, deputies or Biby were injured in the incident.

Taylor maintained on Thursday that the deputy's Taser use and method of arrest was appropriate and justified.

"We get no joy in doing what had to be done. My officers feel pretty bad but they acted appropriately," Taylor said. "My reaction was no different than the public's outcry. I probably would've deployed my Taser as well. Would have I been happy about it? No. But I can tell you, after looking at the fact-scenario, they acted appropriately."

Taylor described the physique and size of the boy, who's name hasn't been released because he's a juvenile, as that of a "normal 10-year-old."

The sheriff described Myers as a "thick" man at 6 foot 2 inches tall. He also said he knew Myers to be a chaplain with the local order of the Fraternal Order of Police.

"Myers is like a gentle giant," Chief of Law Enforcement Charlene Graham said.

Taylor said this was the fourth time this year that deputies had used a Taser.

In October, the device's manufacturer, Taser International, issued a recommendation to include the chest in the non-preferred target area, which also includes the head, neck and testicle areas.

The boy was struck by two darts in the preferred target zone, one in the lower abdomen and the other in the left leg, Taylor said.

After the incident was reported in the morning edition of The Chieftain, Taylor said he received phone calls from media as far away as New York. He said he was interviewed for "Inside Edition."

Tasers are controversial in their use, but much of the national interest stems from the recent firing of an officer in Arkansas who stunned an unruly 10-year-old girl with a Taser.

The officer was not fired for stunning the girl but failing to follow department procedure for not activating a built-in camera on the Taser.

Taylor said Tasers his officers use do not have cameras and that this incident "is nothing like the one in Arkansas."

Many of the comments posted on The Chieftain's Web site were critical of the sheriff department's Taser use on the boy.

"Nobody wants to Tase a 10-year-old. My hope is that this young man gets the help he needs," Taylor said.

The 10th Judicial District's Critical Incident Team is not investigating the incident. The team consists of investigators from every law enforcement agency in the county that are charged with probing controversial incidents involving officers, such as in-custody deaths, shootings and serious accidents.

nickb@chieftain.com

http://www.chieftain.com/articles/2009/12/04/news/local/doc4b18c14be4be0333474716.prt

Legally Kidnapped: DHS Lawsuit

2009-12-04T06:25:00.000-05:00

Legally Kidnapped: DHS Lawsuit

Child advocates plan rally, memorial service in Indianapolis

2009-12-04T05:25:00.000-05:00

Child advocates plan rally, memorial service in Indianapolis

By Tim Evans
tim.evans@indystar.com

Advocates for children and families today planned a rally outside a local office of the Indiana Department of Child Services to demand greater accountability.

The rally was set for 4 p.m. at the Marion County office of the the state department, 4150 N. Keystone Ave.

The purpose of the Northside rally is to call for greater accountability by the state child protection agency, said Jennifer Cobb of … and Justice for All Inc., one of the event organizers.

Following the rally, the group will move to the Oasis of Hope Baptist Church, 1701 E. 25th St., for a memorial service honoring children who have died under the care of Department of Child Services over the past two years.

Speakers at the Near Northside memorial service will include Byron Alston, Dawn Robertson, Cobb, Pastor Joe Zelenka, The Rev. Richard Willoughby and Samuel Carson. Musical guests will include Gary Antelept.

For more information, contact Cobb at (317) 222-8476 or andjusticeforallinc@gmail.com.

2 clients claim Knoxville attorney does nothing after retainer fees

2009-11-30T14:25:00.001-05:00

Posted: Nov 16, 2009 4:57 PM EST

"He just wants me to go away. He will be pleased to return my file or deliver it to my new counsel," Brian Duncan says, referring to the letter he received.

"I have not seen Mr. Threadgill for any meetings. I have not had any personal conversations with him since leaving my retainer there," Emily Lee said.

"I've exercised my best legal effort and judgement based on 40 years of experience," attorney John Threadgill said.

By DON DARE
6 On Your Side Reporter

KNOXVILLE (WATE) -- If you've ever needed a civil issue resolved legally, the best advice is to hire an attorney to win your case. But several people have called 6 On Your Side to complain about an attorney they say has done little to help win their cases.

Under an oath attorneys take in Tennessee, they adhere to standards that include completing their work in a timely manner and keeping their clients informed.

But that's not what's happening for two people who hired the same attorney, John Threadgill, in Knoxville.

In Maryville, Brian Duncan installs and services garage doors. A few years ago, he sued a former employer he says owed him a lot of money.

Brian figured his case was pretty solid. He hired Threadgill in August 2007, paid him several thousand dollars and says their spirits were high about resolving the case.

"When I showed him all the documents I had, he said this is an open and shut case. Give me a $2,500 retainer and I'll take it on contingency," Brian said.

But he also says it's been a bumpy road with his attorney.

When asked what happened, he said, "Nothing, a little over two years of not being able to get a hold of my lawyer. The only paperwork that I've had from him so far regarding my case were questions I had to answer for the opposing side that he sent to me that I answered."

In Knoxville, Emily Lee, a licensed clinical social worker, hired Threadgill in March 2008 to settle a business issue. She meet him once in March 2008 when she wrote a check for his retainer.

"I have not seen Mr. Threadgill for any meetings. I have not had any personal conversations with him since leaving my retainer there," Emily said.

Fourteen months ago, she wrote a letter to Threadgill, explaining she was disappointed in his representation. "Responsiveness is something that's required in my profession, and I would have hoped with his."

Threadgill wrote to Brian Duncan in October saying he's no longer representing him, but earned his $2,500.

John Threadgill declined the 6 On Your Side request for on camera interview, but defended himself saying, "I've been to court eight or nine times on behalf of Mr. Duncan. His case file is two inches thick."

Threadgill said Emily Lee's case is still pending.

He went on to say everything has been done that could be for Duncan and Lee.

He concluded saying, "I've exercised my best legal effort and judgement based on 40 years of experience."

The state Supreme Court's Board of Professional Responsibility slapped John Threadgill with a petition for discipline in August. It's his third discipline petition in five years.

To get consumer information about the Board of Professional Responsibility, click here.

"He just wants me to go away. He will be pleased to return my file or deliver it to my new counsel," Brian says, referring to the letter he received.

Threadgill says he has responded to the discipline petition, but declined to give details.

If you have a consumer issue, call the 6 On Your Side hotline at 865-633-5974.

Was this your custody evaluator? Stephen Doyne, Phd

2009-11-15T15:47:00.001-05:00

Facebook | Lisa R Smith

Concerned Citizens:

We are looking into professional misconduct of . This will be a collective complaint to protect the public.

Superior Court of California

County of San Diego

330 West Broadway

San Diego, CA 92101

Case: 37-2008-00093885-CU-BT-CTL

Emad G. Tadros, M.D., Plaintiff vs. Stephen E. Doyne, Defendant

Complaint:

1. Violation of BPC 17200 et seq.

2. Breach of Contract

3. Negligence; and,

4. Fraud.

Exhibits:

1. In correspondence, Doyne claims to be a “Diplomate American College of Forensic Psychologists.” There is no organization called the American College of Forensic Psychologists.

2. The American College of Forensic Psychology in a letter dated September 18, 2007 the American College of Forensic Psychology writes back to Plaintiff stating, “…Doyne is not, and has not never been, a member of the American College of Forensic Psychology. We do not have Diplomates and he lists the group as American College of Forensic Psychologists, which is not our group.”

3. The American College of Forensic Examiners is a sham organization owned by a con artist named Robert O’Block that provides fake diplomas for a price, he operates a “certification mill.” A pet cat has been issued the same credentials as Doyne; he has the certification that Zoe the cat has. Robert O’Block has also certified a murderer while he was incarcerated in prison; it was mailed it to him while he was in prison (see forensic evidence review by Professor of Law Carol Henderson pp 7 & 8; also Google “the credentialing con” & “the print by mark hansen expertise to go”).

**As implied, Doyne does not possess certification by the one and only well respected forensic Board named the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). The ABPP is the one and only to be recognized by all state licensing boards and the American Psychological Association (APA), and specifically in Forensic and/or Family Psychology specialty.

4. San Diego Family Court did not have record of Doyne’s curriculum vitae (CV). The court ordered Doyne to release his CV upon Plaintiff’s request. Doyne’s CV lists false and misleading credentials such as:

a. In page 1 under honors and awards, Doyne’s CV states he is a Diplomate in Psychology, American College of Forensic Examiners, which is a sham organization selling fake diplomas (2750 East Sunshine, Springfield, MO 65804).

b. CV states Doyne is a Diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Examiners (child custody evaluators), a sham organization run by the same con artist (2750 East Sunshine, Springfield, MO 65804).

5. Page five, under Teaching Experience, Doyne’s CV states he was an Adjunct Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law. In a letter of response to Dr. Tadros dated August 7, 2007 from the Office of the Vice President and Provost, the Assistant VP for Academic Administration of the School of Law at USD states, “I have searched our paper and digital records back to the mid-1970’s and do not find a record of Stephen Doyne ever teaching at the University of San Diego.”

6. Page five, under Teaching Experience, Doyne’s CV states he was an Instructor at the University of California at San Diego. In a letter of response to Dr. Tadros dated November 6, 2007 UCSD states that, “after extensive research of our payroll documentation, it has come to our attention that Stephen Doyen has not been directly employed by the University of California, San Diego.”

7. Page five, under Teaching Experience, Doyne’s CV states he was an Instructor at the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP). In a letter of response to Dr. Tadros dated September 5, 2007 CSPP states, “that we do not have employment records.”

If you would like further information please send an email to: itsinthecredentials@gmail.com . We will send you additional information.

Parents for Accountability of Credentials of Court Appointed Experts

Parents for Accountability

Posted in California, Stephen E. Doyne. 1 Comment »

Historic Hate Crimes Legislation Signed

2009-11-11T00:39:00.001-05:00

Historic Hate Crimes Legislation Signed

President Barack Obama signed the historic Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act yesterday. The bill extends the definition of federal hate crimes to include attacks motivated by sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability and empowers federal authorities to help local law enforcement investigate hate crimes.

In his remarks yesterday, President Obama said, "In the most recent year for which we have data, the FBI reported roughly 7,600 hate crimes in this country. Over the past 10 years, there were more than 12,000 reported hate crimes based on sexual orientation alone. And we will never know how many incidents were never reported at all...no one in America should ever be afraid to walk down the street holding the hands of the person they love. No one in America should be forced to look over their shoulder because of who they are or because they live with a disability."

The law is named for two men who were slain in alleged hate crimes in 1998. Matthew Shepard, a gay university student, was murdered in Wyoming, and James Byrd, Jr., an African-American man, was dragged to death by white supremacists in Texas. Previously, the federal hate crimes law only covered attacks motivated by race, color, national origin or religion.

Judy Shepard, mother of Matthew Shepard wrote, "The legislation went through so many versions and so many votes that we had to constantly keep our hopes in check to keep from getting discouraged...But with President Obama's support and the continually growing bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate lining up behind the bill this year, it became clear that 2009 was the year it would finally happen."

The Senate passed the legislation last week on a 68 to 29 vote. The bill passed in the House on October 8 with a vote of 281 to 146.

Media Resources: Feminist Daily Newswire 10/23/09; Remarks of President Barack Obama 10/28/09; Statement of Judy Shepard 10/29/09

Judge Reprimanded for Jailing Guy Who Gave Him the Raspberry

2009-10-28T20:09:00.001-04:00

I think I'm with the judge on this one, even if the state supreme court said he screwed up.

Municipal Court Judge Emery Toth was reprimanded last month for violating the New Jersey Code of Judicial Conduct by "speaking disrespectfully and intemperately to a litigant" and for abusing his contempt power by throwing the litigant in jail after he responded. The litigant had escalated matters, though, by using certain well-known gestures and that time-honored salute, the "raspberry."

The defendant, a cab driver named Esmanuel Buldoni (a.k.a., oddly, "Luis Martinez"), had been charged with three traffic violations. He was in prison at the time of his arraignment, possibly because he had failed to show up for a prior court date, and so the exchange took place over a video link to the courtroom. After Buldoni pleaded not guilty, he and the judge got into a dispute over why exactly Buldoni was in prison at the time. After a short exchange, Judge Toth ended the argument. "I don't want to have an Oprah Winfrey conversation with you," he said. "All right? . . . I'll give you a trial date next week. See you around. Goodbye."

According to Toth, Buldoni then made the "raspberry" sound and gestured with his middle finger in a way that Toth said he interpreted as meaning "kiss off." The kiss-off does not seem to have been a big deal, but the raspberry was not to be endured:

http://www.law.com/newswire/cache/1202433825070.html

Owner of Tennesse Salvage and Demolition Company Pleads Guilty to Environmental Crimes

2009-10-04T01:11:00.001-04:00

Company Violated Clean Air Act and Defrauded the United States Sept.29, 09

WASHINGTON—The owner of a Chattanooga, Tenn., salvage and demolition company, Watkins Street Project LLC, pleaded guilty today in federal court in Chattanooga, Tenn., for conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act and to defraud the United States.

Gary Fillers of Chattanooga, Tenn., pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Collier for the Eastern District of Tennessee to one criminal felony count for conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act’s “work practice standards” related to the proper stripping, bagging, removal and disposal of asbestos.

According to the charges, Fillers and other indicted and unindicted co-conspirators, engaged in a year-long scheme in which substantial amounts of regulated asbestos containing materials was removed from the former Standard Coosa Thatcher Plant without following the Clean Air Act and the regulations governing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notification requirements; removing all asbestos prior to demolition; and stripping, bagging, removal and disposal of such asbestos.

“Work practice standards under the Clean Air Act are designed to protect workers from the harmful effects of asbestos,” said John C. Cruden, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “Conspiring to violate these work practice standards will not be tolerated and those who do can expect to be prosecuted.”

“Exposure to asbestos can cause cancer and other serious respiratory diseases,” said Maureen O'Mara, Special Agent-in-Charge of EPA’s criminal enforcement program in Atlanta. “Those who put the public health at risk will be vigorously prosecuted.”

Fillers faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss to the victims. Today’s plea is related to the indictment of Watkins Street Project LLC, Mathis Companies Inc., Donald Fillers, James Mathis and David Wood. All of these defendants pleaded not guilty to related conspiracy, Clean Air Act, false statements and obstruction of justice charges on Sept. 14, 2009. Trial is currently set to begin on Nov.18, 2009, before Judge Collier.

Asbestos has been determined to cause lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma, an invariably fatal disease. EPA has determined that there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos.

This case was investigated by EPA special agents and investigators with Chattanooga-Hamilton County Air Pollution Control Bureau. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew T. Morris and Todd W. Gleason, of the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section.

09-1058

Environment and Natural Resources Division

Letalvis Cobbins found guilty in Christian - Newsom murders

2009-08-25T12:40:00.000-04:00

Posted: Aug 25, 2009 6:50 AM EDT Updated: Aug 25, 2009 12:30 PM EDT
Letalvis Cobbins Letalvis Cobbins

KNOXVILLE (WATE) -- The jury has found Letalvis D. Cobbins guilty of the murders of Channon Christian and her boyfriend, Christopher Newsom, in 2007.

Cobbins faces the possibility of the death penalty because he was convicted of facilitation of first degree felony murder in 35 counts.

The jury found Cobbins not guilty of five counts including the murder of Newsom during his rape, the murder of Christian during Newsom's rape and three counts of aggravated rape of Newsom.

The jury will return Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. for the sentencing hearing.

The jurors worked about 10 hours Monday and on Tuesday morning before reaching a verdict. They never asked Judge Richard Baumgartner any questions during their deliberations.

About the jury and the charges

The jury is made up of six women and six men. Six are black, five are white and one is Asian.

The jurors had 18 counts of murder alone to consider in this case. They had to reach a verdict on each count. Click here to read the verdict forms.

The jury in this case is also the sentencing jury and it has the final say on the sentence.

If jurors couldn't agree on the death penalty sentence, they could discuss lesser sentences such as life without parole.

Families grateful for verdict

After the verdict was announced, Deena Christian said, "I'm very relieved and very grateful," adding "A guilty for one was a guilty for both."

Deena said she felt Channon and Chris "both got justice today." Before the first verdict was read, she said, "I don't even know if I was breathing."

She said despite her belief that the jury would find Cobbins guilty, "You never know what's in someone else's mind and heart."

Deena said no matter what sentence the jury gives Cobbins, "It won't make a difference to me." She added that the sentencing will be difficult.

"I feel sometimes that someone somewhere is holding me up because I couldn't do it on my own," Deena said.

About the crimes

The other suspects who are charged with murder in the case are: Lemaricus Duvall Davidson (Cobbins' half brother), George Giovanni Thomas and Vanessa Coleman, who was Cobbins' girlfriend.

Those three could also face the death penalty if they're convicted. They're being tried separately.
http://www.wate.com/Global/story.asp?s=10984873

Three Dead in Dyersburg Shooting

2009-08-04T12:31:00.000-04:00

Incident Appears to be Murder-Suicide

Updated: Monday, 03 Aug 2009, 10:18 AM CDT
Published : Sunday, 02 Aug 2009, 10:09 PM CDT

FOX13 Memphis

Dyersburg, Tenn. - Three people are dead in Dyersburg after a father accused of child abuse apparently shot and killed his daughter and one of her protective custodians, then turned the gun on himself.

According to Capt. Steve Isbell with Dyersburg Police, officers were called to the 800-block of Blake Cove just after 7:30pm Sunday.

46-year old Todd Randolph, his wife 45-year old Susan Randolph and a 15-year old girl were found with gunshot wounds. Todd Randolph and the teenage girl were pronounced dead at the scene. Susan Randolph was airlifted to The Med and was released Monday morning.

