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3 of 4 Charges Against Terry Childs Dropped
phantomfive writes "Terry Childs, who was arrested nearly a year ago for refusing to turn over the passwords to San Francisco's FiberWAN network, has been cleared of three of the four charges against him. The dropped charges referred to the attachment of modems to the network; the remaining charge is for refusing to turn over the password. The prosecutor has vowed to appeal, to have the charges reinstated. We have the original story, and the story where Childs tells his side, for those who want a refresher."
It's a little known fact that prosecutors cannot be sued for anything they do in court to a defendant. Prosecutors are truly the worst part of the system since they are unaccountable to the public and are rewarded for getting convictions, not enforcing the law wisely. As a profession, they are so corrupt that they make civil lawyers look sympathetic since civil lawyers are at least limiting themselves to cases where you can kinda sorta see how their client was genuinely harmed.
Most prosecutors answer to the District Attorney, and can be fired by the DA almost at will. The District Attorney is an elected official. In those cases where the prosecutor doesn't answer to the elected District Attorney (or essentially the same office with a different title), they answer to the elected head of the of the executive branch of whatever level of government they represent (Mayor, Governor, President, etc). If your local prosecutors are loose cannons, campaign against their boss.
The only reason that prosecutors appear to be unaccountable to the public is because the public doesn't pay enough attention to local politics/civics
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
From http://www.linkedin.com/pub/chris-vein/7/110/71b you can see that Chris Vein was a senior advisor at the White House after only three years in the workforce! I do not think such a rise is possible by merit or desirable in an honest government.
I hope this case looks deeply at the motivations behind getting the police involved. I'm also extremely curious as to what the $1million that has to be spent to repair the "damage" is required for and hope the defence and judge push hard for an explanation of this unusual claim
NPR doesn't show video clips at all. :)
All kidding aside, I think you have your blinders on. I listen to NPR for, on average, an hour a day (most of my morning and evening commutes) and while I find them to be superior to most other news outlets other than the BBC, there have been plenty of times that I've noticed them talking about something at length, before playing the source material (and sometimes they don't play the source material at all), which is the exact behavior that the GP described. I also listen to right wing talk radio, and while the entire reason that they seem to exist is to program responses into people, their methods of doing so are a bit different. Someone like Limbaugh or Hannity absolutely loves playing soundbites (original source material in this case) over, and over, and over, but they're often taken out of context or referencing a slightly (in some cases completely) different subject.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Speaking of incompetent but well meaning people on the jury, I used to work with a girl who sat on a jury trial over a murder where two boys (14 and 16) shot and killed some girl who was obsessed with one of them, enlisted the help of his mom and another friend (a 19 year old woman) who took the body to a barn across the county and caught it on fire.
This girl on the jury came into work after the first day of trial and told us they were going to fry if she had anything to do with it. I wrote a letter to the judge and defense attorney about this. She was left on the jury and the death penalty was taken off the table. I was also arrested and brought before the judge and told that if I threaten a juror it was a felony and so on before being release 5 miles away from my car with no way to get home but walking with no charges ever being filed. I was totally flabbergasted and had no idea what was going on. The jury was then sequestered.
Years later, someone else that used to work there told me she had told the judge that she only said those things because I kept telling her to convict the people. I never spoke to her directly, I was just there when she was bragging about how much power the jury had (and hence, how much power she had because of it) I guess I had the same last name (no relation) as one of the defendants and throwing me under the bus was her way of making sure they paid while she stayed out of trouble.
I have to disagree with your entire statement. Lawyers are busy people, a lot the local ones are my clients.
They don't have time to learn more about anything other than law.
There is no way to educate someone who doesn't have a desire to learn, or who has themselves convinced that they don't have time to learn.
Some of my clients ask for my opinion on cases, and I've been an expert witness on 2.
One good example is this one. A local kid "cracked" into his schools (completely unprotected) "teacher only" network share and looked at his grades, then told the "network administrator" (read:80year old librarian) about the security issue.
A month later, some grades were changed in this system (still unprotected to this day btw) and they threw the book at this kid.
I can access this system from the parking lot, with my cell phone.
After explaining this to the court, the prosecutor still insisted that the kid must have hacked into the system because of half of an answer to a single question,
Lawyer : "Are you suggesting that any one member of the jury could have done this easily?"
Me: "Probably not, but" >> "Thank you, no further questions."
When the expert witnesses get cut off in the middle of their explanations, how in the hell are we supposed to educate anyone?
Fyi, the kid was released because someone else went in and deleted the entire network share while he was still in jail.