High tech crime calls for high-tech crimefighting

Craig Schmidt was talking about botnets, almost matter-of-factly. A botnet is a collection of compromised computers connected to the Internet. Schmidt is the senior manager of investigation of Microsoft's digital crimes unit. And, besides the fact that Schmidt grew up in Spring Lake Park, what do botnets have to do with Anoka County?
Quite a bit, actually.

Members of the Anoka County attorney and sheriff's offices -- considered local pioneers in the investigation of cyber crime and the use of computer forensics -- met recently with investigative and crime specialists from Microsoft. The two-day closed conference at Anoka-Ramsey Community College in Coon Rapids offered strategies in fighting modern crimes with modern technology.

Topics included e-mail header analysis, social networking, instant messaging, steganography (writing hidden messages), basic encryption, anonymization techniques, Internet service providers and domain name systems. These are topics that many law enforcement officials might never have approached 10 years ago. But for a video-game-playing, text-messaging generation that has grown up wearing ear buds and considers a cellphone to be the modern-day pocket watch, using all this technology is as natural as breathing.

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Social Media Changing the Face of Criminal Justice

Virginia Beach police thought they were done with the case of Lakeira Calahan. The baby girl's uncle pleaded guilty to neglect in Lakeira's May 2009 death and served a yearlong jail sentence. The girl's mother, stepfather and older brother moved to Arkansas. More than two years passed.
A Facebook conversation changed everything.

In messages between a friend and a Facebook user appearing to be Lakeira's mother, Julie Calahan, the 23-year-old mother talks about hurting Lakeira the morning before her death, causing the baby girl's fatal injuries, a detective testified in court. The friend turned over the messages to Child Protective Services, which sent them to a Virginia Beach police detective, who reopened the investigation, questioned Calahan and charged her in Lakeira's death. Calahan now awaits trial on charges of second-degree murder and felony child neglect. If convicted, she faces up to 60 years in prison.

Cases like Calahan's are becoming increasingly common as people communicate more and more via social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, leaving behind a record that can end up in the hands of police, prosecutors and defense attorneys. Local attorneys said evidence from social media factors into almost every case they handle now, although it's less common for that evidence to form the backbone of a case, as it did with Julie Calahan. More often, photos, status updates and exchanges on social media sites help guide police investigations and contribute to a larger pool of more traditional evidence sources.

The result can be damning.

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Why the judge got it right on Dharun Ravi's sentencing

The polarized reaction to the Dharun Ravi cyberbullying case — he’s typically characterized as either a prankster or a murderer — is symptomatic of a general public confusion about how to respond to youthful offenders.

On the one hand, the capacity of youthful offenders to do grievous harm has grown with their ready access to the internet, to weapons and to toxic substances. The sometimes horrific consequences of youthful offenses provoke understandable public outrage.
On the other hand, a growing body of scientific understanding suggests that treating youthful offenders as indistinguishable from adults results in manifest injustice. As the Ravi sentencing made painfully clear, youthful offending compels us to grapple with questions of culpability, morality and proportionality that are quite different from those at work when the perpetrator is a much older adult.
At the heart of the Ravi sentencing was this question: At what age, and under what circumstances, do we deem young people sufficiently adult-like to impose adult-like sentences upon them when they offend? Our culture provides no clear answer.

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Bills boost job hopes of former offenders

Ohioans with criminal records will find it easier to get jobs, become licensed in construction trades and get a driver’s license under legislation passed yesterday by both houses of the General Assembly. Gov. John Kasich will sign the “collateral sanctions” bill when it reaches his desk, spokesman Rob Nichols said. “Relief and redemption are on the way,” one ex-offender support group proclaimed after the votes. The new law will affect 1.9 million Ohioans with criminal records.
It was a rare thing — liberal black female Democrats from Columbus and Cleveland working with conservative white male Republicans from Springfield and Cincinnati on a bill that one sponsor said “changes lives.” “The work that we are doing today opens opportunities,” Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati, said before the 27-4 vote on Senate Bill 337. The Ohio House later voted 96-1 for House Bill 524, legislation mirroring the Senate bill. One of the bills will go to Kasich when lawmakers return the week of June 11.


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Baltimore rolling out domestic violence test city wide

They are the questions that can save your life and through the course of two plus years, the city of Baltimore believes they've done just that. "We really did embark on it as an experiment. It was a pilot project, we didn't know it was gonna work. We didn't know what the impact would be and by doing the pilot and doing the data, what we found is that it worked." Sheryl Goldstein is now the outgoing director of the mayor's office on criminal justice.