Investigators determined that the teen's father, 34-year old Christopher Milburn, approached the Randolph home and opened fire. Milburn was found dead about a block away with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Dyersburg Police and the Department of Children Services had launched an investigation into allegations of abuse last week involving Christopher Milburn and his 15 year old daughter. Department of Children Services had placed the 15 year old into the care of the Randolph family pending the outcome of the investigation.

http://www.myfoxmemphis.com/dpp/news/tennessee/080209_Three_Dead_in_Dyersburg_Shooting

2009-07-28T15:22:00.001-04:00

Quotable quotes 070508

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by Alohomora | Upload your own presentation

Glossary of Legal Terms

2009-07-22T02:52:00.001-04:00

Glossary of Legal Terms

acquit - To find a defendant not guilty in a criminal trial.

adjudication - A judgment or decree.

affidavit - A written or printed declaration or statement under oath.

affirm - The ruling of an appellate court that the judgment of a lower court is correct and should stand.

appeal - Review of a case by a higher court.

appellant - Party appealing a decision or judgment to a higher court.

appellee - The party against whom an appeal is filed.

arbitration - The hearing and settlement of a dispute between opposing parties by a third party whose decision the parties have agreed to accept.

arraignment - A court hearing in a criminal case where a defendant is advised of the charges and asked to plead guilty or not guilty. Most arraignments in Tennessee are held in General Sessions Court.

bail bond - An agreement by a third party to pay a certain sum of money if the defendant fails to appear in court.

bench trial - Trial held before judge sitting without a jury; jury waived trial.

bench warrant - Process issued by the court or “from the bench” for the attachment or arrest of a person.

binding over - The act by which a court or magistrate requires a person to enter into a recognizance or furnish bail to appear for trial, to keep the peace, to attend as a witness, etc. Also describes act of lower court in transferring case to higher court or to grand jury after a finding of probable cause to believe that defendant committed crime.

brief - A legal document, prepared by an attorney, which presents the law and facts supporting his or her client.

caseload - The number of cases a judge handles.

cause of action - A legal claim.

certiorari - A procedure for removing a case from a lower court to a higher court for review.

change of venue - Moving a case from one court, or location, to another.

civil law - All law that is not criminal law.

class - There are five classifications of felonies and three classifications of misdemeanors. With the exception of murder in the first degree, all felonies in the Revised Criminal Code, in the old Title 39 and in titles other than Title 39 are classified. Each felony has an A, B, C, D, or E classification. “A” is the most serious and “E” is the least serious. Each misdemeanor has either an A, B, or C classification with “A” being most serious and “C” being least serious. Murder in the first degree carries three possible penalties: life (with the possibility of parole), life without parole, and death.

code - A collection of laws promulgated by legislative authority.

common law - A system of jurisprudence based on precedent rather than statutory laws.

commutation - Change of punishment from a greater to a lesser degree or ending a sentence that has been partially served.

corpus delicti - The body or material substance upon which crime has been committed; e.g., the corpse of a murdered person or the charred remains of a burned house.

de novo - “Anew.” A trial de novo is a completely new trial.

declaratory judgment - A judgment declaring the rights of the parties on a question of law.

decree - Decision or order of the court. A final decree completes the suit; an interlocutory decree is provisional or preliminary.

default judgment - Under Rules of Civil Procedure, when a party against whom a judgment for affirmative relief is sought has failed to plead (i.e., answer) or otherwise defend, he is in default and a judgment by default may be entered either by the clerk or the court.

defendant - A person charged with a crime or a person against whom a civil action is brought.

deposition - Sworn testimony taken outside the courtroom according to the rules of the court.

discovery - A pretrial proceeding where a party to an action may be informed of the facts known by other parties or witnesses.

docket - Book containing entries of all proceedings in a court.

double jeopardy - Prohibition against more than one prosecution for the same crime.

due process - Constitutional guarantee that an accused person receives a fair and impartial trial.

en banc - “On the bench.” All judges of a court sitting together to hear a case.

et al. - Abbreviation of the Latin "et alter", meaning: “and others.”

ex parte - A proceeding brought for the benefit of one party only without notice to or challenge by an adverse party.

felony - A serious criminal offense for which the minimum sentence is one year.

grand jury - A panel of citizens sworn to inquire into crime and if appropriate bring accusations, or indictments, against the suspects.

guardian ad litem - A person appointed by a court to manage the interests of a minor or incompetent person whose property is involved in litigation.

habeas corpus - “Latin phrase meaing: You have the body.” A writ of habeas corpus requires that a person be brought before a judge. It is usually used to direct an official to produce a prisoner so the court may determine if liberty has been denied without due process.

indictment - Written accusation of a grand jury charging a crime.

injunction - Court orders prohibiting specific actions from being carried out.

interrogatories - Written questions which must be answered under oath.

judgment - Final determination by a court.

judgment document - Document that explains the sentence an offender receives from a trial court.

jurisprudence - The science of law.

limited jurisdiction - Courts limited in the types of criminal and civil cases they may hear.

litigant - Person or group engaged in a lawsuit.

misdemeanor - Criminal offense that is less than a felony and punishable by less than a year in jail.

mitigating circumstances - Do not justify or excuse an offense, but may be considered as reasons for reducing the degree of blame.

motion - Oral or written request before, during or after a trial on which a court issues a ruling or order.

moot - Unsettled or undecided.

negligence - The absence of ordinary care.

nolo contendere - Latin phrase meaning “I will not contest it”; a plea in a criminal case which has a similar legal effect as pleading guilty. A defendant may plead nolo contendere only with the consent of the court.

opinion, per curiam - Phrase used to distinguish an opinion of the whole court from an opinion written by only one judge.

parole - The conditional and revocable release of an inmate by the Board of Paroles to parole supervision.

peremptory challenge - Procedure for rejecting prospective jurors without a reason. Each side is permitted a limited number of peremptory challenges.

power of attorney - Document authorizing another to act as one’s agent or attorney in fact (not an attorney at law).

probable cause - Reasonable belief that a crime has been committed; the basis for all lawful searches.

probate - The legal process of establishing the validity of a will and settling an estate.

probation - A sentence of confinement which is suspended upon a term of probation supervision. It may include community service or restitution or both. Probation must automatically be considered if the defendant is eligible.

pro bono - Legal services provided without attorney fees.

pro se - Legal representation of oneself

pro tem - “Temporary.”

recess - A short interval during which court suspends business, but without adjourning.

remand - To send back.

sentence, concurrent - Two or more sentences which run at the same time.

sentence, consecutive - Two or more sentences which run one after another.

sentence, determinate - A sentence that states exactly the time to be served or money to be paid.

sequester a jury - To place members of a jury into 24 hour a day seclusion until a verdict is reached.

settlement conference - A meeting between parties of a lawsuit, their attorneys and a judge to attempt a resolution of the dispute without a trial.

statute - A law created by the Legislature.

stay - Halting a judicial proceeding by order of the court.

subpoena - A written legal notice requiring a person to appear in court and give testimony or produce documentary evidence.

subpoena duces tecum - “Under penalty you shall take it with you.” A process by which the court commands a witness to produce specific documents or records in a trial.

tort - An injury or wrong committed with or without force to the person or property of another giving rise to a claim for damages.

venue - The specific county, city or geographical area in which a court has jurisdiction.

voir dire - (pronounced “vwar-deer”) - “To speak the truth.” The process of preliminary examination of prospective jurors regarding their qualifications.

writ - A written court order directing a person to perform or refrain from performing a specific act.

writ of mandamus - An order issued by a court of superior jurisdiction commanding performance of a particular act by an inferior court or public official.

Cocke County DCS “Bad to the Bone”

2009-07-14T09:36:00.000-04:00

Have you ever called a government agency for help only to be chuckled at and made fun of? Then chances are you have never had to contact the Cocke County Department of Children Services (DCS) located on Heritage Street in Newport, Tennessee.

Such was the case on Monday, July 6, when Renée Lynn, Editor-in-Chief of “The Knoxville Journal,” needed to discuss a dire situation with Kim Ramsey, a case worker at the Cocke County DCS. Mrs. Lynn tried numerous times to reach Ms. Ramsey or anyone in the department to no avail.

Finally, Mrs. Lynn got in touch with Ms. Ramsey to converse about a very serious issue concerning information relevant to two foster children under their jurisdiction. Apparently the information was ignored.

When asked very pertinent questions about the care of these children, Ms. Ramsey began laughing over the phone along with other employees. They just kept on laughing. Ms. Ramsey made no effort to correct her rude behavior with an apology. Mrs. Lynn then informed Ms. Ramsey that this was not a laughing matter, but was a grave set of circumstances. Again Mrs. Lynn was met with snickering.

It just so happened that Mrs. Lynn’s telephone was on speaker phone and at least one other person witnessed the outrageous behavior of Ms. Ramsey.

Mrs. Lynn commented, “It is a sad day when upstanding citizens are being subjected to such disrespect from government employees.”

This is not the first complaint lodged against the Cocke County DCS. This reporter knows of at least one other incident in which the Cocke County office has overstepped their bounds.

Ms. Vicki Hodge, supervisor of the Cocke County DCS did return a call to Mrs. Lynn on Tuesday, July 7, but did not apologize for the offensive conduct of her employees.

If you have any information about the Cocke County DCS you would like to share, please call Myra Wheeler at The Knoxville Journal at (865) 546-5353.

http://www.theknoxvillejournal.com/inside/pages/news/Cocke-County-DCS.html

I am sure they would be interested in all the stories in TN, give it a shot.

US House votes to impeach federal judge for sexual harassment, obstruction

2009-06-24T18:38:00.000-04:00

[JURIST] The US House of Representatives [official website] Friday approved four separate articles of impeachment [text, PDF] against Judge Samuel Kent [official profile; JURIST news archive] of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Kent is the first federal judge to be impeached in 20 years, and only the thirteenth federal judge ever to be impeached. No members of the House voted against the resolution that was adopted without amendment and based on an earlier report [text, PDF] of the House Committee on the Judiciary [official website]. Kent’s alleged “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be tried in the US Senate [official website] include sexual harassment of his secretary, sexual harassment of his case manager, obstructing a judicial proceeding by making false statements, and making false and misleading statements to federal agents during his investigation. An impeachment conviction would remove Kent from the bench before his resignation date. Kent wrote a letter of resignation [JURIST report] to President Obama earlier this month, but since it is not effective until June 2010, he would continue to receive his salary. Kent pleaded guilty [JURIST report] to a criminal charge of obstruction of justice in May in a plea agreement [text, PDF] that prevented him from being the first federal judge to go on criminal trial for sexual harassment. He was sentenced [JURIST report] in May to 33 months in prison, and ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and $6,500 in restitution as part of his plea agreement [text, PDF]. In 2007, the American Bar Association (ABA) [professional association] adopted new policies reforming the Model Code of Judicial Conduct [JURIST report], which for the first time included prohibitions against sexual harassment, although some advocacy groups believe these changes do not go far enough [AP report].
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2009/06/us-house-votes-to-impeach-federal-judge.php

New Site Provides Advice On North Carolina Family Law

2009-06-08T05:03:00.000-04:00

New Site Provides Advice On North Carolina Family Law

For my NY Advocates- NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING

2009-06-08T02:55:00.000-04:00

A post from one of my yahoo group fighters:

On Monday, June 8, a
hearing is being held regarding the failure of oversight of judges and
lawyers in NY State. Many of us have been harmed by judicial and lawyer
corruption in all the States. This is message to all who want to
support this and/or attend and particularly if you're a NY resident and
have filed a complaint.

For more info: You can contact me at
Tskeene@westelcom. com or contact Will Galison at wgalison@aol. com ,
if you're in the NYC area and desirous of transportation.

You can examine the extensive record of judicial and lawyer corruption acquired through
exposecorruptcourts.blogspot.com

Videotaping will be allowed. If you have a denied complaint and cannot
attend ,please submit it to Senator Sampson and also to either will or
I. Announcement below: Terry

Senate Standing Committee On The Judiciary Notice of Public Hearing

Monday, June 8th, 2009, 10:00 am - 3:00 pm

SENATE STANDING COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING

SUBJECT: The Appellate Division First Department Departmental
Disciplinary Committee, the grievance committees of the various
Judicial Districts and the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct

PURPOSE: This hearing will review the mission, procedures and level of
public satisfaction with the Appellate Division First Department
Departmental Disciplinary Committee, the grievance committees of the
various Judicial Districts as well as the New York State Commission on
Judicial Conduct

Albany

Monday June 8, 2009

10 A.M.

Meeting Room 6 Empire State Plaza

Albany, NY 12247

Lawyer Who Failed to Follow Billing Rules Forfeits Fees

2009-06-07T01:14:00.001-04:00

Vesselin Mitev
New York Law Journal
May 05, 2009

A Long Island, N.Y., matrimonial attorney who did not bill her client at the requisite 60-day intervals cannot collect claimed legal fees, a New York state judge has ruled.

Attorney Charlene K. Verkowitz, appearing pro se, argued that she had substantially complied with rules requiring matrimonial lawyers to provide written, itemized bills at least every 60 days.

But New York Supreme Court Justice William R. LaMarca of Nassau County disagreed, noting in Verkowitz v. Torres, 17206/06, that since Verkowitz had not "follow[ed] the rules," she had to forfeit her fees.

Verkowitz, of New Hyde Park, N.Y., was hired by Ernest Torres on Nov. 7, 2002, to represent him in a Suffolk County Family Court support hearing. That day, Torres signed a retainer and paid a $3,500 fee, according to the decision.

The next month, Torres retained Verkowitz to represent him in a separate matrimonial action. Unused portions of his previous retainer were credited to the matrimonial bill, and Torres paid an additional $3,500.

On July 14, 2003, Torres relieved Verkowitz as counsel, prompting the subsequent suit over $7,915 in counsel fees plus costs, according to the decision.

During the eight-month period from initial retainer to her discharge, Verkowitz sent four bills to Torres: on Dec. 6, 2002; Feb. 3, 2003; June 17, 2003; and Nov. 5, 2003.

The Feb. 3, 2003, bill showed a credit balance of $2,309 but more than 120 days had elapsed between the February bill and the June 17 bill. Her lawsuit only covered fees mentioned in the first three bills.

At trial in December 2008, Verkowitz testified that between the second and third billing cycle she "continually advised" Torres that his retainer had been exhausted. Torres was "often" in her office during this time reviewing his case, according to the decision.

Torres denied he was told about the bills and claimed he told Verkowitz about his "dire financial straits," which were also the subject of a motion to modify a separation agreement with his wife, Justice LaMarca wrote.

According to Michael R. Walker, Torres' attorney, his client had limited funds, as evidenced by the fact he charged the first two retainers on his girlfriend's credit card.

Under 22 NYCRR 1400.3, a retainer agreement sets forth the "[f]requency of itemized billing, which shall be at least every 60 days; the client may not be charged for time spent in discussion of the bills received."

Here, LaMarca wrote, "there is no doubt that Verkowitz did not abide by the rules, in that she did not provide written itemized bills at least every 60 days."

The failure to comply with the rules "promulgated to address abuses in the practice of matrimonial law and to protect the public will result in preclusion from recovering such legal fees," the judge continued, quoting Julien v. Machson, 245 AD2d 122.

Verkowitz cited, among other cases, Mulcahy v. Mulcahy, 285 AD2d 587, and Sherman v. Sherman, 34 AD3d 670, which set forth that attorney fees may be recovered if there is "substantial compliance" with 22 NYCRR 1400.3.

However, LaMarca distinguished those cases as addressing the recovery of legal fees from an adversary spouse, observing "[t]hat is not this case."

"In all cases cited by Verkowitz, the courts recited the law ... that attorneys must follow the rules or forfeit legal fees," the judge held. "There is no doubt that the third bill ... was not sent within 60 days as mandated."

Although he held that Verkowitz did not substantially comply with the rules, LaMarca did not order her to return the $2,309 credit indicated on the second bill, citing Mulcahy for the proposition that "a court need not direct the return of a retainer fee already paid for properly-earned services."

In an interview, Walker said his client's case was factually different than that of a Brooklyn accountant who earlier this year was ordered to pay his attorney fees despite a 17-month billing delay.

In Edelstein v. Greisman, 18848/08, attorney Saul Edelstein had won at the arbitration level before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Mark I. Partnow upheld his award.

Here, Verkowitz had lost in arbitration, Walker said.

LaMarca properly interpreted the statute, said Walker, of Gallagher, Walker, Bianco & Plastaras in Mineola, N.Y. "We have strict rules precisely for this reason."

In an interview, Verkowitz said she "respectfully disagree[d] with the judge's interpretation of substantial compliance."

She said the initial arbitration award was "100 percent" in her favor but had been overturned by a "technicality," prompting a rehearing which she lost.

LaMarca's decision did not mention the arbitration.

http://www.law.com/jsp/law/careercenter/CareerCenterArticleFriendly.jsp?id=1202430444547

Sign My Guestbook Of Family Court Reformers

2009-05-29T13:35:00.001-04:00

A quote, what does it mean to you?

2009-05-29T13:21:00.000-04:00

"Great people and great athletes realize early in their lives their destiny, and accept it. Even if they do not consciously realize the how, the where, the what.
Percy Cerutty"

Teen turns himself in on homicide charge

2009-05-28T13:17:00.001-04:00

STAFF REPORTS

A 15-year-old boy turned himself in to police Wednesday on charges they he shot and killed another teenager on May 9.

Kenneth
Woodroof III, 17, was shot in the head on the porch of his Georgia
Avenue home. Police said he was preparing to sell marijuana to two
people who were coming to his house when the shooting occurred.

The
boy was developed as a suspect last week, and a warrant was issued for
his arrest last Friday. He is being held in juvenile detention. The Tennessean does not name juvenile suspects unless they are transferred to adult court.

Florida SUPREME COURT DISCIPLINES 28 ATTORNEYS

2009-05-21T19:26:00.001-04:00

SUPREME COURT DISCIPLINES 28 ATTORNEYS
2009-05-06 00:58:00

The Florida
Bar, the state's guardian for the integrity of the legal profession, announces
that the Florida Supreme Court in recent court orders disciplined 28 attorneys,
disbarring 10, suspending 16 and placing two on probation. Some attorneys
received more than one form of discipline. Two attorneys were reprimanded. Two
were ordered to pay restitution.

As an official agency of the Florida Supreme
Court, The Florida Bar and its Department of Lawyer Regulation are charged with
administering a statewide disciplinary system to enforce Supreme Court rules of
professional conduct for the 86,000-plus lawyers admitted to practice law in
Florida. Since Aug. 1, 2007, case files
have been posted to attorneys'
individual Florida Bar profiles and may be reviewed at and/or downloaded from
The Florida Bar's Web site, www.floridabar.org.

