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Are We Safe In Our Own Homes Anymore? Myspace Sex Offenders
MySpace identifies 90,000 sex offenders on its site
NEW YORK – MySpace Inc. has identified 90,000 convicted sex offenders on its socialnetworking site, 40,000 more than acknowledged earlier, according to Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s attorney general.
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The information was turned over in response to a subpoena, Blumenthal said yesterday in a statement. Facebook Inc., which runs another social-networking site, hasn’t yet responded to a similar subpoena, he said. Recent reports indicate substantial numbers of convicted offenders with Facebook profiles, he added.
MySpace.com, a unit of News Corp., and Facebook both signed multistate agreements last year to adopt safety standards to better protect children online. Regulators had accused both of not doing enough to police their sites to shield minors from predators.
“These convicted, registered sex offenders creating profiles under their own names unmasks MySpace’s monstrously inadequate countermeasures,” Blumenthal, co-leader of the state coalition focused on Internet social-networking safety, said in a statement. “MySpace must purge these dangerous offenders now – and rid them for good.”
Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer at MySpace, which is based in Beverly Hills, Calif., said in an e-mailed statement that the offenders had been removed from the site. “MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections,” he said.
Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., said it monitors its site and users for suspicious activity.
“We have been working proactively with states’ attorneys general to run their lists of registered sex offenders against our user base,” Chris Kelly, Facebook chief privacy officer, said in an e-mailed statement. “If we find that someone on a sex offender registry is a likely match to a user on Facebook, we notify law enforcement and disable the account.”
Facebook is the world’s largest social-networking site, with 221.8 million unique visitors in December, followed by MySpace with 124.9 million, according to ComScore Inc. of Reston, Va.
Adults Charged in Torture Investigation
Several Adults Charged In Torture Investigation
Police allege that Michael Schumacher, 34, and Kelly Layne Lau, 30, held the 16-year-old boy against his will for more than a year and, along with the teen’s one-time guardian, Caren Ramirez, 43, beat him, denied him food and sometimes kept him chained to the fireplace or a heavy table inside a house on Tennis Lane.
In addition, Anthony Waiters, 29, faces 10 felony counts, including torture, mayhem, child beating, child endangerment and an enhancement for using a baseball bat in carrying out abuse. Waiters lived near Schumacher and Lau on Tennis Lane.
Fifteen warrants released on Wednesday detail a pattern of alleged torture involving the 16-year-old boy.
One warrant dated from December stated that although the teen is 16, he looked much younger because of malnourishment. His body was also covered in soot and scars.
A warrant stated that in one instance, the boy was sleeping in a fireplace where he was chained when someone purposely lit the fireplace, resulting in a significant burn injury to the youth’s left arm.
Documents also said the teen was regularly hit on the head with a baseball bat and on at least one occasion and was cut with a knife and strangled with a belt until he lost consciousness.
The boy was also forced to take unknown pills, consume alcoholic beverages and smoke marijuana in an effort to keep him in a lethargic state, a warrant said.
The paperwork said police searching the home confiscated belts with buckles, computer equipment, cell phones, knives, lighter fluid, bleach, plastic zip ties, two aluminum baseball bats, salt and alcoholic beverages.
Prior to Wednesday, only one warrant in the case had been unsealed.
A short arraignment for the four defendants was continued Monday. None of them entered pleas.
Reported by: Rich Ibarra
Law enforcement to review Tylenol murders
(CNN) — The FBI announced Wednesday that it is working with Illinois state and local police to review evidence related to the 1982 Tylenol murders.
The deaths occurred after Extra-Strength Tylenol pills were laced with potassium cyanide.
“This review was prompted, in part, by the recent 25th anniversary of this crime and the resulting publicity,” the FBI said in a written statement.
“Further, given the many recent advances in forensic technology, it was only natural that a second look be taken at the case and recovered evidence.”
The anniversary coincided with a number of tips to law enforcement agencies related to the crimes, the FBI said.
Agents on Wednesday searched the Cambridge, Massachusetts, house of James W. Lewis, who was convicted of sending an extortion note to Johnson & Johnson but denied having anything to do with the poisonings.
