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Thursday, November 29, 2012
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Karolina Obrycka, outside the Dirksen Federal Building after testifying Tuesday. October 22, 2012 | Scott Stewart~Sun-Times
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On Tuesday, it tripped up another veteran Chicago officer.
Peter Masheimer — the cop dispatched to investigate Abbate’s February 19, 2007 attack at a Northwest Side tavern — endured a torrid afternoon on the stand in Federal Court as clips from the security camera footage were played by Obrycka’s attorneys in an attempt to show that he was part of a police cover-up.
“I did not remember,” Masheimer testified repeatedly.
At the same time, he was presented with video evidence showing that within an hour of the attack at Jesse’s Short Stop Inn he was given Abbate’s full name on a piece of paper by Obrycka, told that Abbate was a Chicago Police officer and told that there was a video of the entire incident.
None of those details made it into a police report that Masheimer filed, which described the attacker as an unknown man named Tony.
Nor does audio recording of the barroom match sworn testimony Masheimer gave an internal police probe of his conduct in which he told investigators he “never had [a] conversation” with Obrycka about the cameras, claimed Obrycka “never made that statement” about Abbate being a cop, and denied he was given Abbate’s last name, he admitted.
Masheimer — given a 30-day unpaid suspension for his handling of the report — said he only recalled the damning details much later “after reviewing the tape.”
He left them out of his report because he knew detectives would follow up, because he was given three versions of the spelling of Abbate’s last name and could not verify that Abbate was a cop, he said, adding that he did not know Abbate and was not asked by anyone to hush up the incident.
Masheimer’s uncomfortable testimony came on the second day of a civil jury trial expected to take three weeks. It could cost Chicago taxpayers millions if officers — including cops far above Masheimer’s pay grade — are found to have conspired in a cover up before the video of the attack went viral and Abbate was eventually slapped with felony charges.
Earlier Tuesday, Abbate, whose testimony began on Monday, told the jury that he was having “a bad day” and had decided to get drunk on the day of the assault because his dog had been diagnosed with cancer.
“I was on a mission to get totally inebriated ... blacked out,” Abbate said.
He said he was so drunk on Canadian whiskey, Rumple Minze schnapps and blackberry brandy that he could barely remember any details of the attack, nor of the next 24 hours, during which phone records show he and his close friends and fellow officers exchanged hundreds of calls.
Obrycka’s attorneys allege those calls were part of the cover-up but Abbate testified that he had never asked anyone to do him any illegal favor. The lengthy calls he made in the hours after the incident were merely cases of “drunk-dialing,” he said.
Asked what he meant by that, he answered, “Just acting like a jackass.”
Abbate dialed back his previous claim that he was acting in self-defense when he attacked Obrycka, saying he was only acting in self-defense at the start of the confrontation.
He acknowledged that he had been investigated for four previous complaints made by fellow officers or by the public, including for allegedly dragging a pregnant, handcuffed woman along the ground.
Amid the sometimes heated exchanges with Obrycka’s attorneys, he also attempted a joke.
Asked by city attorney Barrett Rubens why the video shows him flexing his biceps so often, Abbate said, “I guess that’s what you call ‘beer muscles.’”
Friday, November 9, 2012
The legal fate of James Patrick Wonder, the Miramar man accused of manslaughter in the shooting death of federal agent Donald Pettit, is in the hands of a Broward judge.
Assistant State Attorney Michelle Boutros and defense lawyer Frank Maister delivered closing arguments in Wonder's Stand Your Ground hearing Thursday, asking Broward Circuit Judge Bernard Bober to decide whether Wonder, 69, is entitled to immunity from prosecution.
Wonder admits shooting Pettit, 52, in the parking lot of a Pembroke Pines post office on Aug. 5, 2008, but claims he acted in self-defense as Pettit, a special agent with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, was charging at him following a road rage incident. Older, smaller and more frail than the agent, Wonder said he was worried that any physical confrontation would put his life in danger.
A dialysis patient, Wonder has a surgically placed fistula in his left arm that could burst if handled carelessly. While he mentioned the fistula when he was arrested the day after the shooting, he did not explicitly tell the detective interviewing him that he was afraid Pettit would kill him.