The following lawyers
are disciplined (Please note that court orders are not final until time expires
to file a rehearing motion and, if filed, determined. The filing of such a
motion does not alter the effective date of the discipline):

James Harutun
Batmasian, 215 N. Federal Highway, Suite 1, Boca Raton, suspended for three
years, effective retroactive to Aug. 30, 2008, following a March 5 court order.
(Admitted to practice: 1974) In April 2008, Batmasian pleaded guilty in federal
court, to one count of willful failure to collect or pay over tax, a felony. He
was sentenced to eight months imprisonment, followed by two years of supervised
release and penalties of $30,000. (Case No. SC08-1445)

Daniel Antonio Benito,
2423 SW 147th Ave., No. 362, Miami, suspended until further order, following a
March 3 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1997) According to an emergency
suspension order, Benito appeared to be causing great public harm by
misappropriating and/or diverting client funds entrusted to him. In one
instance, a client sent $80,000 to Benito to be held in trust for the purpose of
funding a marital settlement agreement. When the settlement did not materialize,
the client demanded the return of the funds and Benito refused, claiming he was
entitled to them for attorney's fees. (Case No. SC09-372)

Roger Besu, 233
Palm Ave., Miami Beach, suspended until further order, following a Feb. 5 court
order. (Admitted to practice: 1974) According to an emergency suspension order,
Besu appeared to be causing great public harm by misappropriating and/or
diverting client funds entrusted to him. In October 2008, a client filed a
complaint with The Florida Bar, alleging that Besu was holding more than $3.5
million of his money in escrow and he had not been able to reach Besu by
telephone or at his office. Besu did not respond to a Bar subpoena. An audit
revealed nearly $2 million was missing from a trust account that he
controlled.(Case No. SC09-187)

A. Clark Cone, 8607 Wendy Lane E., West
Palm Beach, suspended until further order, following a March 19 court order.
(Admitted to practice: 1981) According to an emergency suspension order, Cone
appeared to be causing great public harm. The Florida Bar's investigation found
that in several instances, Cone misappropriated client funds. After settling a
personal injury case, Cone asked a client to endorse her $38,940.38 settlement
check. Cone then deposited the money into his trust account and converted it to
his use. (Case No. SC09-474)

Katherine Denise Crase, 2804 W. Aquilla St.,
Tampa, suspended effective 30 days from a Feb. 25 court order. (Admitted to
practice: 1991) In July 2008, Crase was found guilty of seven felony counts of
conspiracy and mail fraud. She was sentenced to 30 months in prison. (Case No.
SC09-339)

Joseph R. De Lucca, 5089 Greenwich Preserve Ct., Boynton Beach,
suspended until further order, following a March 11 court order. (Admitted to
practice: 1971) According to an emergency suspension order, De Lucca appeared to
be causing great public harm by misappropriating client trust funds or property.
A Florida Bar audit found that De Lucca had a negative balance of $35,572.91 in
his trust account, after using client funds for his own purposes. (Case No.
SC09-430)

Susan Lynn Eberle, 4437 Koger St., Orlando, suspended for 91 days,
effective 30 days from a March 24 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1985)
Eberle is being held in contempt of court for noncompliance with Florida Supreme
Court orders. In March 2006, Eberle was suspended for 30 days and placed on
probation for two years. She violated the terms of that probation and in August
2007, Eberle was given an additional two years probation to run consecutively
after the first. (Case No. SC08-2405)

Nadege Elliott, P.O. Box 121711, Fort
Lauderdale, disbarred, retroactive to Dec. 15, 2008, following a Jan. 30 court
order. (Admitted to practice: 1998) In three separate cases, Elliott provided
incompetent representation, charged excessive fees and mishandled his trust
accounts. (Case No. SC07-2)

Delaila Jannette Estefano, 9200 S. Dadeland
Blvd., Suite 204, Miami, suspended until further order, following a March 9
court order. (Admitted to practice: 1999) According to an emergency suspension
order, Estefano appeared to be causing great public harm. A criminal case
pending in the Miami-Dade County Circuit Court alleges that Estefano, working
with two others, engaged in a systematic, ongoing course of conduct with intent
to defraud and/or obtain property from a mortgage lender by false pretenses. An
investigation by the Miami-Dade Police Department revealed the use of Estafano's
law firm escrow account in the alleged fraudulent activities. (Case No.
SC09-384)

Stephen Jay Goldstein, 13899 Biscayne Blvd., Suite 307, North Miami
Beach, disbarred effective April 10, following a March 11 court order. (Admitted
to practice: 1972) Goldstein wrote checks from his trust and operating accounts
in the amounts of $22,290.00, $527.83, $50,000 and $43,725. All were returned
for insufficient funds. (Case No. SC09-329)

Christina Gomez, 4440 S.W. Archer
Road, Apt. No. 726, Gainesville, disbarred effective retroactive to Sept. 8,
2008, following an April 2 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1992) Gomez
participated in at least three fraudulent financial transactions, one of which
resulted in her receiving approximately $835,000. Because she failed to provide
all the required subpoenaed records, The Florida Bar has so far been unable to
conduct a complete audit to determine the magnitude of fraud and
misappropriation that may have occurred. (Case No. SC08-2139)

Rafael
Gonzalez, 6309 Wild Orchid Drive, Lithia, suspended for three years, effective
30 days from an Oct. 2, 2008 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1991) Gonzalez
was initially suspended for 14 days in September 2007 and violated the terms of
the court's order by practicing law. (Case Nos. SC07-2314 and SC08-434)

Webb
Greenfelder, P.O. Box 353, San Antonio, suspended for 91 days, effective
immediately, following a March 5 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1998)
Greenfelder was arrested when police investigated a domestic violence incident
at his home. Charges were later dropped. Greenfelder has been ineligible to
practice law since October 2005 as a result of not paying his Florida Bar dues.
He is also delinquent with his continuing legal education requirements. (Case
No. SC08-1497)

Gloretta Hankins Hall, 221 S.E. Osceola St., Stuart, to
receive a public reprimand, following a March 5 court order. (Admitted to
practice: 1991) In May 2006, Hall was the supervising lawyer on a malpractice
case and her associate was assigned to manage the case. Hall failed to monitor
the associate's activities in the case and hired her sister to act as an expert
witness, because the associate had not hired a nurse expert. At a later date,
Hall learned that her sister provided testimony at the deposition that was not
truthful regarding their familial relationship. (Case No. SC08-1730)

Joseph
I. Harrison, 800 S. Douglas Road, Suite 450, Coral Gables, disbarred for five
years, effective 30 days from a March 20 court order. (Admitted to practice:
2006) Harrison was further ordered to pay restitution totaling $90,800 to two
clients. In at least three separate cases, Harrison charged excessive fees but
provided no significant legal services. He deposited funds in his operating
account instead of a trust account as required and knowingly made false
statements to a third party. (Case Nos. SC08-76, SC08-575 and SC08-804)

David
Robert Heil, 2324 Lee Road, Winter Park, suspended for 10 days, effective 30
days from an April 2 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1984) In December,
2002, Heil was hired to represent a client in a personal injury case. In October
2007, without giving prior notice to the client, Heil filed a notice of
voluntary dismissal and subsequently, the statute of limitations ran out on the
case. (Case No. SC08-1748)

George Nicholas Konstantakis, 44 Cocoanut Row,
Suite M210, Palm Beach, disbarred for five years, effective 30 days from a March
5 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1987) He was further ordered to pay
restitution of $26,680 to a client's living revocable trust. In 2004,
Konstantakis agreed to represent a client in civil proceedings. Thereafter, he
failed to attend the hearings, show up for trial and communicate with the
client. The client was unaware of the final judgment until she was served with
an order of contempt in December 2006 for failure to provide financial
information. (Case Nos. SC08-917 and SC08-1550)

Mark Lawrence, 801 Brickell
Ave., Suite 900, Miami, disbarred effective 30 days from the date of a March 5
court order. (Admitted to practice: 1988) Lawrence admitted to failing to
preserve and apply trust funds as required by Florida Bar rules; issuing checks
from his trust account to pay his child support obligations; and engaging in
dishonest conduct. (Case No. SC09-310)

Jeffrey Merrill Leukel, P.O. Box 8004,
Sanford, suspended for 90 days, effective retroactive to Oct. 20, 2008,
following an April 1 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1986) Leukel was
further placed on probation for three years and ordered to enter into a contract
with Florida Lawyer's Assistance. In September 2008, Leukel pleaded no contest
to driving while his license was permanently revoked, a third-degree felony.
(Case No. SC08-1957)

Jerona Charmaine Maiyo, 6996 Piazza Grande Ave., Suite
309, Orlando, disbarred effective immediately, following a March 26 court order.
(Admitted to practice: 2001) Maiyo failed to perform her duties as a lawyer. She
accepted retainer fees from clients and did not perform work. In some instances,
Maiyo abandoned the cases without giving notice. She did not inform The Florida
Bar of her correct address, so at one point, all correspondence mailed to her
was returned as being unclaimed and not forwardable. In December 2007, Maiyo was
suspended for failure to complete her continuing legal education requirements.
(Case No. SC08-1747)

Andrew William Menyhart, P.O. Box 541739, Merritt
Island, suspended until further order, following a March 19 court order.
(Admitted to practice: 1992) According to an emergency suspension order,
Menyhart appeared to be causing great public harm by misappropriating funds from
his trust account. In one matter, a $19,000 check written on Menyhart's trust
account was returned due to insufficient funds. On another occasion, Menyhart
wrote a check to a client as partial payment of a settlement. That check was
also returned. An audit by The Florida Bar found that Menyhart altered bank
statements to show that he was still holding funds for a $100,000 estate, when
in fact, he was not. (Case No. SC09-475)

Gary Michael Murphree, 142 Beacon
Blvd., #A, Miami, suspended for one year, effective retroactive to Sept. 15,
2008, following an April 2 court order and placed on probation for three years,
effective immediately. (Admitted to practice: 1994) In May 2008, Murphree was
found guilty in circuit court of possessing cocaine and drug paraphernalia with
intent to use. Murphree failed to notify The Florida Bar, as required, of the
charges. (Case No. SC08-1534)

Gregory F. Pillon, 730 NW 40th Ave., Miami,
disbarred effective retroactive to Sept. 12, 2007, following an April 2 court
order. (Admitted to practice: 2004) In May 2007, Pillon pleaded no contest to
obtaining a mortgage by false representation, a felony. The plea agreement
provided that Pillon would surrender his license to practice law. (Case No.
SC07-1681)

David Philip Ryan, III, 250 Catalonia Ave., Suite 804, Coral
Gables, suspended until further order, following a March 3 court order.
(Admitted to practice: 1997) According to an emergency suspension order, Ryan
appeared to be causing great public harm by misappropriating and/or diverting
funds entrusted to him. A Florida Bar audit revealed that Ryan used client funds
to satisfy personal matters. (Case No. SC09-338)

Richard Brian Simring, 5400
LaGorce Drive, Miami Beach, disbarred effective retroactive to Sept. 9, 2008,
following an April 2 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1991) In July 2008,
Simring pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money
laundering, a felony. (Case No. SC08-1672)

Fred Rowan Tokarsky, 11156 Cypress
Trail Drive, Orlando, suspended for three years, effective immediately,
following a March 5 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1997) In August 2008,
Tokarsky was found guilty in federal court of three felonies: devising a scheme
to defraud through mail fraud, conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, and
theft of government funds. (Case No. SC08-2100)

Kendrick Gerard Whittle, 3646
N.W. 98th St., Miami, disbarred effective retroactive to Oct. 23, 2007,
following a Feb. 24 court order. (Admitted to practice: 1999) In several
instances, Whittle misappropriated client funds. He used approximately
$297,781.73 to pay clients as well as personal bills including rent, utilities
and credit cards. (Case No. SC07-2394)

James Dean Wood, 870 115th Ave.,
Treasure Island, to receive a public reprimand, following a March 5 court order.
(Admitted to practice: 1994) Wood received $25,000 to handle a case. He
initially traveled from Pinellas County to Miami to meet with the client. After
that, there is no evidence that Wood researched the case or communicated with
the client. (Case No. SC08-1767)

Child Advocacy Actions That Work

2009-05-19T03:31:00.001-04:00

A number of ways that you can step up and take action to
improve the lives of children.

Some take just a few seconds and some a
bit longer.

Below are different ways you can advocate on behalf of
children.

Email Your Elected Officials

Sending an email to your elected officials is a quick and easy way
to let them know that you demand that they commit to helping children
as a condition of your vote.

Send an email now to your Members of Congress asking them to secure the future by investing in every child.

Call Your Elected Officials

You can all your Members of Congress by calling (202) 224-3121 and
asking to be connected to the office of your Representative or your
Senators.

(Don't know who they are? Find out here.).
Once you are connected to the right office, ask to speak to the staff
member who children's issues.

Clearly have in mind a specific request
of your representative.

Send a Letter to Your Elected Officials

Writing a personal letter is a great way to communicate with your
elected officials. Personalized letters are well-received by elected
officials, as they know it takes time to write a letter with a
well-thought out message. Learn more about how to write a compelling letter to your elected officials.

Meet with Your Elected Officials

A personal meeting with your elected official can be an
effective way to persuade that official to support your cause. It is an
opportunity for you or your group to sit down face-to-face with a key
decision-maker to convey your thoughts on an issue. Learn more about how you can prepare for a meeting, what to do at the meeting and how to follow-up.

Write an Op-Ed

An op-ed is an opinion piece written by a regular reader,
representative of a group or cause, or an elected official who is not
an employee of the newspaper. Op-eds are a great advocacy tool and a
way to raise awareness about children's issues—if placed, they
are read by decision makers, opinion leaders and fellow citizens. Learn more about op-eds and how to write one.

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-advocacy-resources-center/child-advocacy-actions/?print=t

N.J. Court: No local residency restrictions

2009-05-15T07:03:00.001-04:00

Thursday, 14 May 2009

The New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that towns do not have the right
to make their own laws regarding where sex offenders can or cannot live.

According to the unanimous ruling, municipalities are not allowed to
ban sex offenders from "living within a designated distance of any
school, park, playground, public library, or daycare center…"
The judges said "Megan's Law already makes that call," reports the
Newark Star-Ledger.

The result? Over 100 municipalities could have to remove ordinances
that prevented offenders from residing near schools and daycare centers.

Link: Court decision

does anybody Plurk?

2009-04-17T02:42:00.001-04:00

does anybody Plurk?

National Partnership for Women & Families:

2009-04-05T00:25:00.001-04:00

Guaranteeing Equal Rights

Promote a fair and independent judiciary with
judicial nominees who have a demonstrated
commitment to fundamental rights

Consult broadly during the judicial nomination
process and ensure Congress fully exercises its role
to advise and consent

Enact a comprehensive federal ban on sex
discrimination and adopt the international
Convention on Elimination of all Forms of
Discrimination Against Women

Fully fund domestic violence programs and ensure
victims have needed supports

Strengthen protections against human trafficking

National Partnership for Women & Families:

we need your input

2009-03-20T02:12:00.001-04:00

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/5/in-support-of-lisa-and-bella-smith-2

Where was her safety net?

2009-03-04T14:08:00.001-05:00

tampabay.com
The girl in the window

Lane DeGregory, Times Staff Writer

Published Thursday, July 31, 2008

Part One: The Feral Child

PLANT CITY — The family had lived in the rundown rental house for almost three years when someone first saw a child's face in the window.

A little girl, pale, with dark eyes, lifted a dirty blanket above the broken glass and peered out, one neighbor remembered.

Everyone knew a woman lived in the house with her boyfriend and two adult sons. But they had never seen a child there, had never noticed anyone playing in the overgrown yard.

The girl looked young, 5 or 6, and thin. Too thin. Her cheeks seemed sunken; her eyes were lost.

The child stared into the square of sunlight, then slipped away.

Months went by. The face never reappeared.

Just before noon on July 13, 2005, a Plant City police car pulled up outside that shattered window. Two officers went into the house — and one stumbled back out.

Clutching his stomach, the rookie retched in the weeds.

Plant City Detective Mark Holste had been on the force for 18 years when he and his young partner were sent to the house on Old Sydney Road to stand by during a child abuse investigation. Someone had finally called the police.

They found a car parked outside. The driver's door was open and a woman was slumped over in her seat, sobbing. She was an investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families.

"Unbelievable," she told Holste. "The worst I've ever seen."

The police officers walked through the front door, into a cramped living room.

"I've been in rooms with bodies rotting there for a week and it never stunk that bad," Holste said later. "There's just no way to describe it. Urine and feces — dog, cat and human excrement — smeared on the walls, mashed into the carpet. Everything dank and rotting."

Tattered curtains, yellow with cigarette smoke, dangling from bent metal rods. Cardboard and old comforters stuffed into broken, grimy windows. Trash blanketing the stained couch, the sticky counters.

The floor, walls, even the ceiling seemed to sway beneath legions of scuttling roaches.

"It sounded like you were walking on eggshells. You couldn't take a step without crunching German cockroaches," the detective said. "They were in the lights, in the furniture. Even inside the freezer. The freezer!"

While Holste looked around, a stout woman in a faded housecoat demanded to know what was going on. Yes, she lived there. Yes, those were her two sons in the living room. Her daughter? Well, yes, she had a daughter . . .

The detective strode past her, down a narrow hall. He turned the handle on a door, which opened into a space the size of a walk-in closet. He squinted in the dark.

At his feet, something stirred.

• • •

First he saw the girl's eyes: dark and wide, unfocused, unblinking. She wasn't looking at him so much as through him.

She lay on a torn, moldy mattress on the floor. She was curled on her side, long legs tucked into her emaciated chest. Her ribs and collarbone jutted out; one skinny arm was slung over her face; her black hair was matted, crawling with lice. Insect bites, rashes and sores pocked her skin. Though she looked old enough to be in school, she was naked — except for a swollen diaper.

"The pile of dirty diapers in that room must have been 4 feet high," the detective said. "The glass in the window had been broken, and that child was just lying there, surrounded by her own excrement and bugs."

When he bent to lift her, she yelped like a lamb. "It felt like I was picking up a baby," Holste said. "I put her over my shoulder, and that diaper started leaking down my leg."

The girl didn't struggle. Holste asked, What's your name, honey? The girl didn't seem to hear.

He searched for clothes to dress her, but found only balled-up laundry, flecked with feces. He looked for a toy, a doll, a stuffed animal. "But the only ones I found were covered in maggots and roaches."

Choking back rage, he approached the mother. How could you let this happen?

"The mother's statement was: 'I'm doing the best I can,' " the detective said. "I told her, 'The best you can sucks!' "

He wanted to arrest the woman right then, but when he called his boss he was told to let DCF do its own investigation.

So the detective carried the girl down the dim hall, past her brothers, past her mother in the doorway, who was shrieking, "Don't take my baby!" He buckled the child into the state investigator's car. The investigator agreed: They had to get the girl out of there.

"Radio ahead to Tampa General," the detective remembers telling his partner. "If this child doesn't get to a hospital, she's not going to make it."

• • •

Her name, her mother had said, was Danielle. She was almost 7 years old.

She weighed 46 pounds. She was malnourished and anemic. In the pediatric intensive care unit they tried to feed the girl, but she couldn't chew or swallow solid food. So they put her on an IV and let her drink from a bottle.

Aides bathed her, scrubbed the sores on her face, trimmed her torn fingernails. They had to cut her tangled hair before they could comb out the lice.

Her caseworker determined that she had never been to school, never seen a doctor. She didn't know how to hold a doll, didn't understand peek-a-boo. "Due to the severe neglect," a doctor would write, "the child will be disabled for the rest of her life."

Hunched in an oversized crib, Danielle curled in on herself like a potato bug, then writhed angrily, kicking and thrashing. To calm herself, she batted at her toes and sucked her fists. "Like an infant," one doctor wrote.

She wouldn't make eye contact. She didn't react to heat or cold — or pain. The insertion of an IV needle elicited no reaction. She never cried. With a nurse holding her hands, she could stand and walk sideways on her toes, like a crab. She couldn't talk, didn't know how to nod yes or no. Once in a while she grunted.

She couldn't tell anyone what had happened, what was wrong, what hurt.