What's worked is the lethality assessment. It is a simple piece of paper with 13 questions, but now becoming as valuable of a law enforcement tool as the gun on an officer's hip. When responding to a domestic violence call, police have the victim take this test and based on the score offer immediate help through the House of Ruth. “Close to a thousand victims as a result of this project have gotten services that they wouldn’t have gotten including shelter, counseling, legal assistance and other types of support," said Goldstein.
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Group seeks to raise juvenile age from 16 to 18

At a press conference Tuesday morning, leaders from Right on Crime, a conservative criminal justice reform initiative, made their case for a bill that would raise the juvenile age from 16 to 18. According to Rep. Marilyn Avila, the “Raise the Age” bill would keep 16- and 17-year-olds in juvenile court for misdemeanors only, while all felonies would continue to be handled in adult court. The Raise the Age system is currently in place in 48 states, Avila said. “North Carolina and New York are the only states that treat their juveniles this way,” she said.
Rep. Jerry Madden of Texas, where a similar law has been implemented, said the juvenile probation numbers dropped from 105,000 last year to 79,000 -- a 25 percent reduction. The current bill calls for $9 million in the first year, and would increase in later years. Avila said the process would take about four years to implement. Chief Frank Palombo, former president of the NC Association of Chiefs of Police, spoke at the press conference, detailing the implications of the current system. He said that in North Carolina, if a 16- or 17-year-old steals a bag of chips, and at 25 decides he wants to be a police officer, he cannot be hired because of his criminal record. He said that if a juvenile in Florida were under the same circumstances, that person could be hired.

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In Rutgers Spying Case, Voices for Gay Rights Urge Leniency

In the two months since he was found guilty of using a webcam to spy on his roommate, Dharun Ravi has gone from being a symbol of antigay bias to being something of a folk hero, with rallies of his supporters urging the court to “free Dharun.” What may be most surprising is how many of those arguing in his defense are prominent gay rights advocates.

With Mr. Ravi scheduled to be sentenced on Monday, many of them have argued against the prison term prosecutors have recommended. They say that Mr. Ravi is being punished for the suicide of his roommate, Tyler Clementi, although he was not charged in it, and that pinning blame on him ignores the complicated social pressures that drive gay teenagers to kill themselves.

As repugnant as his behavior was, they say, it was not the blatantly bigoted or threatening actions that typically define hate crimes. Some fear that a sentence that overreaches might provide tinder to antigay sentiment — a New Jersey talk-radio host complained soon after the verdict of the “gay lobby” railroading Mr. Ravi.
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Build Bigger Jails or Invest in Community-Based Alternatives?

In 2010, 71 percent of California’s jail population were those offenders who were unsentenced and awaiting resolution of their cases. This figure not only exceeds the pretrial detainee national average, but also represents a major shift away from the traditional use of jails where inmates are detained as a form of punishment. However, many of these pretrial detainees are not being held because they have been determined to be a danger to society or represent a flight risk. Rather, they remain in jail because they cannot afford to post bail.

When an individual is detained in jail they have few options for pretrial release: to bond out through a commercial bail bondsman, release on own recognizance, or be released under the supervision of a publicly funded pretrial service program. Unfortunately, not every county has a pretrial service program, and if that is the case, bonding out might be the individual’s only option for pretrial release if they are not eligible for release on own recognizance. However, with high unemployment rates and the current economic hardships many Californians are facing, it is becoming more difficult and less common for the poor and middle-class to be able to raise enough funds to post bail.

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Bill bans death row inmates profiting from crimes

BATON ROUGE – Death row inmates should not profit from the notability they’ve gained from their crimes, said Rep. Barbara Norton as she received unanimous Criminal Justice Committee support Wednesday for legislation authored by Sen. Yvonne Dorsey-Colomb.

Dorsey-Colomb, D-Baton Rouge, filed Senate Bill 565 in response to serial killer Derrick Todd Lee selling artwork on a website, Dark Vomit’s True Crime Macabre and Outsider Art Gallery.

The site, specializing in “serial killer and true crime collectibles,” had two of Lee’s works – a watercolor print of a panda chewing on bamboo and a watercolor of two swans on a lake – but currently is offering only the 9x12 swans drawing, complete with the mailing envelope stamped “Death Row” and with his two hand-written messages “Please don’t bend. Pictures inside.”