Lewis’s wife LeAnn is listed as administrator of a Web design company called Cyberlewis.com. Its Web site lists the company’s address as the same address that authorities searched Wednesday.
On its Web site is posted a note that says, in part, ” … I was villified (sic) globally as the Tylenol Man, accused of being the mass murderer who spiked Tylenol with cyanide in Chicago back in 1982, killing seven. Those grotesque accusations obviously were false, otherwise I could not be writing these words. After 25 years, the Tylenol murders remain unsolved. I have lived a long, bizarre life and I have seen a lot, yet I am literate and lucid enough to view and describe, compare and contrast hugely diverse worlds, cultures and topics, without a moment of boredom, all with an eye to professionalism, demographics and marketability plus ears and heart sensitive to good taste and victims’ feelings.”
A call to LeAnne Lewis’ telephone number was not immediately returned.
FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcinkiewicz said two searches in Cambridge were under way “related to an ongoing investigation.”
She would not say whether they were related to the Tylenol case.
Criminal charges have not been filed in the seven Chicago-area killings, which occurred after Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules were laced with potassium cyanide.
The killings led to changes in packaging of over-the-counter drugs.
Is the Tide Shifting Against the Death Penalty?
The Tide Shifts Against the Death Penalty
If there were such a thing as a golden age of capital punishment in America, it peaked in 1999. There were 98 executions in the U.S. that year, the highest number since 1976, when the Supreme Court, which had overturned all death penalty laws in 1972, began approving them again. For most of the 1990s the number of death sentences handed down annually by courts had been humming along in the range of 280 to 300 and above. And it had been years since the Supreme Court had done much to specify whom states could execute and how they could do it. A decade later, capital punishment has a lot less life in it. Last year saw just 37 executions in the U.S., with only 111 death sentences handed down. Although 36 states and the Federal Government still have death penalty laws on the books, the practice of carrying out executions is limited almost entirely to the South, where all but two of last year’s executions took place. (The exceptions were both in Ohio.) Even in Texas, still the state leader in annual executions, only 10 men and one woman were sentenced to death last year, the lowest number since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. In recent years the Supreme Court has voted to forbid the execution of juveniles and the mentally retarded, and it banned using the death penalty for crimes that did not involve killings. In 2007 the court put executions across the country on hold for eight months while it examined whether lethal injection, the most common means of executing prisoners, violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; in the end it ruled 7-2 that it did not.
Even more significantly, where states once hurried to adopt death penalty laws, the pendulum now appears to be swinging in the other direction. In 2007 New Jersey became the first state in 40 years to abolish its death penalty. In that same year repeal bills were narrowly defeated in Montana, Nebraska and New Mexico, all of which are revisiting the issue this year. Now the focus is on Maryland. After years of failed attempts by death penalty opponents to bring a repeal bill to a vote in the state legislature, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is personally sponsoring this year’s version, promising that he will fight to have the legislature pass it during the current 90-day session. In his state of the state address last week O’Malley called capital punishment “outdated, expensive and utterly ineffective.” (See the top 10 crime stories of 2008.)
Death penalty opponents say the use of DNA evidence, which has led to a number of prisoners being released from death row, is a big part of the reason for the decline in executions generally. “That’s had a ripple effect,” says Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based advocacy group. “The whole legal system has become more cautious about the death penalty. Prosecutors are not seeking it as much. Juries are returning more life sentences. And judges are granting more stays of execution. Last year there were over 40.”
Maryland restored its death penalty in 1978, but it was 16 years before the state carried out its first execution under the new law. Since then the state has put to death four more convicted killers, the last of them in 2005. Today there are five men on Maryland’s death row, though the state suspended executions two years ago after its highest court ruled that regulations governing lethal injections had been adopted improperly. Until new protocols are in place, no executions can go forward, and the governor, a longtime death penalty opponent, has been in no hurry to issue them.
Last year, after months of public hearings, a Maryland state commission on the death penalty voted 13-9 to recommend that it should be abolished. In its final report the commission, which was headed by former U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, cited the usual objections to capital punishment — cost, racial and jurisdictional disparities in sentencing, its ineffectiveness as a deterrent against crime and the possibility that innocent people might be put to death. One of the commission’s members was Kirk Bloodsworth, who had been on death row in Maryland for two years in the mid-1980s before he was cleared by DNA evidence.