Dr. Kathleen Armstrong, director of pediatric psychology at the University of South Florida medical school, was the first psychologist to examine Danielle. She said medical tests, brain scans, and vision, hearing and genetics checks found nothing wrong with the child. She wasn't deaf, wasn't autistic, had no physical ailments such as cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle's almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Armstrong called the girl's condition "environmental autism." Danielle had been deprived of interaction for so long, the doctor believed, that she had withdrawn into herself.

The most extraordinary thing about Danielle, Armstrong said, was her lack of engagement with people, with anything. "There was no light in her eye, no response or recognition. . . . We saw a little girl who didn't even respond to hugs or affection. Even a child with the most severe autism responds to those."

Danielle's was "the most outrageous case of neglect I've ever seen."

• • •

The authorities had discovered the rarest and most pitiable of creatures: a feral child.

The term is not a diagnosis. It comes from historic accounts — some fictional, some true — of children raised by animals and therefore not exposed to human nurturing. Wolf boys and bird girls, Tarzan, Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

It's said that during the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick II gave a group of infants to some nuns. He told them to take care of the children but never to speak to them. He believed the babies would eventually reveal the true language of God. Instead, they died from the lack of interaction.

Then there was the Wild Boy of Aveyron, who wandered out of the woods near Paris in 1800, naked and grunting. He was about 12. A teacher took him in and named him Victor. He tried to socialize the child, teach him to talk. But after several years, he gave up on the teen and asked the housekeeper to care for him.

"In the first five years of life, 85 percent of the brain is developed," said Armstrong, the psychologist who examined Danielle. "Those early relationships, more than anything else, help wire the brain and provide children with the experience to trust, to develop language, to communicate. They need that system to relate to the world."

The importance of nurturing has been shown again and again. In the 1960s, psychologist Harry Harlow put groups of infant rhesus monkeys in a room with two artificial mothers. One, made of wire, dispensed food. The other, of terrycloth, extended cradled arms. Though they were starving, the baby monkeys all climbed into the warm cloth arms.

"Primates need comfort even more than they need food," Armstrong said.

The most recent case of a feral child was in 1970, in California. A girl whom therapists came to call Genie had been strapped to a potty chair until she was 13. Like the Wild Boy, Genie was studied in hospitals and laboratories. She was in her 20s when doctors realized she'd never talk, never be able to take care of herself. She ended up in foster care, closed off from the world, utterly dependent.

Danielle's case — which unfolded out of the public spotlight, without a word in the media — raised disturbing questions for everyone trying to help her. How could this have happened? What kind of mother would sit by year after year while her daughter languished in her own filth, starving and crawling with bugs?

And why hadn't someone intervened? The neighbors, the authorities — where had they been?

"It's mind-boggling that in the 21st century we can still have a child who's just left in a room like a gerbil," said Tracy Sheehan, Danielle's guardian in the legal system and now a circuit court judge. "No food. No one talking to her or reading her a story. She can't even use her hands. How could this child be so invisible?"

But the most pressing questions were about her future.

When Danielle was discovered, she was younger by six years than the Wild Boy or Genie, giving hope that she might yet be teachable. Many of her caregivers had high hopes they could make her whole.

Danielle had probably missed the chance to learn speech, but maybe she could come to understand language, to communicate in other ways.

Still, doctors had only the most modest ambitions for her.

"My hope was that she would be able to sleep through the night, to be out of diapers and to feed herself," Armstrong said. If things went really well, she said, Danielle would end up "in a nice nursing home."

• • •

Danielle spent six weeks at Tampa General before she was well enough to leave. But where could she go? Not home; Judge Martha Cook, who oversaw her dependency hearing, ordered that Danielle be placed in foster care and that her mother not be allowed to call or visit her. The mother was being investigated on criminal child abuse charges.

"That child, she broke my heart," Cook said later. "We were so distraught over her condition, we agonized over what to do."

Eventually, Danielle was placed in a group home in Land O'Lakes. She had a bed with sheets and a pillow, clothes and food, and someone at least to change her diapers.

In October 2005, a couple of weeks after she turned 7, Danielle started school for the first time. She was placed in a special ed class at Sanders Elementary.

"Her behavior was different than any child I'd ever seen," said Kevin O'Keefe, Danielle's first teacher. "If you put food anywhere near her, she'd grab it" and mouth it like a baby, he said. "She had a lot of episodes of great agitation, yelling, flailing her arms, rolling into a fetal position. She'd curl up in a closet, just to be away from everyone. She didn't know how to climb a slide or swing on a swing. She didn't want to be touched."

It took her a year just to become consolable, he said.

By Thanksgiving 2006 — a year and a half after Danielle had gone into foster care — her caseworker was thinking about finding her a permanent home.

A nursing home, group home or medical foster care facility could take care of Danielle. But she needed more.

"In my entire career with the child welfare system, I don't ever remember a child like Danielle," said Luanne Panacek, executive director of the Children's Board of Hillsborough County. "It makes you think about what does quality of life mean? What's the best we can hope for her? After all she's been through, is it just being safe?"

That fall, Panacek decided to include Danielle in the Heart Gallery — a set of portraits depicting children available for adoption. The Children's Board displays the pictures in malls and on the Internet in hopes that people will fall in love with the children and take them home.

In Hillsborough alone, 600 kids are available for adoption. Who, Panacek wondered, would choose an 8-year-old who was still in diapers, who didn't know her own name and might not ever speak or let you hug her?

• • •

The day Danielle was supposed to have her picture taken for the Heart Gallery, she showed up with red Kool-Aid dribbled down her new blouse. She hadn't yet mastered a sippy cup.

Garet White, Danielle's care manager, scrubbed the girl's shirt and washed her face. She brushed Danielle's bangs from her forehead and begged the photographer to please be patient.

White stepped behind the photographer and waved at Danielle. She put her thumbs in her ears and wiggled her hands, stuck out her tongue and rolled her eyes. Danielle didn't even blink.

White was about to give up when she heard a sound she'd never heard from Danielle. The child's eyes were still dull, apparently unseeing. But her mouth was open. She looked like she was trying to laugh.

Click.

Part Two: Becoming Dani

Teenagers tore through the arcade, firing fake rifles. Sweaty boys hunched over air hockey tables. Girls squealed as they stomped on blinking squares.

Bernie and Diane Lierow remember standing silently inside GameWorks in Tampa, overwhelmed. They had driven three hours from their home in Fort Myers Beach, hoping to meet a child at this foster care event.

But all these kids seemed too wild, too big and, well, too worldly.

Bernie, 48, remodels houses. Diane, 45, cleans homes. They have four grown sons from previous marriages and one together. Diane couldn't have any more children, and Bernie had always wanted a daughter. So last year, when William was 9, they decided to adopt.

Their new daughter would have to be younger than William, they told foster workers. But she would have to be potty-trained and able to feed herself. They didn't want a child who might hurt their son, or who was profoundly disabled and unable to take care of herself.

On the Internet they had found a girl in Texas, another in Georgia. Each time they were told, "That one is dangerous. She can't be with other children."

That's why they were at this Heart Gallery gathering, scanning the crowd.

Bernie's head ached from all the jangling games; Diane's stomach hurt, seeing all the abandoned kids; and William was tired of shooting aliens.

Diane stepped out of the chaos, into an alcove beneath the stairs. That was when she saw it. A little girl's face on a flier, pale with sunken cheeks and dark hair chopped too short. Her brown eyes seemed to be searching for something.

Diane called Bernie over. He saw the same thing she did. "She just looked like she needed us."

• • •

Bernie and Diane are humble, unpretentious people who would rather picnic on their deck than eat out. They go to work, go to church, visit with their neighbors, walk their dogs. They don't travel or pursue exotic interests; a vacation for them is hanging out at home with the family. Shy and soft-spoken, they're both slow to anger and, they say, seldom argue.

They had everything they ever wanted, they said. Except for a daughter.

But the more they asked about Danielle, the more they didn't want to know.

She was 8, but functioned as a 2-year-old. She had been left alone in a dank room, ignored for most of her life.

No, she wasn't there at the video arcade; she was in a group home. She wore diapers, couldn't feed herself, couldn't talk. After more than a year in school, she still wouldn't make eye contact or play with other kids.

No one knew, really, what was wrong with her, or what she might be capable of.

"She was everything we didn't want," Bernie said.

But they couldn't forget those aching eyes.

• • •

When they met Danielle at her school, she was drooling. Her tongue hung from her mouth. Her head, which seemed too big for her thin neck, lolled side to side.

She looked at them for an instant, then loped away across the special ed classroom. She rolled onto her back, rocked for a while, then batted at her toes.

Diane walked over and spoke to her softly. Danielle didn't seem to notice. But when Bernie bent down, Danielle turned toward him and her eyes seemed to focus.

He held out his hand. She let him pull her to her feet. Danielle's teacher, Kevin O'Keefe, was amazed; he hadn't seen her warm up to anyone so quickly.

Bernie led Danielle to the playground, she pulling sideways and prancing on her tiptoes. She squinted in the sunlight but let him push her gently on the swing. When it was time for them to part, Bernie swore he saw Danielle wave.

That night, he had a dream. Two giant hands slid through his bedroom ceiling, the fingers laced together. Danielle was swinging on those hands, her dark eyes wide, thin arms reaching for him.

• • •

Everyone told them not to do it, neighbors, co-workers, friends. Everyone said they didn't know what they were getting into.

So what if Danielle is not everything we hoped for? Bernie and Diane answered. You can't pre-order your own kids. You take what God gives you.

They brought her home on Easter weekend 2007. It was supposed to be a rebirth, of sorts — a baptism into their family.

"It was a disaster," Bernie said.

They gave her a doll; she bit off its hands. They took her to the beach; she screamed and wouldn't put her feet in the sand. Back at her new home, she tore from room to room, her swim diaper spewing streams across the carpet.

She couldn't peel the wrapper from a chocolate egg, so she ate the shiny paper too. She couldn't sit still to watch TV or look at a book. She couldn't hold a crayon. When they tried to brush her teeth or comb her hair, she kicked and thrashed. She wouldn't lie in a bed, wouldn't go to sleep, just rolled on her back, side to side, for hours.

All night she kept popping up, creeping sideways on her toes into the kitchen. She would pull out the frozen food drawer and stand on the bags of vegetables so she could see into the refrigerator.

"She wouldn't take anything," Bernie said. "I guess she wanted to make sure the food was still there."

When Bernie tried to guide her back to bed, Danielle railed against him and bit her own hands.

In time, Danielle's new family learned what worked and what didn't. Her foster family had been giving her anti-psychotic drugs to mitigate her temper tantrums and help her sleep. When Bernie and Diane weaned her off the medication, she stopped drooling and started holding up her head. She let Bernie brush her teeth.

• • •

Bernie and Diane already thought of Danielle as their daughter, but legally she wasn't. Danielle's birth mother did not want to give her up even though she had been charged with child abuse and faced 20 years in prison. So prosecutors offered a deal: If she waived her parental rights, they wouldn't send her to jail.

She took the plea. She was given two years of house arrest, plus probation. And 100 hours of community service.

In October 2007, Bernie and Diane officially adopted Danielle. They call her Dani.

• • •

"Okay, let's put your shoes on. Do you need to go potty again?" Diane asks.

It's an overcast Monday morning in spring 2008 and Dani is late for school. Again. She keeps flitting around the living room, ducking behind chairs and sofas, pulling at her shorts.

After a year with her new family, Dani scarcely resembles the girl in the Heart Gallery photo. She has grown a foot and her weight has doubled.

All those years she was kept inside, her hair was as dark as the dirty room she lived in. But since she started going to the beach and swimming in their backyard pool, Dani's shoulder-length hair has turned a golden blond. She still shrieks when anyone tries to brush it.

The changes in her behavior are subtle, but Bernie and Diane see progress. They give an example: When Dani feels overwhelmed she retreats to her room, rolls onto her back, pulls one sock toward the end of her toes and bats it. For hours. Bernie and Diane tell her to stop.

Now, when Dani hears them coming, she peels off her sock and throws it into the closet to hide it.

She's learning right from wrong, they say. And she seems upset when she knows she has disappointed them. As if she cares how they feel.

Bernie and Diane were told to put Dani in school with profoundly disabled children, but they insisted on different classes because they believe she can do more. They take her to occupational and physical therapy, to church and the mall and the grocery store. They have her in speech classes and horseback riding lessons.

Once, when Dani was trying to climb onto her horse, the mother of a boy in the therapeutic class turned to Diane.

"You're so lucky," Diane remembers the woman saying.

"Lucky?" Diane asked.

The woman nodded. "I know my son will never stand on his own, will never be able to climb onto a horse. You have no idea what your daughter might be able to do."

Diane finds hope in that idea. She counts small steps to convince herself things are slowly improving. So what if Dani steals food off other people's trays at McDonald's? At least she can feed herself chicken nuggets now. So what if she already has been to the bathroom four times this morning? She's finally out of diapers.

It took months, but they taught her to hold a stuffed teddy on the toilet so she wouldn't be scared to be alone in the bathroom. They bribed her with M&M's.

"Dani, sit down and try to use the potty," Diane coaxes. "Pull down your shorts. That's a good girl."

• • •

Every weekday, for half an hour, speech therapist Leslie Goldenberg tries to teach Dani to talk. She sits her in front of a mirror at a Bonita Springs elementary school and shows her how to purse her lips to make puffing sounds.

"Puh-puh-puh," says the teacher. "Here, feel my mouth." She brings Dani's fingers to her lips, so she can feel the air.

Dani nods. She knows how to nod now. Goldenberg puffs again.

Leaning close to the mirror, Dani purses her lips, opens and closes them. No sound comes out. She can imitate the movement, but doesn't know she has to blow out air to make the noise.

She bends closer, scowls at her reflection. Her lips open and close again, then she leaps up and runs across the room. She grabs a Koosh ball and bounces it rapidly.

She's lost inside herself. Again.

But in many ways, Dani already has surpassed the teacher's expectations, and not just in terms of speech. She seems to be learning to listen, and she understands simple commands. She pulls at her pants to show she needs to go to the bathroom, taps a juice box when she wants more. She can sit at a table for five-minute stretches, and she's starting to scoop applesauce with a spoon. She's down to just a few temper tantrums a month. She is learning to push buttons on a speaking board, to use symbols to show when she wants a book or when she's angry. She's learning it's okay to be angry: You can deal with those feelings without biting your own hands.

"I'd like her to at least be able to master a sound board, so she can communicate her choices even if she never finds her voice," Goldenberg says. "I think she understands most of what we say. It's just that she doesn't always know how to — or want to — react."

Dani's teacher and family have heard her say only a few words, and all of them seemed accidental. Once she blurted "baaa," startling Goldenberg to tears. It was the first letter sound she had ever made.

She seems to talk most often when William is tickling her, as if something from her subconscious seeps out when she's too distracted to shut it off. Her brother has heard her say, "Stop!" and "No!" He thought he even heard her say his name.

Having a brother just one year older is invaluable for Dani's development, her teacher says. She has someone to practice language with, someone who will listen. "Even deaf infants will coo," Goldenberg said. "But if no one responds, they stop."

• • •

William says Dani frightened him at first. "She did weird things." But he always wanted someone to play with. He doesn't care that she can't ride bikes with him or play Monopoly. "I drive her around in my Jeep and she honks the horn," he says. "She's learning to match up cards and stuff."

He couldn't believe she had never walked a dog or licked an ice cream cone. He taught her how to play peek-a-boo, helped her squish Play-Doh through her fingers. He showed her it was safe to walk on sand and fun to blow bubbles and okay to cry; when you hurt, someone comes. He taught her how to open a present. How to pick up tater tots and dunk them into a mountain of ketchup.

William was used to living like an only child, but since Dani has moved in, she gets most of their parents' attention. "She needs them more than me," he says simply.

He gave her his old toys, his "kid movies," his board books. He even moved out of his bedroom so she could sleep upstairs. His parents painted his old walls pink and filled the closet with cotton-candy dresses.

They moved a daybed into the laundry room for William, squeezed it between the washing machine and Dani's rocking horse. Each night, the 10-year-old boy cuddles up with a walkie-talkie because "it's scary down here, all alone."

After a few minutes, while his parents are trying to get Dani to bed, William always sneaks into the living room and folds himself into the love seat.

He trades his walkie-talkie for a small stuffed Dalmatian and calls down the hall, "Good night, Mom and Dad. Good night, Dani."

Some day, he's sure, she will answer.

• • •

Even now, Dani won't sleep in a bed.

Bernie bought her a new trundle so she can slide out the bottom bunk and be at floor level. Diane found pink Hello Kitty sheets and a stuffed glow worm so Dani will never again be alone in the dark.

"You got your wormie? You ready to go to sleep?" Bernie asks, bending to pick up his daughter. She's turning slow circles beneath the window, holding her worm by his tail. Bernie lifts her to the glass and shows her the sun, slipping behind the neighbor's house.

He hopes, one day, she might be able to call him "Daddy," to get married or at least live on her own. But if that doesn't happen, he says, "That's okay too. For me, it's all about getting the kisses and the hugs."

For now, Bernie and Diane are content to give Dani what she never had before: comfort and stability, attention and affection. A trundle, a glow worm.

Now Bernie tips Dani into bed, smooths her golden hair across the pillow. "Night-night," he says, kissing her forehead.

"Good night, honey," Diane calls from the doorway.

Bernie lowers the shade. As he walks past Dani, she reaches out and grabs his ankles.

Part Three: The Mother

She's out there somewhere, looming over Danielle's story like a ghost. To Bernie and Diane, Danielle's birth mother is a cipher, almost never spoken of. The less said, the better. As far as they are concerned Danielle was born the day they found her. And yet this unimaginable woman is out there somewhere, most likely still on probation, permanently unburdened of her daughter, and thinking — what? What can she possibly say? Nothing. Not a thing. But none of this makes any sense without her.

Michelle Crockett lives in a mobile home in Plant City with her two 20-something sons, three cats and a closet full of kittens. The trailer is just down the road from the little house where she lived with Danielle.

On a steamy afternoon a few weeks ago, Michelle opens the door wearing a long T-shirt. When she sees two strangers, she ducks inside and pulls on a housecoat. She's tall and stout, with broad shoulders and the sallow skin of a smoker. She looks tired, older than her 51 years.

"My daughter?" she asks. "You want to talk about my daughter?" Her voice catches. Tears pool in her glasses.

The inside of the trailer is modest but clean: dishes drying on the counter, silk flowers on the table. Sitting in her kitchen, chain-smoking 305s, she starts at the end: the day the detective took Danielle.

"Part of me died that day," she says.

• • •

Michelle says she was a student at the University of Tampa when she met a man named Bernie at a bar. It was 1976. He was a Vietnam vet, 10 years her senior. They got married and moved to Las Vegas, where he drove a taxi.

Right away they had two sons, Bernard and Grant. The younger boy wasn't potty-trained until he was 4, didn't talk until he was 5. "He was sort of slow," Michelle says. In school, they put him in special ed.