"I just can't take a punch in the mouth no more," he said. "I just can't take a punch anywhere."
Boutros has argued that Wonder was as angry as Pettit the day of the shooting, but where Pettit committed no crime and issued no threat when he confronted Wonder, the defendant seemed prepared to use deadly force before Pettit got out of his car.
According to Wonder, Pettit charged at him "like a football player," crouched with his head down, when Wonder opened fire. But drawing his weapon, disengaging the safety, aiming and firing would have taken longer than the time it would have taken Pettit to run 12 feet from where his car was parked to where Wonder was standing, Boutros said.
"He had his gun out, he took the safety off, and he was ready," Boutros said. She characterized the shooting as the overreaction of an angry man, not the reasonable response of someone who felt his life was in danger.
Maister presented Pettit as the only angry one, itching for a fight over a minor traffic dispute, ignoring the needs of his 12-year-old daughter, who was in the car with him, and disregarding his training as a federal law enforcement officer.
"There was only one of these two men who wanted to have a confrontation in that parking lot that day, and it wasn't James Wonder," Maister said. "This guy [Pettit] is fuming! He's lost it! At what point is [Wonder] entitled to defend himself? Does he actually have to take that first punch?"
Bober said he would issue a written ruling. While he did not say when it would happen, he set a court date for Nov. 29 — Wonder's birthday, coincidentally — with a promise that the ruling would come before then.
Either side can appeal Bober's eventual ruling.
raolmeda@tribune.com
Ex F.B.I. Agent Gets Sentense For Child Porn!
Anthony V. Mangione, who headed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's South Florida office for four years, possessed up to 150 images of child pornography, some depicting the "extreme abuse of children," according to federal prosecutors.
The stunning case against the decorated law enforcement veteran left many wondering how he became immersed in the dark world of child pornography, trading illicit images on the Internet and pretending to be a mother sexually abusing her children.
Mangione, 52, offered no clear explanation on Friday why he started viewing child pornography. He said that about three years ago he began having drinking problems and stealing his wife's prescription pills.
"I'm pretty much a broken guy," Mangione told U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra. "I feel like I'm in a hole eight feet deep with six feet of dirt on top."
Mangione, of Parkland, pleaded guilty in July to e-mailing child pornography to a former school bus driver in Delaware during a six-month period in 2010. After serving his 70-month prison sentence, Mangione will spend an additional 20 years on supervised release.
The FBI and Broward Sheriff's Office seized Mangione's laptop computer in April 2011 after his Internet provider detected him sending child pornography. He quickly retired from ICE and was arrested in September 2011.
Prosecutor Michael W. Grant urged the judge to sentence Mangione to 87 months in prison, arguing that the former law enforcement officer knows the toll child pornography takes on its victims yet was circulating images of children suffering.
"He took the worst moment in (a child's) life and he capitalized on it," said Michael W. Grant, a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section.
Mangione had no supporters speak on his behalf after discouraging family and friends from showing up at the court hearing. Family members and friends wrote letters describing him as a devoted father of three and a dedicated law enforcement officer.
As the Special Agent in Charge of ICE's South Florida office, Mangione supervised more than 400 employees in nine counties. He was regularly at the forefront of arrests of child pornography suspects, vowing to see them punished.
ICE has refused to address questions about Mangione, issuing a statement Friday that the agency "continues to hold our employees to the highest standards of ethical and moral conduct and are proud of the thousands of agents and offiers who exemplify these ideals."
Handcuffed and in a blue prison uniform, Mangione said Friday he takes full responsibility for what he described as "a terrible mistake." But when it came to why he would betray his oath as a law enforcement officer, he didn't come up with an answer.
jburstein@tribune.com,
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Florida man caught in legal limbo for filming police
Flickr/ photographer padawan *(xava du)
Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post
Over a month ago, Steve Horrigan, a Florida resident, was arrested on charges of felony wiretapping for the high crime of recording video of police in public with his cell phone.
The Sarasota County, Florida State Attorney’s Office has yet to even formally file charges against Horrigan, and the North Port Police Department has not yet returned his cell phone.