Even so, repealing the Maryland death penalty is by no means a done deal. Bills to repeal it have been introduced repeatedly since the first of them arrived six years ago, only to die every time in the senate’s judicial proceedings committee. And the makeup of that committee is no different now than it was two years ago, when the bill fell one vote short of the number needed to release it to the full senate. But supporters of the repeal think that this year, with the governor’s support and the commission’s verdict still fresh, the bill will make it to the floor for a vote they are confident they will win. “This year we have momentum to move it,” says Jane Henderson, director of Maryland Citizen’s Against State Executions.
Senator Lisa A. Gladden, a Baltimore Democrat who chairs the committee, also thinks this is the year it will happen. “You have the commission report, which confirms what we already knew,” she says. “The death penalty is not a deterrent, it doesn’t reduce crime, it’s expensive, and it’s unfair. And the governor has the ability to persuade some of the swing voters in my committee — and I only need one — to get the bill onto the floor. ” If the bill is passed by the senate, it will then continue to the legislature’s other chamber, the house of delegates, where house speaker Michael E. Busch has said he believes there are enough votes for approval.
If Governor O’Malley can’t budge any of those swing voters, there are still parliamentary moves at his disposal that could allow him to bring the bill to the full chamber without a committee vote. One of them would be to persuade lawmakers on the committee who oppose the bill to release it anyway without a recommendation of any kind from their body. Some anti-repeal committee members are already said to be warming to that idea.
And O’Malley can get firsthand advice on parliamentary maneuvers from a source very close to home. In 1978, the bill that eventually created Maryland’s death penalty was held up for a time by the same senate committee before eventually being forced to a vote. Its chairman back then was a future state attorney general named J. Joseph Curran, a longtime opponent of capital punishment. These days he also happens to be the governor’s father-in-law.
Welcome to the UTCrimBlog!
Throughout the semester, students will be responsible for posting weekly blogs relating to crime and criminology. Further instruction regarding blogs will be provided in class and posted on the UT Blackboard site. It is my hope that students not only learn about crime and criminology, but have fun as well.
Welcome!
Parker Dismissed from Florida State: www.tbo.com
Published: February 2, 2009
TALLAHASSEE – Preston Parker’s troubled football career at Florida State is over after his second arrest in less than a year.
Coach Bobby Bowden announced the junior receiver was dismissed from the team Monday in a one-sentence statement released by the school. Parker, who met with Bowden before the announcement, will remain in school on scholarship.
The 21-year-old Parker, from Delray Beach, was arrested and charged with driving under the influence after Tallahassee police found him asleep in his running car early Saturday.
The police report said Parker admitted he had been drinking and smoking marijuana. It was the third time Parker has been arrested since 2006.
Parker was suspended for the first two games of the 2008 season after being arrested last April in Palm Beach County on weapons and drug charges. One of the charges was a felony that was later reduced as part of an agreement on a guilty plea by Parker. He was sentenced to 50 hours of community service, a year’s probation and weekly drug testing.
Parker was also arrested in 2006 after police said he tried to steal a DVD from Best Buy. The charge was dismissed after he entered a diversionary program and paid $200 in court costs.
Parker’s dismissal comes two days before national signing day, when major college football programs such as Florida State unveil their latest recruiting classes.
Florida State is also expecting to hear from the NCAA on sanctions for an academic cheating scandal that resulted in the suspension of more than five dozen athletes, including some football players, at the school for some games.
Parker, who also played some at running back and returning kicks, caught 104 passes for 1,189 yards and five touchdowns in three seasons.
Parker’s dismissal, combined with Greg Carr’s departure after four productive seasons at Florida State, means the Seminoles will be relying heavily on underclassmen at wide receiver next season.
Taiwan Easterling and Bert Reed combined for 53 catches good for 617 yards and four touchdowns as freshmen last season. Reed, however, was suspended three times last season and arrested once for his role in a campus brawl in November that resulted in five receivers, including Easterling, being suspended for one game.
Parker was freed Sunday from the Leon County Jail on $500 bail.
Criminology Blog 