Her sons were teenagers when her husband got sick. Agent Orange, the doctors said. When he died in August 1997, Michelle filed for bankruptcy.

Six months later, she met a man in a casino. He was in Vegas on business. She went back to his hotel room with him.

"His name was Ron," she says. She shakes her head. "No, it was Bob. I think it was Bob."

• • •

For hours Michelle Crockett spins out her story, tapping ashes into a plastic ashtray. Everything she says sounds like a plea, but for what? Understanding? Sympathy? She doesn't apologize. Far from it. She feels wronged.

Danielle, she says, was born in a hospital in Las Vegas, a healthy baby who weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces. Her Apgar score measuring her health was a 9, nearly perfect.

"She screamed a lot," Michelle says. "I just thought she was spoiled."

When Danielle was 18 months old, Michelle's mobile home burned down, so she loaded her two sons and baby daughter onto a Greyhound bus and headed to Florida, to bunk with a cousin.

They lost their suitcases along the way, she says. The cousin couldn't take the kids. After a week, Michelle moved into a Brandon apartment with no furniture, no clothes, no dishes. She got hired as a cashier at Publix. But it was okay: “The boys were with her,” she says. She says she has the paperwork to prove it.

• • •

She goes to the boys’ bathroom, returns with a box full of documents and hands it over.

The earliest documents are from Feb. 11, 2002. That was when someone called the child abuse hotline on her. The caller reported that a child, about 3, was “left unattended for days with a retarded older brother, never seen wearing anything but a diaper.”

This is Michelle’s proof that her sons were watching Danielle.

The caller continued:

“The home is filthy. There are clothes everywhere. There are feces on the child’s seat and the counter is covered with trash.”

It’s not clear what investigators found at the house, but they left Danielle with her mother that day.

Nine months later, another call to authorities. A person who knew Michelle from the Moose Lodge said she was always there playing bingo with her new boyfriend, leaving her children alone overnight.

“Not fit to be a mother,” the caller said.

The hotline operator took these notes: The 4-year-old girl “is still wearing a diaper and drinking from a baby bottle. On-going situation, worse since last August. Mom leaves Grant and Danielle at home for several days in a row while she goes to work and spends the night with a new paramour. Danielle . . . is never seen outside the home.”

Again the child abuse investigators went out. They offered Michelle free day care for Danielle. She refused. And they left Danielle there.

Why? Didn’t they worry about two separate calls to the hotline, months apart, citing the same concerns?

“It’s not automatic that because the home is dirty we’d remove the child,” said Nick Cox, regional director of the Florida Department of Children and Families. “And what they found in 2002 was not like the scene they walked into in 2005.”

The aim, he said, is to keep the child with the parent, and try to help the parent get whatever services he or she might need. But Michelle refused help. And investigators might have felt they didn’t have enough evidence to take Danielle, Cox said.

“I’m concerned, though, that no effort was made to interview the child,” he said.

“If you have a 4-year-old who is unable to speak, that would raise a red flag to me. “I’m not going to tell you this was okay. I don’t know how it could have happened.”

• • •

Michelle insists Danielle was fine.

“I tried to potty-train her, she wouldn’t train. I tried to get her into schools, no one would take her,” she says in the kitchen of her trailer. The only thing she ever noticed was wrong, she says, “was that she didn’t speak much. She talked in a soft tone. She’d say, ‘Let’s go eat.’ But no one could hear her except me.”

She says she took Danielle to the library and the park. “I took her out for pizza. Once.” But she can’t remember which library, which park or where they went for pizza.

“She liked this song I’d sing her,” Michelle says. “Miss Polly had a dolly, she was sick, sick, sick . . .”

Michelle’s older son, Bernard, told a judge that he once asked his mom why she never took Danielle to the doctor. Something’s wrong with her, he remembered telling her. He said she answered, “If they see her, they might take her away.”

• • •

A few months after the second abuse call, Michelle and her kids moved in with her boyfriend in the rundown rental house in Plant City. The day the cops came, Michelle says, she didn’t know what was wrong.

The detective found Danielle in the back, sleeping. The only window in the small space was broken. Michelle had tacked a blanket across the shattered glass, but flies and beetles and roaches had crept in anyway.

“My house was a mess,” she says. “I’d been sick and it got away from me. But I never knew a dirty house was against the law.”

The cop walked past her, carrying Danielle.

“He said she was starving. I told him me and my sisters were all skinny till we were 13.

“I begged him, ‘Please, don’t take my baby! Please!’ ”

She says she put socks on her daughter before he took her to the car, but couldn’t find any shoes.

• • •

A judge ordered Michelle to have a psychological evaluation. That’s among the documents, too.

Danielle’s IQ, the report says, is below 50, indicating “severe mental retardation.” Michelle’s is 77, “borderline range of intellectual ability.”

“She tended to blame her difficulties on circumstances while rationalizing her own actions,” wrote psychologist Richard Enrico Spana. She “is more concerned with herself than most other adults, and this could lead her to neglect paying adequate attention to people around her.”

She wanted to fight for her daughter, she says, but didn’t want to go to jail and didn’t have enough money for a lawyer.

“I tried to get people to help me,” Michelle says. “They say I made her autistic. But how do you make a kid autistic? They say I didn’t put clothes on her — but she just tore them off.”

After Danielle was taken away, Michelle says, she tripped over a box at Wal-Mart and got in a car accident and couldn’t work anymore. In February, she went back to court and a judge waived her community service hours.

She’s on probation until 2012.

She spends her days with her sons, doing crossword puzzles and watching movies. Sometimes they talk about Danielle.

• • •

When Danielle was in the hospital, Michelle says, she and her sons sneaked in to see her. Michelle took a picture from the file: Danielle, drowning in a hospital gown, slumped in a bed that folded into a wheelchair.

“That’s the last picture I have of her,” Michelle says. In her kitchen, she snubs out her cigarette. She crosses to the living room, where Danielle’s image looks down from the wall.

She reaches up and, with her finger, traces her daughter’s face. “When I moved here,” she says, “that was the first thing I hung.”

She says she misses Danielle.

“Have you seen her?” Michelle asks. “Is she okay?”

• • •

Is she okay?

Danielle is better than anyone dared hope. She has learned to look at people and let herself be held. She can chew ham. She can swim. She’s tall and blond and has a little belly. She knows her name is Dani.

In her new room, she has a window she can look out of. When she wants to see outside, all she has to do is raise her arms and her dad is right behind her, waiting to pick her up.

Help a child

• If you think a child is being neglected or abused, call the anonymous toll-free hotline:
1-800-962-2873.

• If you need help taking care of your child, call the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay: (813) 234-1234.

• For information on adoption in Hillsborough County: (813) 229-2884; www.HeartGallery
TampaBay.org.

• In Pinellas/Pasco: (727) 456-0637; www.HeartGalleryKids.org.

• If you can't adopt, but want to help foster children in Pinellas or Pasco: (727) 824-0863; www.projectpatchwork.org.

• In Hillsborough: (813) 651-3150; sylviathomascenter.org.

About this story

St. Petersburg Times reporter Lane DeGregory and Times photographer Melissa Lyttle met Danielle and her new family at their home in February. All of the scenes at their house and in speech therapy were witnessed by the journalists.

The opening scene and others were reconstructed from interviews with neighbors, the detective, Danielle's care manager, psychologist, teacher, legal guardian and the judge on her case. Additional information came from hundreds of pages of police reports, medical records and court documents.

Michelle Crockett was interviewed at home in Plant City.

In June, Danielle's new parents sold their Florida home and moved out of state. Bernie built Dani a treehouse. Last week, she began summer school.

Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

Lane DeGregory can be reached at (727) 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com.

Most targets of trooper's snooping identified

2009-02-07T19:34:00.001-05:00

Written by Brad Schrade, The Tennessean

The identities of most of the 182 people whose backgrounds were improperly checked by an ousted state patrol officer were revealed Friday night by the Tennessee Department of Safety.

The list released to The Tennessean contained the names and counties of residence of 154 people who Lt. Ronnie Shirley ran through a state criminal justice computer database.

The release came five months after Safety Commissioner Dave Mitchell fired Shirley amid mounting pressure on Gov. Phil Bredesen's administration to do something about the trooper. The department had resisted releasing the names since the scandal broke in August, citing a criminal investigation.

Shirley is the politically connected officer who helped fix a speeding ticket in 2004 for Bredesen's then-right hand aide, Deputy Gov. Dave Cooley. The patrol leadership at the time concocted a fake punishment for Shirley to throw off the press and public.

Mitchell was not available for comment Friday night, but in a letter attached to the list he said any suggestion that Shirley would get a break is wrong. It's been widely speculated within the patrol that Shirley will get his job back.

"I terminated Shirley based upon the facts provided to me from this investigation," Mitchell's letter said. "His violation of the public trust is unacceptable for a Tennessee State Trooper. As long as I am the Commissioner of Safety, I have no intention of rehiring Ronnie Shirley."

Davidson County District Attorney Torry Johnson cleared Shirley of any criminal wrongdoing earlier this week. That set up the release of the list Friday.

The list released by the department withheld 28 identities, citing federal driver's license protection laws that made the information privileged.

It was heavy with the names of women whose information Shirley checked through a state criminal justice computer database. Most of the checks appear to have been of driver's license information, which includes photos, addresses and other personal information. Many of the women appeared to be from Middle Tennessee. Names on the list included an entertainer, a THP lieutenant and his wife, and two journalists.

Bredesen press secretary Lydia Lenker did not respond before deadline Friday night to an e-mail request seeking an interview with the governor.

The Shirley scandal was the most recent to rock the highway patrol, which has been a consistent source of public embarrassment during Bredesen's time in office. His appointed patrol leadership stepped down in 2005 amid a series of scandals, including allegations of political favoritism and campaign contributions preceding promotions within the patrol, a longstanding agency practice.

Hearing set for Shirley

Bredesen vowed then to clean up the department, but a subsequent series of scandals have raised questions about whether much has changed.

Mitchell's letter said Shirley has no political pull in the department.

"Shirley was treated like any other employee who violated departmental policies," the letter said. Shirley has a final civil service appeal hearing scheduled for late March. An administrative law judge will determine whether he gets his job back.

The Tennessean decided not to publicize the list for now until it could further contact some of the individuals on the list who were victims of the unauthorized searches.

Brad Schrade can be reached at 615-259-8086 or bschrade@tennessean.com.

Lt. Ronnie Shirley

Most targets of trooper's snooping identified

Fox 44 - Burlington and Plattsburgh News, Weather and Sports - Fox44.net | NH DHHS warns of potential scam

2009-02-04T13:57:00.001-05:00

Associated Press - February 2, 2009 9:25 AM ET

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services is warning recipients of state aid of a potential scam targeting their benefits.

The warning goes out after officials in Wisconsin were made aware of an alleged scam in their state. Officials say residents there received calls requesting the card number and PIN to access their cash and food stamp benefits. Authorities believe the callers were posing as state employees.

DHHS Commission Nick Toumpas says they have not had any similar cases reported in New Hampshire but are advising aid recipients not to give out information about their Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, card over the phone.

DHHS say the department does not call to request this kind of information from clients.

Anyone who has received a request for account information over the phone are asked to call the Department of Health and Human Services.

Child Left In Freezing Car While Dad Visits Teen Girl

2008-12-29T20:32:00.001-05:00

GREAT FALLS, Mont. -- A 22-year-old Montana man
has been arrested after his 4-year-old daughter was left in a car for
hours in below-zero temperatures.Jeramey Sheeler, of Vaughn,
Mont., faces a charge of criminal endangerment. Great Falls Police Lt.
Jack Allen says Sheeler left his sleeping daughter in a Jeep parked on
the street early Saturday while he went inside a house to visit a
13-year-old girl.When the 4-year-old woke up, she got out of the
vehicle and starting going house-to-house, knocking on doors at 2 a.m.
Someone let her in and then called police. The temperature outside at
the time was about 14 degrees below zero, according to the Great Falls
Police Department.Police found Sheeler at the house next door.
The girl who lived there told police that she and Sheeler were in bed
together, but nothing sexual happened. Police believe Sheeler left his
daughter in the unheated car for about two hours.Police officers
said they also found a pipe with marijuana residue on the center
console of Sheeler's Jeep. Sheeler is charged with misdemeanor
possession of drug paraphernalia as a result.Officers say the
4-year-old girl is OK and was released to her mother. Sheeler was
ordered not to have contact with his daughter, if he makes the $30,000
bond.

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/print/18343116/detail.html

Why Parents Who Batter Win Custody

2008-12-28T21:37:00.001-05:00

Stop Family Violence - get help, get informed, get involved

www.stopfamilyviolence.org/349
by Sarah Childress

Published on September 25, 2006 by Newsweek
Why Parents Who Batter Win Custody
by Sarah Childress

It took
six years for Genia Shockome to gather the courage to leave her
husband, Tim. He pushed her, kicked her and insulted her almost from
the moment they married in 1994, she says. She tried to start over with
their children when the family moved from Texas to Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
It didn't last long. Tim called her constantly at work and, after they
split up, pounded on her door and screamed obscenities, she alleged in
a complaint filed in 2001. Tim was charged with harassment. As part of
a plea deal, Tim agreed to a stay-away order—but denies ever abusing
her or the children. In custody hearings over the past six years, Tim
has insisted that he's been a good father, and argued that Genia's
allegations poisoned their children against him. The judge sided with
Tim. This summer he was granted full custody of the kids, now 11 and 9.
Genia was barred from contacting them.

Genia is
one of many parents nationwide who have lost custody due to a
controversial concept known as parental alienation. Under the theory,
children fear or reject one parent because they have been corrupted or
coached to lie by the other. Parental alienation is now the leading
defense for parents accused of abuse in custody cases, according to
domestic-violence advocates. And it's working. The few current studies
done on the subject consider only small samples. But according to one
2004 survey in Massachusetts by Harvard's Jay Silverman, 54 percent of
custody cases involving documented spousal abuse were decided in favor
of the alleged batterers. Parental alienation was used as an argument
in nearly every case.

This
year the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges denounced
the theory as "junk science," and at least four states have passed
legislation to curtail its use in custody cases involving allegations
of domestic violence. "It's really been a cancer in the family courts,"
says Richard Ducote, an attorney in Pittsburgh who has represented
abuse victims in custody cases for 22 years. "It's made it really
difficult for parents to protect their kids. If you ask for protection,
you're deemed a vindictive, alienating parent."

It may
seem hard to fathom how a judge could award custody to a parent accused
of abuse. But battered spouses often don't file criminal charges—so no
judicial finding is made against their mates—and family-court judges
typically aren't trained to referee the complexities of abusive
relationships. (Although men are sometimes battered by their wives,
women are the victims in the majority of abuse cases.) Judges often
throw out documented evidence of spousal abuse, arguing that it is
irrelevant in a custody case. And experts say that family-court judges
often look favorably on the alleged abuser because he seems more
willing to share custody than the accuser—who is hellbent on keeping
the father away from the child. According to a survey by Geraldine
Stahly, a psychology professor at California State University at San
Bernardino, attorneys will caution battered spouses against reporting
abuse in court so they don't lose their children. (Stahly and other
academics say the parental-alienation argument has more legitimacy in
custody disputes that don't involve charges of abuse.)

Parental-alienation
syndrome was first introduced by child psychiatrist Richard Gardner in
the 1980s. Fathers-rights groups picked up on the idea and began trying
it out in court. These groups condemn abusers. But Dan Hogan, executive
director of Fathers & Families, a nonprofit group that advocates
for joint custody, argues that all too often the accusers lie in order
to win custody of their kids.

There's
a small but growing movement to ban parental alienation in custody
cases, sparked by embattled parents bonding online. They've linked with
lawyers and advocates for battered spouses across the country. At least
four states, including California, have laws protecting parents who
make good-faith abuse allegations. Others may soon follow their lead.
Greg Jacob, an attorney who takes cases for abused parents pro bono, is
drafting legislation to shop to Virginia and Maryland next month.
Meanwhile, parents like Genia keep fighting. "It's so hard, having my
children lost," she says, her voice breaking. "This was my life—my
children."

http://www.stopfamilyviolence.org/ocean/host.php?folder=12&page=349&T=#

To better understand, they walk in their shoes

2008-11-25T13:27:00.001-05:00

Students 'experience' desperation, indignities of being
destitute

By Taryn Plumb, Globe Correspondent | November 23, 2008

This is a month in the life.

First week: Felicia Fuentes, 30-year-old mom to two teenagers, slogs through welfare paperwork. At school, her kids are forced to sit on the floor and watch as classmates are hauled out for drug possession.

Second week: Mom returns to the welfare office. Kids can't get to class; no money for transportation. They haven't eaten, either.

Third week: Teens steal a camera and a stereo system. Mom pawns a chest for $50.

Fourth week: Still no welfare. House foreclosed. Mom and kids out on the street.

"It's incredibly frustrating," said 22-year-old Amanda Szymczuk, donning Fuentes's identity and heavy load during a recent poverty simulation at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. "The situation my family has been left in is so hopeless."

They came in Abercrombie & Fitch jeans and wildcat-emblazoned sweat shirts, mostly white, mostly kids from middle-class or upper middle-class families planning to go on to careers in social service jobs.

But for 80 minutes, they put on more tattered personas; they struggled. They felt frustration and hopelessness, and became exasperated with bureaucracy.

This was the life of poverty, as portrayed in an annual simulation hosted by UNH's departments of family studies and social work.

"Poverty is not a game for the millions of Americans who live it every day," said facilitator Elizabeth Dolan, associate professor of family studies. "Just think how it would feel if you did this all the time."

There's evidence that more people are.

The number of New Hampshire families receiving food stamps jumped from 29,315 in September 2007 to 32,662 this past September, according to Terry Smith, director for the division of family assistance at the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.

Over the same period, the number of those on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families rose from 4,927 to 5,074.

Smith explained that when the economy goes sour, it takes food stamp statistics a couple of years to reflect a change. "We've only begun to see this thing," he said.

Lives moved quickly in the UNH exercise; the simulation lasted for an 80-minute "month" split into 20-minute "weeks." A ringing bell signaled the end of each week; the group of 80 to 90 students then cycled back to their "houses," separated into quadrangles or triangles of seats, marked ironically with "Home Sweet Home."

Lined along the walls were all the services the families would require: a bank, a school, a grocery store, a childcare center, an employment office, a pawn shop, welfare, a police department, a work site, a utility office, and a mortgage and rent collector.

The students, mostly juniors and seniors, were given names and some played the roles of moms, teenagers, and toddlers; a few were even senior citizens. Most families had monthly bills between $1,000 and $1,200 - creating a wide gap between their average monthly incomes of about $500 to $700, gained from Social Security, welfare, and minimum-wage jobs.

One elderly pair received a $767 Social Security check - 10 percent of which went straight to the check-cashing office. To get by, they "winged" a day-care business for their neighbors, stole $100 from their landlord, and sold bus passes for twice their face value.