Unfortunately, Horrigan’s case is not some isolated anomaly, but instead part of a much larger war on citizens who attempt to hold police accountable for their activities and do so in a wholly legal manner.
The state of Horrigan’s case has him in legal limbo wherein he cannot move forward with his lawsuit, and the state attorney has even more time before they have to file charges.
On top of the felony wiretapping, Horrigan is facing a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest without violence, something which Carlos Miller characterizes as “the usual tack-on charge in Florida when you’ve pissed off the cops.”
Under state law in Florida, an individual who was arrested for a misdemeanor must be tried within 90 days of the arrest, while a felony arrest gives a period of 175 days.
Horrigan was arrested on January 25 of this year, so the state attorney has more time to make him squirm before they have to bring him to trial.
Thankfully, Horrigan’s case is getting some attention, at least amongst the local media like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
Recently they ran an in-depth piece not only about Horrigan’s case, but the nationwide struggle between citizens who want to hold police accountable and those individuals who refuse to allow citizens to exercise this right.
Unfortunately, the author of the piece failed to point out the fact that there is absolutely no legal basis upon which an officer can arrest an individual for filming them in public carrying out their public duties where they have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Indeed, Miller points to four cases he has covered (which you can read about here, here, here and here) where residents of Florida had been arrested for recording police on video in public, all of which ended up being dismissed.
There is also the precedent set in Illinois where a judge declared their law – which is quite similar to the Florida law – unconstitutional.
North Port Police Captain Robert Estrada defended the actions of law enforcement, claiming that Horrigan crossed the line when he recorded what was supposedly a confidential conversation between officers, after having been ordered to stop.
However, Estrada admits that he has not actually seen Horrigan’s video, and he also admits that the police were operating in a public place where there is no expectation of privacy.
Estrada employs some laughably fallacious logic in stating, “If the officers there were yelling to each other loud enough for everyone to hear, that would obviously not constitute a personal conversation,” but since police did not consent to being recorded and they had to divert their attention from the traffic stop to deal with Horrigan, they arrested him.
“It is a gray area, I don’t know,” Estrada admitted. “It’s up to the courts to decide.”
Horrigan, on the other hand, agrees with Florida prosecutors (and the actual law) in saying that the law is actually black and white, without the massive gray area which Estrada would prefer to exploit.
It is completely nonsensical for Estrada to claim he knew that the conversation was confidential, or that he is at all qualified to speak on the details of the case, while also claiming that he has never actually seen the video in question.
Horrigan thinks the reasons behind his arrest are quite different than the supposed eavesdropping of a confidential conversation.
“The two guys who they stopped in the car that I was recording are fighting their charges, even though they are pretty minor. Both are 2nd degree misdemeanors, so I’ll be going to their hearings to see what’s up with that,” Horrigan writes in an email. “It’s pretty egregious that the cops arrested both of these guys even though there were two pre-toddlers in the back seat. Those poor kids were probably terrified.”
“They had to wait for a family member to get there to take the kids home, otherwise they would have called the children services. I was in handcuffs in the police car before they arrested the two brothers so I couldn’t get that recorded. That is probably why they nicked me, so that I wouldn’t have been able to record the screaming kids in the back seat after arresting Dad for driving on a restricted license. These cops have no shame at all,” he concluded.
I would not be at all surprised if prosecutors waited up until the last possible moment, holding on to his cell phone the entire time, just to never file charges and hand over his phone with no explanation whatsoever.
On top of causing considerable hardship and stress for Horrigan, this would make it much harder, if not impossible, for him to file a lawsuit since they both returned his phone and failed to actually file charges.
This is yet another instance of calculated police harassment of citizens who exercise their right to record police in public and hold them accountable for their activities.
I thought that the Illinois decision would help discourage this kind of behavior, but apparently such decisions will have to be made on a state-by-state basis before police and prosecutors start paying attention.
This article first appeared at EndtheLie.com. Read other contributed articles by Madison Ruppert here.