"You're just overwhelmed by how alone you feel," said Nicollette Thomson, a 26-year-old from Kingston who took on the identity of a 72-year-old woman with diabetes. "It's an intense feeling when you don't have enough money."

Elsewhere, the jail was half full, mostly with teenagers; the pawn shop line was a dozen deep; the classrooms lacked seats.

"Our school is awful," said 15-year-old Francisca Fuentes - portrayed by 20-year-old Katie Cameron of Bedford, N.H. She explained that there aren't any field trips, there's no nurse, and students have to pay for all of their supplies.

At that very moment, another 15-year-old (actually 22-year-old Kacie Farrell of Hooksett, who aspires to be a children's speech therapist) was suddenly hauled out of class by a female police officer for drug possession.

"I'd be quite embarrassed, probably ashamed," the petite brunette said when asked how she'd feel if something like this really happened.

As she sat down at the "jail," she looked around the swarm. "I wonder where my mother is now?"

Unluckily for her, mom didn't end up bailing her out for two weeks; she was overwhelmed with trying to obtain food stamps and bus passes and applying for jobs.

"It's hectic, crazy," said 20-year-old Shikara Thody, from Woodstock, Vt., who was clasping a food stamp card, $2 in cash, five bus passes, an ID, and social security cards.

Nearby, at the welfare office, paperwork was piling up. Six two-sided forms for Szymczuk, the welfare mother who spent an hour - or three weeks - filling them out and waiting in line to meet with a case worker.

This was her story: deserter husband who left heavy debts and $10 in cash, three-room house before foreclosure, and two teenage kids, including a ninth-grade dropout. Budget: $800 for rent, $295 for utilities, $440 for food. Income: $0.

Despite her situation, the social services people were "so unsupportive, so unenthused," she said.

Pawn shop clerks even made her play rock-paper-scissors with another hard-up mom to determine whose chest of drawers they would buy.

But they had to be that way; otherwise, it wouldn't be realistic, noted those who took on the public assistance roles.

Justine Shea, for one, described her welfare office receptionist character as "trying to be helpful, but she isn't that bright."

A worker at the nonprofit Rockingham Community Action, Shea has seen enough families go through the merry-go-round. "It's a nightmare," she said, shaking her head, as she sat at a long table stacked with a rainbow of forms. "A total nightmare."

Szymczuk had always heard as much; but until now, she'd never really understood.

"It's very clear how difficult it is to just get started," she said, a pile of paperwork threatening to overflow her lap.

"I don't know what to do with the kids; we owe everybody money. I have to figure it all out."

But after 80 minutes, resolved or not, it was over.

The family scenarios got packed back into boxes for next year, the food stamp cards and IDs thrown out, the social services disbanded.

The students, back in their own lives, filed out to warm residence halls and cars, a bit more sympathetic, a bit more humble.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/11/23/to_better_understand_they_walk_in_their_shoes?mode=PF

FBI AGENT KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY

2008-11-19T17:32:00.001-05:00

FBI AGENT KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY

Pittsburgh,
PA—Special Agent Samuel Hicks, assigned to the Pittsburgh FBI Office,
was fatally shot today while executing a federal search warrant
associated with a drug distribution ring. One suspect is in custody and
an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the shooting is
being conducted.

Special Agent Hicks, 33, joined the
FBI in March 2007 and reported to the Pittsburgh Office in August 2007.
He was a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh. Special Agent Hicks
is a former police officer with the Baltimore Police Department and
also worked as a teacher. He is survived by his wife and three-year-old
son.

“This is a real tragedy with the loss of such a talented agent who made
the ultimate sacrifice for his country when putting on a badge and
accepting the responsibility for protecting our nation,” said Special
Agent in Charge Michael A. Rodriguez. “The FBI family mourns alongside
Agent Hicks’ family. We ask that the media and the public respect the
family's privacy during this very difficult time.”

"The loss of Sam Hicks is a tragedy," said FBI Director Robert S.
Mueller, III. "Our hearts and prayers go out to Sam's family and the
members of the Pittsburgh Field Office."

He looks so young. May his family find comfort and peace through this ordeal.

Thank you, S.A. Hicks for your service.

Search for anti-police blogger costs $88,000

2008-11-16T14:13:00.001-05:00

Unsuccessful efforts to uncover the identity of Internet bloggers
critical of the Memphis Police Department and its top officers will
cost the city $88,000.

The city filed suit in state court in an attempt to identify the
people behind a Web site called MPD Enforcer 2.0, but the lawsuit was
eventually dropped.

The legal bill for that suit has arrived, and The Commercial Appeal
reports it totals about $88,000. The city's legal department declined
giving a breakdown on the legal expenses, and the police department had
no comment.

When the suit was filed earlier this year, authorities said they
were upset because a picture of an undercover officer was posted on the
site. It was later determined, however, that the officer's picture was
also on the police department Web site.

http://www.wbir.com/print.aspx?storyid=69127

School social worker accused of fraud

2008-11-16T02:32:00.001-05:00

http://www.dailygazette.com/
See HTML Version of article

Falsified resume, credentials alleged

By Kathy Bowen

School social worker accused of fraud

Maria Geizer

BURNT HILLS & BALLSTON LAKE — A Saratoga Springs woman has been charged with altering and using her husband’s credentials to retain a job as a school social worker, according to the state attorney general’s office.

Maria Geizer, 38, of Grand Avenue, worked in the Burnt Hills-Ballston Lake School District from 1999 to 2007 through a contract with Community Human Services of Glenville, according to district spokeswoman Christy Multer.

“Although she worked in our schools, she was not a district employee,” Multer said.

John Irving, executive director of Community Human Services, said Geizer’s alleged deception was discovered when a check of her information revealed the identifying numbers actually belonged to her husband.

“I called her into my office and questioned her about it, and she requested the day off to supposedly go to Albany to straighten the matter out,” he said about her resignation last year. “That was on a Friday and on Monday she turned in her letter of resignation.”

He would not say how much Geizer was paid when she worked for the nonprofit organization.

“That’s confidential information,” he said.

Multer said she did not know how many students Geizer might have been in contact with during her tenure at the district.

“Our social workers have some students they see on a regular basis and some who only have one or two meetings following a death in the family or some other unusual event,” she said.

Geizer was employed as a social worker at the Charlton Heights Elementary School from 1999 to 2003 and at the Richard O’Rourke Middle School from 2003 to 2007.

Multer said she didn’t know the circumstances under which Geizer had left employment at the school in 2007.

“She’s been gone for over a year,” she said.

According to the attorney general’s office, Geizer applied for employment in 1999 as a social worker and falsely claimed on her employment application and resume that she held a master’s degree in psychology — a requirement to be a social worker.

Prosecutors said she also falsely claimed that she was licensed by the state Education Department — a requirement to bill Medicaid for counseling services.

Her alleged actions were caught during a random fraudulent-billing audit by the state Office of the Medicaid Inspector General when Community Human Services and the school district requested copies of Geizer’s master’s degree and professional license.

She allegedly altered her husband’s master’s degree certificate and his state Education Department license to provide mental health counseling by removing his name and inserting her own name and presented them.

Her husband is not charged, and a call to the attorney general's office for further information was not returned.

Geizer was arraigned in Glenville Town Court on felony charges of unauthorized practice, grand larceny and criminal possession of a forged instrument. She was released after arraignment and is expected to appear in Schenectady County Court at a later date.

The case is being prosecuted by an assistant attorney general. “Those who work in our educational system must meet the required criteria that the law has put in place,” said Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. “We trust educators and other school personnel to be qualified and trained in order to properly interact with our children. Any breach of that trust not only violates New York state law, it may deprive our children of the care and quality services to which they are entitled.”

Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died

2008-11-03T18:06:00.001-05:00

updated 5:46 p.m. EST, Mon November 3, 2008

BREAKING NEWS

updated 20 minutes ago

Obama's grandmother dies hours before election

Barack Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died following a bout with
cancer, Obama and his sister said today. She was 86. Obama, who spoke
about his grandmother often on the stump, left the campaign trail for
two days in late October to visit Dunham in Hawaii. developing story

http://www.cnn.com/

Your VOICE matters! Don't forget to VOTE!

2008-11-03T16:06:00.001-05:00

Your VOICE matters!
Don't forget to VOTE!

Meet Tyler
Oakley–the winner of HRC's 'Come Out and Vote'
video contest!

Tomorrow's the big day. Help make 2008 the Year to Win by
casting your vote for fair-minded
candidates!

Polls in
Tennessee must close by 7:00 p.m., but exact hours vary by area.

To confirm
your voter registration and find your polling place, please click
here.

Spend election night with
HRC! Get all the latest news on HRC-endorsed races,
ballot initiatives and, of course, a behind the scenes look at
the campaigns at www.hrc.org/yeartowin!

See the FBI can help us, REPORT FRAUD & Corruption

2008-10-22T07:17:00.001-04:00

FBI — Tennessee Waltz - Press Room - Headline Archives 05-02-08
Bribery. Bagmen. Crooked politicians. Ethical lapses.

All ugly terms that were part of an FBI public corruption case that began nearly six years ago and recently came to a successful close.

Last month, the undercover sting known as "Tennessee Waltz" (coincidentally, also the official state song), ended where it started: a contractor working in Shelby County Juvenile Court Clerk's Office was sentenced for his role in a corrupt invoice scam, accepting money for work never performed.

He was the 12th and final subject brought to justice in the case.

Tennessee Waltz was a landmark investigation: it not only led to the convictions or guilty pleas of a dozen state and local public officials—including several state senators, a state representative, two county commissioners, and two school board members—but also to new state ethics laws and the creation of an independent ethics commission in Tennessee.

It began in May 2002, when our Memphis office opened an investigation into reports of fraud and corruption in the Juvenile Court Clerk’s Office. One of the individuals we questioned—a well-known lobbyist who was consulting for that office— admitted to wrongdoing and agreed to cooperate and wear a wire to record conversations with suspects.

It wasn't long before our lobbyist was approached by an employee in the office who claimed to be a close acquaintance of several state legislators. The employee advised the lobbyist that he was a "bagman" for these politicians—and that, in exchange for money, these lawmakers would vote on legislation that would benefit the lobbyist's clients.

So our corruption investigation expanded—from local government to the state legislature. In the fall of 2003, we launched an undercover operation to address what appeared to be a widespread public corruption problem.

This man was one of 12 individuals who was convicted or pled guilty in the case.
One of the 12 subjects in the case

As part of the operation, we set up a fictitious company that recycled surplus electronic equipment to third world countries. We let it be known that we wanted legislation that would benefit our company, and we wanted exclusive contracts with local governments. Our undercover agents offered bribes to individuals who—based on information we had—we believed would take them...and they did. And then they told their colleagues, who in some instances took bribes as well.

Some of the corrupt politicians even introduced legislation that we drafted (but no legislation was ever passed). All told, we paid out more than $150,000 in bribe money by the time the undercover portion of Tennessee Waltz ended in 2005.

The case, worked with the help of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, is one of our most successful examples to date of how we use lawful sensitive techniques like undercover operations to investigate allegations of systemic corruption.

For the FBI, public corruption continues to be our top criminal priority. Right now, we have more than 2,500 pending cases—an increase of 50 percent from 2003. And during the past two years alone, our work with our partners has led to the conviction of more than 1,800 government officials.

Read more about our efforts to combat public corruption at all levels of government.

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Grandparent Scam hits all over US

2008-10-21T21:51:00.001-04:00

kare11.com | Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN | 'Grandparent Scam' takes Minnesotans for thousands
'Grandparent Scam' takes Minnesotans for thousands
Bea Chang 1 hr ago

It's called the 'Grandparents Scam.' Con artists pose as a grandchild in distress and in need of money. In two cases alone Minnesota grandparents were conned out of nearly 20-thousand dollars. "I talk to him on the phone and he couldn't even talk to me he's just sick to his stomach," said Tony Jarousek of Saint Cloud of his grandfather who's too humiliated to talk with us about it, Tony talks on behalf of him. "He's very embarrassed about it, he's sick to his stomach, he just wants to put in the past and move on," he explained. The sickness stems from a number of coincidences which built up to the perfect scam. Two weeks ago Tony went on a Canadian vacation with his co-workers to Niagara Falls. "I used my credit card once, the rest was cash," Jarousek said. Cautious about scams himself, he was careful on the trip, but out of his control was a phone call made to his grandfather. "The caller basically convinced my grandpa it was me and said that I was in trouble. I was in a car accident on the Canadian side, my insurance didn't cover me on that side and I needed money fast so I could catch this bus," he explained. It all seemed plausible, his grandfather knew about Tony's trip to Canada, which is where the con man told his grandfather to wire a check. He did, they called back, and asked him to wire more money. "It was another four thousand some dollars, totaling another nine-thousand so he went back did it again thinking he was helping me out," said Jarousek. Knowing that his grandparents are out thousands, Tony started to do his own research and found the 'grandparents scam' all over the internet. It typically starts with a phone call, the scam artist says hi grandma or grandpa, do you know who this is? The grandparents guess the name and with that the scam is underway. "He recently got a settlement check from his insurance company and was planning to get his roof replaced," Jarousek said his grandfather really didn't even have the money, but sent what there was and now it's the grandson who looks to help his grandfather. "Any ideas as far as some sort of fundraiser of donation, I'm up for ideas." Several cases like this have been reported over the past couple weeks in Minnesota. At least two have happened in Hopkins, one for $10,000.
By Jeffrey DeMars, KARE 11 News

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Some good sites for CPS Info

2008-10-17T17:24:00.001-04:00

Here are some good sites to get information and support.

http://legallykidnapped.blogspot.com/

http://disgustedwiththesystem.blogspot.com/

http://www.fightcps.com/

http://kidjacked.com/

Teen set chlorine bombs near sleeping family, police say - CNN.com

2008-10-08T08:41:00.001-04:00

Teen set chlorine bombs near sleeping family, police say - CNN.com
PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) -- A suburban Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, teenager tried to kill his sleeping family by placing homemade chlorine bombs while they slept, police said.

Christopher Janney, 16, of South Fayette, Pennsylvania, was charged with attempted homicide for leaving what police described as "chlorine compression bombs" near the heads of five family members while they were asleep. Janney is being charged as an adult.

Police said the six devices were made of clear bottles with white powder that smelled of chlorine. The bottles did not explode and no one was injured.

Janney's mother, Bonnie, told CNN affiliate WPXI-TV that her son "has mental problems," but that she did not think he would do anything to hurt her. A person who answered the phone at the family's home told The Associated Press no one would comment.

The one-page complaint spelled out some details of what family members told police, but did not explain Janney's purported motive.

Linda Hippert, superintendent of South Fayette School District where Janney is a high school junior on the soccer team, called the incident shocking.

She described Janney as "just what I would call your regular everyday student, and by that I mean not a student who was in trouble," she said.

Police didn't explain specifically how the bombs were assembled or what kind of injuries they were capable of causing.

"It's an open investigation. We don't want to jeopardize what we're doing," South Fayette Police Chief Louis Volle said Tuesday. "We've got a lot of unanswered questions."

Sgt. Al Wessel of Allegheny County's bomb squad told CNN affiliate KDKA-TV that he did not believe such devices would kill, but said they could cause serious burns and possible blindness.

The criminal complaint also said that Janney had used a peppermill to grind up rat poison. It did not indicate whether he tried to use the rat poison on his family.

Police said they recovered a chemical gas mask, and text messages and e-mail from a computer and cell phone in Janney's home. He had asked at least one person how to mix chemicals and wrote, "I went through with my plan," the complaint said.

The teen was arrested Sunday, but Volle wouldn't say where or how. The complaint said Janney and an accomplice planned to leave town by bus.

Janney is charged with five counts each of attempted homicide and one count each of reckless endangerment and criminal conspiracy.

Janney remained in jail Tuesday afternoon and it wasn't clear if he had an attorney. He has a preliminary hearing scheduled for Wednesday in Pittsburgh at which he could either present a defense attorney or have one assigned to him by a judge.

To Save Bella From Further Abuse

2008-10-07T17:52:00.001-04:00

Target:

To Return Bella to her mother, Lisa Smith, where she belongs

Sponsored by:

friends, advocates and families

This
petition is in support of returning Bella Smith, to her mother, Lisa
Smith. Where she legally belongs. Children can not be stolen from their
homes with out trials and proof of real harm.
Bella was removed from
her home without probable cause or a warrant. There were no reports of
harm against the mother. Bella was taken by a Knox County Juvenile Case
Manager, Stacey Turpin. Ms. Turpin said she had a warrant and did not.
She removed the child out of anger. Once the child was removed, she was
given to an abusive, violent father, who had been out of Bella's life,
by his choice for more than a year. The father has committed several
violent acts against the mother and other women, this is all documented
in police records. The Juvenile Court has failed to provide the child
with a safe environment. She has not had proper, continued medical
attention or insurance. The father has testified in 3 Courts,
under oath, that he does not give the child medicines prescribed by her
Doctor. Yet, the Juvenile Court refuses to acknowledge this
medical neglect. The guardian ad litem, Joseph Della-Rodolfa, never met
or attempted to meet with Bella & Lisa. Yet he met with the father
several times, he recommended to the court, Bella stay with him, based
on absolutely nothing. GAL's are to ensure what's in the child's best
interest. Not there own or what is most convenient for them. He has
failed to protect Bella also, both physically and medically.
There
must be due process, fair and equal treatment, and protection of
Constitutional Rights, in children's cases. No one has attempted to
reunite Bella with her Mother.
It sends a negative message to
society and battered women, when the State chooses to prosecute women
for rightfully protecting their children.
This child has been to Dr.
and ER more than 42 in a year and a half, her bruises, marks, and
scratches have all been documented and photographed. The child her self
has stated several times, her "daddy whipped her butt, with the
switch". No one has done anything to protect this child, and they
have allowed the father to make continuous accusations and harass
Ms. Smith's family. There has not even been an attempt to re unite
Bella with her Mother.
We ask you, Judge Swann, the State of
TN, the prosecutor, Leland Price, who seeks to punish Ms.
Smith, to look at the facts and the law, to see the fraud that has been
committed and correct it. TN has had a long, negative history in The
Children's Services area, we ask that you not allow Bella to become
another statistic.
Do not continue with this case, allow Ms. Smith
to regain the rightful custody of Bella, and return her home, where she
can be safe and loved, and most important, where she wants to be.
Little girls need their Mothers.
Regards,

This
petition is in support of returning Bella Smith, to her mother, Lisa
Smith. Where she legally belongs. Children can not be stolen from their
homes with out trials and proof of real harm.
Bella was removed from
her home without probable cause or a warrant. There were no reports of
harm against the mother. Bella was taken by a Knox County Juvenile Case
Manager, Stacey Turpin. Ms. Turpin said she had a warrant and did not.
She removed the child out of anger. Once the child was removed, she was
given to an abusive, violent father, who had been out of Bella's life,
by his choice for more than a year. The father has committed several
violent acts against the mother and other women, this is all documented
in police records. The Juvenile Court has failed to provide the child
with a safe environment. She has not had proper, continued medical
attention or insurance. The father has testified in 3 Courts,
under oath, that he does not give the child medicines prescribed by her
Doctor. Yet, the Juvenile Court refuses to acknowledge this
medical neglect. The guardian ad litem, Joseph Della-Rodolfa, never met
or attempted to meet with Bella & Lisa. Yet he met with the father
several times, he recommended to the court, Bella stay with him, based
on absolutely nothing. GAL's are to ensure what's in the child's best
interest. Not there own or what is most convenient for them. He has
failed to protect Bella also, both physically and medically.
There
must be due process, fair and equal treatment, and protection of
Constitutional Rights, in children's cases. No one has attempted to
reunite Bella with her Mother.
It sends a negative message to
society and battered women, when the State chooses to prosecute women
for rightfully protecting their children.
This child has been to Dr.
and ER more than 42 in a year and a half, her bruises, marks, and
scratches have all been documented and photographed. The child her self
has stated several times, her "daddy whipped her butt, with the
switch". No one has done anything to protect this child, and they
have allowed the father to make continuous accusations and harass
Ms. Smith's family. There has not even been an attempt to re unite
Bella with her Mother.
We ask you, Judge Swann, the State of
TN, the prosecutor, Leland Price, who seeks to punish Ms.
Smith, to look at the facts and the law, to see the fraud that has been
committed and correct it. TN has had a long, negative history in The
Children's Services area, we ask that you not allow Bella to become
another statistic.
Do not continue with this case, allow Ms. Smith
to regain the rightful custody of Bella, and return her home, where she
can be safe and loved, and most important, where she wants to be.
Little girls need their Mothers.

Regards,

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/5/in-support-of-lisa-and-bella-smith-2

signature
goal: 2,000

1,527

signatures!

Anybody Find A Head?

2008-10-07T17:39:00.001-04:00

NORTH CANTON -- A mother checking in on her son Saturday night found him beheaded in his bathroom.

On Monday, investigators identified the victim as 34-year old Brett Smith.

His mother reported him missing Saturday to police.

Officers checked his home, found nothing out of the ordinary, and
that's when his mother, Judy, broke into his house and called 9-1-1.

Here is a transcript of the call:

Mother: "We just broke in and it looks like he's in the bathroom, but his head's missing."

Operator: "...but what?"

Mother: "His head isn't there. I know it sounds really weird."

Click on the link on the right to listen to the full 9-1-1 call.

Police say Smith's death is being investigated as a homicide, and so far there are no suspects.

Police would not release any other details.

Neighbors told Channel 3 News they are rattled.

"It took kind of most the day for it to sink in," said Barbara Nelson. "It was so heinous."

© 2008 WKYC-TV
http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=98042&catid=45

No cold medicines for kids under 4

2008-10-07T12:25:00.001-04:00

WASHINGTON - Children under 4 should not be given over-the-counter
cough and cold remedies, drug companies said Tuesday in a concession to pediatricians who doubt the drugs do much good and worry about risks.
The voluntary change in advice to parents comes less than a week after federal health officials
said they also saw little evidence that the drugs work. But government
officials were afraid that taking the medicines off store shelves might
prompt parents to give their children adult medicines.

The drug makers said they will also add a warning that parents
should not give antihistamines to children to make them sleepy. These
are allergy-relief medications often found in medicines that combine
several ingredients to treat a variety of symptoms.

The new measures "reflect industry's overall commitment to the
continued safe and appropriate use of children's oral OTC cough and
cold medicines," Linda Suydam, president of the Consumer Healthcare
Products Association, said in announcing the changes on behalf of the
companies.

"We are doing this voluntarily out of an abundance of caution," she
added. The new instructions will appear on products distributed for the
coming cold season. Last year, the companies pulled medicines for
babies and tots under 2 from the market.

Pediatricians, who have been calling for a ban on OTC cough and cold
remedies for children under 6, welcomed the industry's latest shift.

"It's a huge step forward," said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Baltimore's
health commissioner. "There is no evidence that these products work in
kids, and there is definitely evidence of serious side effects."

Problems with OTC cough and cold medicines send some 7,000 children
to hospital emergency rooms each year, with symptoms including hives,
drowsiness and unsteady walking. Many kids overdose by taking medicines
when their parents aren't looking.

Since a majority of the problems involve 2- to 3-year-olds, the
industry's new instructions, if followed by parents, should help.

"The 2- and 3-year-olds are definitely the highest risk," said
Sharfstein. "More than 50 percent of the problem is with these kids.
"If they don't have this stuff around the home, they're less likely to
grab it and ingest it."

Pediatricians still support recalling the medicines for children under 6, and the Food and Drug Administration is studying their effectiveness for children under 12. But federal health officials said at a public hearing last week that it could take them a year or more to make a final decision and order changes.

Leading cough and cold brands include Dimetapp, Pediacare,
Robitussin, Triaminic, Little Colds and versions of Tylenol that have
ingredients to treat cold symptoms. U.S. families spend at least $287
million a year on cold remedies for kids, according to Nielsen Co.
statistics that do not include Wal-Mart sales.

The industry also said it is expanding an educational campaign aimed
at getting parents to be more careful about giving their kids cough and
cold medicines.

Parents should never:

_Give adult medicines to a child.

_Give two or more medicines with the same ingredients at the same time.

_Give antihistamines to make a child sleepy.

Parents should:

_Give the exact recommended dose, using the measuring device that comes with the medicine.

_Keep OTC medicines out of sight and out of reach.

_Consult their doctor if they have any questions.

Colds usually clear up by themselves after a few days, and many doctors
say rest and drinking plenty of fluids are all that's needed.

___

On the Net:

Consumer Healthcare Products Association statement: http://tinyurl.com/4bzj2f

Introduction: THE U.S. LEGAL SYSTEM

2008-10-06T21:05:00.001-04:00

Every business day, courts throughout the United States render decisions that together affect many thousands of people.

Some affect only the parties to a particular legal action, but others
adjudicate rights, benefits, and legal principles that have an impact
on all Americans. Inevitably, many Americans may welcome a given ruling
while others -- sometimes many others -- disapprove. All, however,
accept the legitimacy of these decisions, and of the courts' role as
final interpreter of the law. There can be no more potent demonstration
of the trust that Americans place in the rule of law and their
confidence in the U.S. legal system.

The
pages that follow survey that system. Much of the discussion explains
how U.S. courts are organized and how they work. Courts are central to
the legal system, but they are not the entire system. Every day across
America, federal, state, and local courts interpret laws, adjudicate
disputes under laws, and at times even strike down laws as violating
the fundamental protections that the Constitution guarantees all
Americans. At the same time, millions of Americans transact their
day-to-day affairs without turning to the courts. They, too, rely upon
the legal system. The young couple purchasing their first home, two
businessmen entering into a contract, parents drawing up a will to
provide for their children -- all require the predictability and
enforceable common norms that the rule of law provides and the U.S.
legal system guarantees.

This
introduction seeks to familiarize readers with the basic structure and
vocabulary of American law. Subsequent chapters add detail, and afford
a sense of how the U.S. legal system has evolved to meet the needs of a
growing nation and its ever more complex economic and social realities.

A FEDERAL LEGAL SYSTEM:
Overview

The
American legal system has several layers, more possibly than in most
other nations. One reason is the division between federal and state
law. To understand this, it helps to recall that the United States was
founded not as one nation, but as a union of 13 colonies, each claiming
independence from the British Crown. The Declaration of Independence
(1776) thus spoke of "the good People of these Colonies" but also
pronounced that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be,
FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES." The tension between one people and
several states is a perennial theme in American legal history. As
explained below, the U.S. Constitution (adopted 1787, ratified 1788)
began a gradual and at times hotly contested shift of power and legal
authority away from the states and toward the federal government.
Still, even today states retain substantial authority. Any student of
the American legal system must understand how jurisdiction is
apportioned between the federal government and the states.

The
Constitution fixed many of the boundaries between federal and state
law. It also divided federal power among legislative, executive, and
judicial branches of government (thus creating a "separation of powers"
between each branch and enshrining a system of "checks-and-balances" to
prevent any one branch from overwhelming the others), each of which
contributes distinctively to the legal system. Within that system, the
Constitution delineated the kinds of laws that Congress might pass.

As
if this were not sufficiently complex, U.S. law is more than the
statutes passed by Congress. In some areas, Congress authorizes
administrative agencies to adopt rules that add detail to statutory
requirements. And the entire system rests upon the traditional legal
principles found in English Common Law. Although both the Constitution
and statutory law supersede common law, courts continue to apply
unwritten common law principles to fill in the gaps where the
Constitution is silent and Congress has not legislated.

SOURCES OF FEDERAL LAW

The United States Constitution

Supremacy of Federal Law

During
the period 1781-88, an agreement called the Articles of Confederation
governed relations among the 13 states. It established a weak national
Congress and left most authority with the states. The Articles made no
provision for a federal judiciary, save a maritime court, although each
state was enjoined to honor (afford "full faith and credit" to) the
rulings of the others' courts.

The
drafting and ratification of the Constitution reflected a growing
consensus that the federal government needed to be strengthened. The
legal system was one of the areas where this was done. Most significant
was the "supremacy clause," found in Article VI:

This
Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in
Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under
the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the
Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing
in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary
notwithstanding.

This
paragraph established the first principle of American law: Where the
federal Constitution speaks, no state may contradict it. Left unclear
was how this prohibition might apply to the federal government itself,
and the role of the individual state legal systems in areas not
expressly addressed by the new Constitution. Amendments would supply
part of the answer, history still more, but even today Americans
continue to wrestle with the precise demarcations between the federal
and state domains.

Each Branch Plays A Role in the Legal System

While
the drafters of the Constitution sought to strengthen the federal
government, they feared strengthening it too much. One means of
restraining the new regime was to divide it into branches. As James
Madison explained in Federalist No. 51, "usurpations are
guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and
separate departments." Each of Madison's "departments," legislative,
executive, and judiciary, received a measure of influence over the
legal system.

Legislative

The Constitution vests in Congress the power to pass legislation. A proposal considered by Congress is called a bill.
If a majority of each house of Congress -- two-thirds should the
President veto it -- votes to adopt a bill, it becomes law. Federal
laws are known as statutes. The United States Code is a
"codification" of federal statutory law. The Code is not itself a law,
it merely presents the statutes in a logical arrangement. Title 20, for
instance, contains the various statutes pertaining to Education, and
Title 22 those covering Foreign Relations.

Congress' lawmaking power is limited. More precisely, it is delegated
by the American people through the Constitution, which specifies areas
where Congress may or may not legislate. Article I, Section 9 of the
Constitution forbids Congress from passing certain types of laws.
Congress may not, for instance, pass an ex post facto law (a
law that applies retroactively, or "after the fact"), or levy a tax on
exports. Article I, Section 8 lists areas where Congress may legislate.
Some of these ("To establish Post Offices") are quite specific but
others, most notably, "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and
among the several States," are less so. Obviously the power to
interpret the less precise delegations is extremely important. Early in
the young republic's history, the judiciary branch assumed this role
and thus secured an additional and extremely vital role in the U.S.
legal system.

Judicial

As
with the other branches, the U.S. judiciary possesses only those powers
the Constitution delegates. The Constitution extended federal
jurisdiction only to certain kinds of disputes. Article III, Section 2
lists them. Two of the most significant are cases involving a question
of federal law ("all Cases in Law and Equity, arising under this
Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made�") and
"diversity" cases, or disputes between citizens of two different
states. Diversity jurisdiction allows each party to avoid litigating
his case before the courts of his adversary's state.

A second judicial power emerged in the Republic's early years. As explained in Chapter 2, the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Marbury v. Madison
(1803) interpreted its delegated powers to include the authority to
determine whether a statute violated the Constitution and, if it did,
to declare such a law invalid. A law may be unconstitutional
because it violates rights guaranteed to the people by the
Constitution, or because Article I did not authorize Congress to pass
that kind of legislation.

The
power to interpret the constitutional provisions that describe where
Congress may legislate is thus very important. Traditionally, Congress
has justified many statutes as necessary to regulate "commerce� among
the several States," or interstate commerce. This is an elastic
concept, difficult to describe with precision. Indeed, one might for
nearly any statute devise a plausible tie between its objectives and
the regulation of interstate commerce. At times, the judicial branch
interpreted the "commerce clause" narrowly. In 1935, for instance, the
Supreme Court invalidated a federal law regulating the hours and wages
of workers at a New York slaughterhouse because the chickens processed
there all were sold to New York butchers and retailers and hence not
part of interstate commerce. Soon after this, however, the Supreme
Court began to afford President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal
programs more latitude, and today the federal courts continue to
interpret broadly the commerce power, although not so broadly as to
justify any legislation that Congress might pass.

Executive

Article
II entrusts to the President of the United States "the executive
Power." Under President George Washington (1789-1801), the entire
executive branch consisted of the President, Vice President, and the
Departments of State, Treasury, War, and Justice. As the nation grew,
the executive branch grew with it. Today there are 15 Cabinet-level
Departments. Each houses a number of Bureaus, Agencies, and other
entities. Still other parts of the executive branch lie outside these
Departments. All exercise executive power delegated by the President and thus are responsible ultimately to him.

In
some areas, the relationship between the executive and the other two
branches is clear. Suppose one or more individuals rob a bank. Congress
has passed a statute criminalizing bank robbery (United States Code, Title 18, Section 2113*). (Note:
Technically, the statute applies only to a bank that is federally
chartered, insured, or a member of the Federal Reserve System. Possibly
every bank in the United States meets these criteria, but one that did
not, and could not be construed as impacting interstate commerce, would
not be subject to federal legislation. Federal statutes typically
recite a jurisdictional basis: in this case, the federal charter
requirement.)
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a bureau within the
Department of Justice, would investigate the crime. When it apprehended
one or more suspects, a Federal Prosecutor (also Department of Justice)
would attempt to prove the suspect's guilt in a trial conducted by a
U.S. District Court.

The
bank robbery case is a simple one. But as the nation modernized and
grew, the relationship of the three branches within the legal system
evolved to accommodate the more complex issues of industrial and
post-industrial society. The role of the executive branch changed most
of all. In the bank robbery example, Congress needed little or no
special expertise to craft a statute that criminalized bank robbery.
Suppose instead that lawmakers wished to ban "dangerous" drugs from the
marketplace, or restrict the amount of "unhealthful" pollutants in the
air. Congress could, if it chose, specify precise definitions of these
terms. Sometimes it does so, but increasingly Congress instead
delegates a portion of its authority to administrative agencies housed
in the executive branch. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) thus
watches over the purity of the nation's food and pharmaceuticals and
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates how industries
impact the earth, water, and air.

Although
agencies possess only powers that Congress delegates by statute, these
can be quite substantial. They can include the authority to promulgate
rules that define with precision more general statutory terms. A law
might proscribe "dangerous" amounts of pollutants in the atmosphere,
while an EPA rule defines the substances and amounts of each that would
be considered dangerous. Sometimes a statute empowers an agency to
investigate violations of its rules, to adjudicate those violations,
and even to assess penalties!

The
courts will invalidate a statute that grants an agency too much power.
An important statute called the Administrative Procedure Act (United States Code
Title 5, Section 551, et. seq.) explains the procedures agencies must
follow when promulgating rules, judging violations, and imposing
penalties. It also lays out how a party can seek judicial review of an
agency's decision.

Other Sources of Law

The
most obvious sources of American law are the statutes passed by
Congress, as supplemented by administrative regulations. Sometimes
these demarcate clearly the boundaries of legal and illegal conduct --
the bank robbery example again -- but no government can promulgate
enough law to cover every situation. Fortunately, another body of legal
principles and norms helps fill in the gaps, as explained below.

Common Law

Where
no statute or constitutional provision controls, both federal and state
courts often look to the common law, a collection of judicial
decisions, customs, and general principles that began centuries ago in
England and continues to develop today. In many states, common law
continues to hold an important role in contract disputes, as state
legislatures have not seen fit to pass statutes covering every possible
contractual contingency.

Judicial Precedent

Courts
adjudicate alleged violations of and disputes arising under the law.
This often requires that they interpret the law. In doing so, courts
consider themselves bound by how other courts of equal or superior rank
have previously interpreted a law. This is known as the principle of stare decisis,
or simply precedent. It helps to ensure consistency and predictability.
Litigants facing unfavorable precedent, or case law, try to distinguish
the facts of their particular case from those that produced the earlier
decisions.

Sometimes
courts interpret the law differently. The Fifth Amendment to the
Constitution, for instance, contains a clause that "[n]o person� shall
be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
From time to time, cases arose where an individual would decline to
answer a subpoena or otherwise testify on the grounds that his
testimony might subject him to criminal prosecution -- not in the
United States but in another country. Would the self-incrimination
clause apply here? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
ruled it did, but the Fourth and Eleventh Circuits held that it did
not. (Note:
The U.S. Circuit Court for the Second Circuit is an appellate court
that hears appeals from the federal district courts in the states of
New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. The Fourth Circuit encompasses
Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia,
and the Eleventh Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.) This effectively meant that the law differed depending where in the country a case arose!

Higher-level
courts try to resolve these inconsistencies. The Supreme Court of the
United States, for instance, often chooses to hear a case when its
decision can resolve a division among the Circuit courts. The Supreme
Court precedent will control, or apply to all the lower federal courts.
In United States v. Balsys, 524 U.S. 666 (1998), the Supreme Court ruled that fear of foreign prosecution is beyond the scope of the Self-Incrimination Clause. (Note: The numbers in this sentence comprise the citation to the Balsys decision.
They indicate that the Court issued its ruling in the year 1998 and
that the decision appears in volume 524 of a series called United States Reports, beginning on page 666.)
This ruling became the law of the entire nation, including the Second
Circuit. Any federal court subsequently facing the issue was bound by
the high court ruling in Balsys. Circuit court decisions similarly bind all the District Courts within that circuit. Stare decisis also applies in the various state court systems. In this way, precedent grows both in volume and explanatory reach.

DIFFERENT LAWS; DIFFERENT REMEDIES

Given
this growing body of law, it is useful to distinguish among different
types of laws and of actions, or lawsuits, brought before the courts
and of the remedies the law affords in each type of case.

Civil/Criminal

Courts
hear two kinds of disputes: civil and criminal. A civil action involves
two or more private parties, at least one of which alleges a violation
of a statute or some provision of common law. The party initiating the
lawsuit is the plaintiff; his opponent the defendant. A defendant can
raise a counterclaim against a plaintiff or a cross-claim against a
co-defendant, so long as they are related to the plaintiff's original
complaint. Courts prefer to hear in a single lawsuit all the claims
arising from a dispute. Business litigations, as for breach of
contract, or tort cases, where a party alleges he has been injured by
another's negligence or willful misconduct, are civil cases.