Madison Ruppert is the Editor and Owner-Operator of the alternative news and analysis database End The Lie and has no affiliation with any NGO, political party, economic school, or other organization/cause. He is available for podcast and radio interviews. Madison also now has his own radio show on Orion Talk Radio from 8 pm -- 10 pm Pacific, which you can find HERE. If you have questions, comments, or corrections feel free to contact him at admin@EndtheLie.com
The information in the video description says:
Seminole County.
Two Seminole County Sheriff’s Office deputies were kicked off the force after a turbulent traffic stop that was caught on the officers’ dashboard camera.
In a stinging rebuke, Sheriff Don Eslinger said deputies Erik Ducharme and Chris Clutter not only acted inappropriately at the scene but also lied and put the lives of others in danger with their irresponsible actions.Dashcam video from a May 19 traffic stop in Sanford shows the deputies getting out of their vehicles with a shotgun and Taser drawn. They immediately begin screaming and using profanity at the men in the car, who they pulled over on an alleged seatbelt violation.The men in the car said they were, in fact, wearing seat belts and did nothing to provoke the stop or what took place after.
The deputies claimed the driver did not stop right away after they started running their lights and sirens, but an internal investigation and the dashcam video showed that was not true.In the video, it does not appear that the men in any way threatened the deputies. At one point, Clutter shocked the driver with a Taser without warning.Investigative reports released on Monday included a statement from another officer who said he was in the line of fire and that things were so out of control he feared he was about to get shot by his own zone partner. Eslinger fired the deputies on Monday, and in a sharply worded notice of discipline stated, “You exercised poor judgment in the escalating levels of force you used as compared to the resistance offered by the occupants of the car. Your conduct at the scene was compounded by the dishonesty in your characterization of the incident in your report further demonstrating a lack of regard for the policies and procedures of this agency.”Both deputies had been with Seminole County for less than three years. Neither had been disciplined before.
by Julian Heicklen
Amendment VI of the U. S. Constitution states: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury….” It does not say: “may enjoy.” It does not say: “if the accused chooses.” It does not say: “unless the accused declines.” It does not say: “if the judge agrees.” It does not say: “unless the Supreme Court says otherwise.” It says that there shall be a jury trial.
Everyone in the criminal legal system knows that if a defendant declines a jury trial, it is because his lawyer thinks or knows that his client is guilty. It is no longer possible for the judge to be impartial.
The reason a defendant’s lawyer declines a jury trial is because he hopes to win the case in one of three ways:
1. He has some obscure legal argument that the jury (and maybe even the judge and/or prosecutor) do not understand.
2. The judge owes the defendant’s lawyer something. The lawyers and the judge all know each other and have opinions, grudges, and obligations with each other.
3. The defense lawyer or the defendant may be in a position to help the judge’s career if he wins.
This is particularly true if the defendant holds a relevant government job.
NYPD employee handiwork
Consider the case of the killing of Sean Bell. He was killed by police on his wedding day. His bride-to-be received his corpse as a wedding present. The incident is described in detail at Wikipedia.
The Sean Bell shooting incident took place in the New York City borough of Queens on November 25, 2006, in which one Latino and two African-American men were shot at a total of fifty times by a team of both plainclothes and undercover NYPD officers (two of whom were themselves African-American), killing one of the men, Sean Bell, on the morning of his wedding day, and severely wounding two of his friends.[1] The incident sparked fierce criticism of the police from some members of the public and drew comparisons to the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo.[2] Three of the five detectives involved in the shooting went to trial [3] on charges ranging from manslaughter to reckless endangerment, and were acquitted.[4]” (see the web page for references)
The three detectives involved in the shooting were indicted by a grand jury for manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and assault. They waived a jury trial. The bench trial started on March 16, 2007. All three detectives were found not guilty of all charges by Justice Arthur J. Cooperman.
Apparently the police department did not agree with the judge’s decision. Although the detectives were acquitted, the three of them and their commanding officer were fired or forced to resign on March 24, 2012.
If there had been a jury trial, the detectives were likely to have been found guilty of something—probably not first degree murder, but at least criminal negligence. However, even it did find the police not guilty, its verdict would have been more credible.
On the other hand the judge desperately needs the police to protect him. They may save his life. There are lots of ex-criminals in the county that would like to kill him.
In a courtroom trial, there is only one impartial participant. That is the jury.
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