While
most civil litigations are between private parties, the federal
government or a state government is always a party to a criminal
action. It prosecutes, in the name of the people, defendants charged
with violating laws that prohibit certain conduct as injurious to the
public welfare. Two businesses might litigate a civil action for breach
of contract, but only the government can charge someone with murder.

The
standards of proof and potential penalties also differ. A criminal
defendant can be convicted only upon the determination of guilt "beyond
a reasonable doubt." In a civil case, the plaintiff need only show a
"preponderance of evidence," a weaker formulation that essentially
means "more likely than not." A convicted criminal can be imprisoned,
but the losing party in a civil case is liable only for legal or
equitable remedies, as explained below.

Legal and Equitable Remedies

The
U.S. legal system affords a wide but not unlimited range of remedies.
The criminal statutes typically list for a given offense the range of
fines or prison time a court may impose. Other parts of the criminal
code may in some jurisdictions allow stiffer penalties for repeat
offenders. Punishment for the most serious offenses, or felonies, is
more severe than for misdemeanors.

In
civil actions, most American courts are authorized to choose among
legal and equitable remedies. The distinction means less today than in
the past but is still worth understanding. In 13th century England,
"courts of law" were authorized to decree monetary remedies only. If a
defendant's breach of contract cost the plaintiff �50, such a court
could order the defendant to pay that sum to the plaintiff. These
damages were sufficient in many instances, but not in others, such as a
contract for the sale of a rare artwork or a specific parcel of land.
During the 13th and 14th centuries, "courts of equity" were formed.
These tribunals fashioned equitable remedies like specific performance,
which compelled parties to perform their obligations, rather than
merely forcing them to pay damages for the injury caused by their
nonperformance. By the 19th century, most American jurisdictions had
eliminated the distinction between law and equity. Today, with rare
exceptions, U.S. courts can award either legal or equitable remedies as
the situation requires.

One
famous example illustrates the differences between civil and criminal
law, and the remedies that each can offer. The state of California
charged the former football star O.J. Simpson with murder. Had Simpson
been convicted, he would have been imprisoned. He was not convicted,
however, as the jury ruled the prosecution failed to prove Simpson's
guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Afterwards, Mrs. Simpson's family sued
Simpson for wrongful death, a civil action. The jury in this case
determined that a preponderance of the evidence demonstrated Simpson's
responsibility for the death of his wife. It ordered Simpson to pay
money damages -- a legal remedy -- to the plaintiffs.

THE ROLE OF STATE LAW IN THE FEDERAL SYSTEM

The
Constitution specifically forbade the states from adopting certain
kinds of laws (entering into treaties with foreign nations, coining
money). Also, the Article VI Supremacy Clause barred state laws that
contradicted either the Constitution or federal law. Even so, large
parts of the legal system remained under state control. The
Constitution had carefully specified the areas where Congress might
enact legislation. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution (1791) made
explicit that state law would control elsewhere: "The powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by
it to the States, are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the
people."

There
nonetheless remained considerable tension between the federal
government and the states -- over slavery, and ultimately over the
right of a state to leave the federal union. The civil conflict of
1861-65 resolved both disputes. It also produced new restrictions on
the state role within the legal system: Under the Fourteenth Amendment
(1868), "No State shall� deprive any person of life, liberty or
property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This amendment greatly
expanded the federal courts' ability to invalidate state laws. Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which forbade racial segregation in the Arkansas state school system, relied upon this "equal protection clause."

Beginning
in the mid-20th century, a number of the trends outlined above -- the
rise of the administrative state, a more forceful and expansive
judicial interpretation of due process and equal protection, and a
similar expansion of Congress' power to regulate commerce -- combined
to enhance the federal role within the legal system. Even so, much of
that system remains within the state domain. While no state may deny a
citizen any right guaranteed by the federal Constitution, many
interpret their own constitutions as bestowing even more generous
rights and privileges. State courts applying state law continue to
decide most contractual disputes. The same is true of most criminal
cases, and of civil tort actions. Family law, including such matters as
marriage and divorce, is almost exclusively a state matter. For most
Americans most of the time, the legal system means the police officers
and courts of their own state, or of the various municipalities and
other political subdivisions within that state.

This
introduction offers a mere thumbnail sketch of the legal system. The
remainder of the volume affords greater detail, flavor, and
understanding. Chapters 1 and 2 describe respectively how the federal
and state court systems have been organized, while Chapter 3 explains
at length the complex question of jurisdiction. The chapter necessarily
delineates the borders between the federal and state courts but it also
explores the question of who may sue, and of the kinds of cases courts
will hear. Chapter 4 expands the focus from the courts to the groups
who appear before them. The practice of law in the United States is
studied, and the typical litigants described. The chapter also explains
the role played by interest groups that press particular cases to
advance their social and political agendas. Chapter 5 details how the
courts handle criminal cases while Chapter 6 turns the focus to civil
actions. Chapter 7 describes how federal judges are selected. The final
chapter explores how certain judicial decisions -- those of higher
courts especially -- can themselves amount to a form of policy making
and thus further entwine the judiciary in a complex relationship with
the legislative and executive branches.

By Michael Jay Friedman*

* Michael Jay Friedman is a Program Officer in the U.S.
Department of State, Bureau of International Information Programs. He
holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Pennsylvania
and a J.D. degree from Georgetown University Law Center.

http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/legalotln/

Are You Registered?

2008-10-04T10:29:00.001-04:00
U.S.Election Assistance Commission
Are You Registered?

The Tennessee deadline to mail voter registration forms is October 6. If you have not yet registered to vote, you can find the form at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission website.

To confirm that you are already registered, contact your local board of elections.

Voting Resources

Once you are registered, visit the Voter Resources & Voting Rights page on Civilrights.org – our new online resource for voters.

This comprehensive resource center will give you the information you need to register to vote, be prepared for Election Day, and help ensure that every vote is counted.

In addition, this site provides information from a variety of Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) member organizations and allies to help you learn where candidates stand on important civil rights issues, understand what's at stake in this election, and find out what you can do to help others exercise their right to vote.

So get registered, get ready, and vote!
Blogged with the Flock Browser

StopStealingOurChildren: Sign it, Save her, Share it

2008-09-13T09:13:00.000-04:00
StopStealingOurChildren: Sign it, Save her, Share it

Save her, Share it, sign it

2008-09-08T00:51:00.001-04:00

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/5/in-support-of-lisa-and-bella-smith-2

This petition is in support of returning Bella Smith, to her mother, Lisa Smith. Where she legally belongs. Children can not be stolen from their homes with out trials and proof of real harm.
Bella was removed from her home without probable cause or a warrant. There were no reports of harm against the mother. Bella was taken by a Knox County Juvenile Case Manager, Stacey Turpin. Ms. Turpin said she had a warrant and did not. She removed the child out of anger. Once the child was removed, she was given to an abusive, violent father, who had been out of Bella's life, by his choice for more than a year. The father has committed several violent acts against the mother and other women, this is all documented in police records. The Juvenile Court has failed to provide the child with a safe environment. She has not had proper, continued medical attention or insurance. The father has testified in 3 Courts, under oath, that he does not give the child medicines prescribed by her Doctor. Yet, the Juvenile Court refuses to acknowledge this medical neglect. The guardian ad litem, Joseph Della-Rodolfa, never met or attempted to meet with Bella & Lisa. Yet he met with the father several times, he recommended to the court, Bella stay with him, based on absolutely nothing. GAL's are to ensure what's in the child's best interest. Not there own or what is most convenient for them. He has failed to protect Bella also, both physically and medically.
There must be due process, fair and equal treatment, and protection of Constitutional Rights, in children's cases. No one has attempted to reunite Bella with her Mother.
It sends a negative message to society and battered women, when the State chooses to prosecute women for rightfully protecting their children.
This child has been to Dr. and ER more than 42 in a year and a half, her bruises, marks, and scratches have all been documented and photographed. The child her self has stated several times, her "daddy whipped her butt, with the switch". No one has done anything to protect this child, and they have allowed the father to make continuous accusations and harass Ms. Smith's family. There has not even been an attempt to re unite Bella with her Mother.
We ask you, Judge Swann, the State of TN, the prosecutor, Leland Price, who seeks to punish Ms. Smith, to look at the facts and the law, to see the fraud that has been committed and correct it. TN has had a long, negative history in The Children's Services area, we ask that you not allow Bella to become another statistic.
Do not continue with this case, allow Ms. Smith to regain the rightful custody of Bella, and return her home, where she can be safe and loved, and most important, where she wants to be. Little girls need their Mothers.
Regards,

Legally Kidnapped: New policies make it harder for CPS to remove kids

2008-08-27T23:39:00.000-04:00
Legally Kidnapped: New policies make it harder for CPS to remove kids

High School Shooting, 15 year old dies

2008-08-21T22:20:00.000-04:00

Accused shooter charged with first-degree murder; psychological eval to be sought

By Don Jacobs (Contact), Matt Lakin (Contact)
Originally published 08:22 a.m., August 21, 2008
Updated 05:40 p.m., August 21, 2008

Central High School student Ryan McDonald, shown in this picture from the 2008 Centralite yearbook, died Thursday after being shot in the school cafeteria by another student, according to Knoxville police and a hospital spokesman.

Classes will resume Friday at Central High School, one day after a shooting that killed a junior and left a freshman charged with murder.

“I want to assure parents, despite this isolated incident, our schools are safe,” Superintendent Jim McIntyre said at a press conference with law enforcement this afternoon.

McIntyre said students need to be able to return to a structured routine after a crisis such as today’s shooting.

Police at the press conference said they still haven’t settled on a motive for this morning’s shooting in the Central cafeteria, which killed 15-year-old Ryan McDonald and left Jamar B. Siler, also 15, charged with first-degree murder and an unspecified probation violation.

Siler’s attorney, Knox County Public Defender Mark Stephens, said in a Juvenile Court hearing this afternoon that he needs time to conduct a psychological evaluation on the boy, who’s accused of shooting McDonald once, then leaving the school.

Judge Tim Irwin set a preliminary hearing for next Wednesday and a trial date for Sept. 17. He allowed Siler’s family to visit with him for 30 minutes at the juvenile detention center.

Prosecutors have 10 days to decide whether they’ll ask to transfer the case to adult Criminal Court.

“So far we’ve discussed only preliminary information,” Stephens said of his client. “In terms of what may have happened this morning, those conversations haven’t begun.”

Stephens said his office has represented the boy in the past, but he didn’t know the exact nature of the cases.

Both Siler and McDonald had faced charges as juveniles.

Siler had been charged twice with public intoxication, and McDonald was arrested in March on a charge of disorderly conduct.

Details of those arrests and the outcome of the cases were not available today.

The confrontation between the two students occurred about 8:11 a.m. before classes began at the school in Fountain City, according to Knoxville Police Department Deputy Chief William C. Roehl.

The students knew each other, according to Roehl, but he said he did not know what led to the shooting.

“They had contact with one another,” Roehl said.

It was not a random shooting, he said.

“It was an isolated incident,” Knox County Schools Superintendent James McIntyre said at a press conference.

Police said they were notified about 8:57 a.m. that the student had died. University of Tennessee Medical Center spokesman Jim Ragonese identified the victim as McDonald.

The first report of the shooting to E-911 came from a Knox County Sheriff’s Office deputy whose daughter is a student at the school, which has about 1,400 students.

Officers responded at 8:13 a.m., and the suspect was arrested by a sheriff’s deputy in the 200 block of Doughty Drive at 8:17 a.m., three blocks from the school, which is located 5321 Jacksboro Pike.

A small caliber, semiautomatic handgun was found on Siler, and an investigator said there were at least four rounds still in the magazine.

One shot was fired, according to Knoxville Police Department spokesman Darrell DeBusk, and the alleged shooter just walked away.

Police flooded the area after the shooting and found Siler walking on Doughty Drive. He was taken into custody without incident.

Kevin Perry, pastor of Word of Life Ministries in the Burlington community, said he talked to a student who attends his church and was in the cafeteria at the time of the shooting.

“He saw them when they were arguing and pushing and shoving,” Perry said. “He didn’t see the guy shoot him. What he did see was the guy fall.

“He shot the guy in the chest and casually walked away as if nothing had happened.”

Student Devin Dial, a junior, said the shooting happened shortly after 8 a.m.

“I walked in and went straight to the Commons,” she said.

“I didn’t hear it, but I saw them go to the ground.

“I saw (the wounded boy) go to the ground and start shaking.”

She called her mother and spoke two words: “Mommy. Gun,” said her mother, Jennifer Mirtes, president of the Central High parent-teacher organization.

“I whipped around,” Mirtes said. “I started loading kids into my car, and I got them off campus as quickly as possible.”

She said she took about 12 students in her Monte Carlo to Litton’s restaurant, nearby on Essary Road.

Jennifer Sharp and her son, Central High School senior Jesse Sharp, 17, saw the suspect walking along the road before police converged on him.

“He was walking like he was cutting school or something,” Jennifer Sharp said. She said the suspect strolled along Stanton Road and onto Doughty Drive from her home at 200 Doughty Drive.

“He was looking around like he was looking for a teacher or something,” Jesse Sharp said.

Several Central High students gathered in the Sharps’ front yard, trying to reach fellow students via cell phone.

“These are like all our own kids; they’re like family,” Jennifer Sharp said.

A shaken Scott Sharp, Jennifer Sharp’s husband, restlessly walked his front yard, shaking his head in apparent dismay.

“I’ve always feared this,” Scott Sharp said. “You hear about this happening at other places, but… It’s scary.

“The world’s getting bad. But there’s nothing you can do.”

Central was locked immediately as well as all Knox County schools as a precautionary measure, according to the E-911 Center.

Initial reports were that the shooter took a gun from his backpack and shot the student.

Parents are to line up at Central Baptist Church of Fountain City, 5364 N. Broadway, according to a secretary at Central High.

Police then will direct parents, in order, from the church to the school to pick up their children.

Officials initially indicated students would be bused to the church. The current system aims to allow the school to monitor who is picking up whom, the secretary said.

Commissioner R. Larry Smith said he and other officials including Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam and county Mayor Mike Ragsdale were attending a breakfast at Fire Station No. 1 downtown, where ground was being broken for a new firefighters museum, when a secretary whispered word of the shooting into Ragsdale’s ear.

“We all just got up and left the breakfast and immediately went out there,” Smith said.

Smith is a 1972 Central graduate and president of the Central High School Alumni Association.

“We’ve never had anything like this happen before,” Smith said. “I’m just in shock. I’m just in shock that this happened and my heart goes out to the individual.”

Among Central parents picking up their children this morning was the Rev. Chris Buice, pastor of Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, where two people were killed and six others shot when a gunman opened fire during a Sunday morning service July 27.

His daughter Sarah, 14, attends Central but was running late this morning.

Buice is at the Central Baptist handing out water.

“It’s our community. So many people reached out to us, now we want to reach out to them,” Buice said.

“It was a good day to be running late.”

Grief counselors are on the scene.

Continuing News Editor/Metro David Keim and Business Editor Bill Brewer contributed to this story.

More details as they develop online and in Friday’s News Sentinel.

Continuing News Editor/Metro David Keim, Business Editor Bill Brewer and metro reporter Marti Davis contributed to this story.

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2008/aug/21/shooting-reported-central-high-school/#comments

Bella Has Been Kidnapped

quotes

Have your housing rights been violated in TN?

mental patient tethered to wall sparks outcry

mental patient tethered to wall sparks outcry

20 Reasons Why She Stays

THE 10 MOST IMPORTANT THINGS ARE...

Family sues police in death of girl, 7

Do Family Courts Judges actually dispense justice or dispense with it? Hmmm, you be the judge!

To clear up some misconceptions about Class Action Lawsuits

Class Action Lawsuits

Lawmakers should look into state's collusion in organizing babysitters

Web Links on CPS - Stop CPS Legal Kidnapping's MySpace Blog |

Be Inspired

Kerr v. Osborne, Substanial Evidence To Support Custody, Reasonable Time To Vacate Agreed Order

more lies and failures of social workers

Kelly defense: Victimized by their own staff

WomensLaw.org: Obama's 2011 Budget Makes Domestic Violence a Priority

HHS Budget Makes Smart Investments, Protects the Health and Safety of America’s Families

TBI, state auditors investigating County Clerk employee for embezzlement

Sheriff Taylor's sticking to his Taser - policy

Legally Kidnapped: DHS Lawsuit

Child advocates plan rally, memorial service in Indianapolis

2 clients claim Knoxville attorney does nothing after retainer fees

Was this your custody evaluator? Stephen Doyne, Phd

Historic Hate Crimes Legislation Signed

Historic Hate Crimes Legislation Signed

Judge Reprimanded for Jailing Guy Who Gave Him the Raspberry

Owner of Tennesse Salvage and Demolition Company Pleads Guilty to Environmental Crimes

Letalvis Cobbins found guilty in Christian - Newsom murders

Three Dead in Dyersburg Shooting

Incident Appears to be Murder-Suicide

Quotable quotes 070508

Glossary of Legal Terms

Cocke County DCS “Bad to the Bone”

US House votes to impeach federal judge for sexual harassment, obstruction

New Site Provides Advice On North Carolina Family Law

For my NY Advocates- NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING

Lawyer Who Failed to Follow Billing Rules Forfeits Fees

Sign My Guestbook Of Family Court Reformers

A quote, what does it mean to you?

Teen turns himself in on homicide charge

Florida SUPREME COURT DISCIPLINES 28 ATTORNEYS

Child Advocacy Actions That Work

Email Your Elected Officials

Call Your Elected Officials

Send a Letter to Your Elected Officials

Meet with Your Elected Officials

Write an Op-Ed

N.J. Court: No local residency restrictions

does anybody Plurk?

National Partnership for Women & Families:

we need your input

Where was her safety net?

Most targets of trooper's snooping identified

Hearing set for Shirley

Fox 44 - Burlington and Plattsburgh News, Weather and Sports - Fox44.net | NH DHHS warns of potential scam

Child Left In Freezing Car While Dad Visits Teen Girl

Why Parents Who Batter Win Custody

To better understand, they walk in their shoes

Students 'experience' desperation, indignities of being destitute

FBI AGENT KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY

FBI AGENT KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY

Search for anti-police blogger costs $88,000

School social worker accused of fraud

School social worker accused of fraud

Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died

document.write(cnnRenderT1TimeStamp(1225751870615));updated 20 minutes ago

Obama's grandmother dies hours before election

Your VOICE matters! Don't forget to VOTE!

See the FBI can help us, REPORT FRAUD & Corruption

Grandparent Scam hits all over US

Some good sites for CPS Info

Teen set chlorine bombs near sleeping family, police say - CNN.com

To Save Bella From Further Abuse

Anybody Find A Head?

No cold medicines for kids under 4

Introduction: THE U.S. LEGAL SYSTEM

Are You Registered?

StopStealingOurChildren: Sign it, Save her, Share it

Students 'experience' desperation, indignities of being
destitute

updated 20 minutes ago