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Mothers and Mandatory Minimums

This Mother's Day was another bittersweet one for Janet Earle. At 78, she has outlived two of her three sons. A dozen years ago, she lost her third son, Scott, through the cracks of Florida's criminal justice system. That Scott remains in a Florida prison is as useless for public safety as it is heartbreaking to Janet Earle.

Janet Earle's story is unique because her son's sentence is so unwarranted. Scott's drug conviction was not the result of evil intent, but rather of a sadly common combination of addiction and bad judgment. Scott began using painkillers after he suffered a sports injury as a teenager. He did not become an addict, however, until after he was involved in several car accidents. His dependence on the medication grew until he was taking over a dozen pills each day. Janet Earle didn't notice her son's addiction because during this time he worked full-time at an auto dealership and moonlighted as a musician.

In September 1995, Scott was admitted to the emergency room for a painful diverticulitis attack. The doctor prescribed him Vicodin. Several days later, Scott's roommate introduced him to a beautiful woman at a neighborhood bar. After getting drinks with Scott and learning of his recent hospital visit, the woman asked him if she could have some of his pills for her back pain. Scott obliged. Unbeknownst to him, however, the woman was an undercover police officer.

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Age-old question: when should children be responsible for their crimes?

The age of criminal responsibility acts as the gateway to the criminal justice system – under a certain age you are kept out. Most jurisdictions have this age barrier because it’s widely understood children need sheltering from the criminal law consequences of their behaviour until they are developed enough to understand whether their behaviour is wrong. But what age is the right age? And how do legal systems deal with this difficult question?
What is the age of criminal responsibility?

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, requires states to set a minimum age “below which children shall be presumed not to have the capacity to infringe penal law”. The convention does not actually indicate what age level should be set as a minimum. But in fixing a minimum age, the commentary on the United Nation’s Beijing Rules notes that: “The modern approach would be to consider whether a child can live up to the moral and psychological components of criminal responsibility; that is, whether a child … can be held responsible for essentially antisocial behaviour.”

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Forensics: A new way to track crime scene invaders?

London: In a big aid to detectives faced with investigating gruesome crimes, a leading Italian forensic scientist claims to have built up data that may help determine whether marks on a dead body were due to violence or work of insects which moved in after death.

Dr Stefano Vanin at University of Huddersfield says that tiny creatures very often can cause lesions to a corpse which closely resemble injuries left by a human assailant. For example, ants which clamber over a dead body's face can deposit marks which mimic the effects of a punch.
It is vital that detectives are quickly able to separate post-mortem insect damage from wounds that were caused before death by a killer, he says.

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Drug courts a win-win for users, taxpayers

Judge William Schma retired from the Kalamazoo County Circuit Court bench in 2006. Six years later, he still runs into people whose lives turned around thanks to his drug court. Repeatedly.
“I just got a call from someone graduating from the humanities program at Western Michigan University who wants me to come to graduation,” said Schma, a pioneer in Michigan’s drug treatment court system. “I bumped into somebody making my sandwich at Subway who said, ‘Your program saved my life.’”
Such stories are common among the judges presiding in the 100 drug courts of various sorts and sizes across Michigan. They handled more than 8,300 cases from October 2009 through September 2011, according to the State Court Administrator’s Office. They operate in 47 of Michigan’s 83 counties, which means both that they are common — and that there is room for expansion.
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DNA Contamination Blamed on Human Error

Human error at a private forensic services lab is being blamed for DNA contamination that led to the wrong man facing trial for rape. A Home Office statement said an investigation by the Forensic Science Regulator Andrew Rennison is still looking at whether other cases are also at risk but so far 26,000 other samples have been checked and no more have been identified.

The error occurred at what is described as the most advanced automated DNA testing system in the UK at LGC forensics labs in Teddington. A used plastic sample holder containing up to eight vials of DNA was mistakenly reloaded into the machine by a laboratory worker, instead of being put into a bin. The system had been installed in March 2011, and the contamination occurred in October.

Every DNA sample in that seven month period has been checked, and LGC said no other instance of contamination had been uncovered. The regulator is now working with the company in monitoring new procedures that have been put in place, to ensure the mistake is not repeated.




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Researchers Explore Alternatives to Reducing Crime at High-Crime Locations

The bar with the regularly flashing police lights in its parking lot. The apartment building that’s frequently featured on the news because of numerous crime investigations. A new essay suggests an alternative approach to reducing crime in such places, by placing regulations on places where crime is highly concentrated. Authors John Eck, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati, and his daughter, Emily Eck, a researcher at Dalhousie University, are featured this month in the journal, Criminology and Public Policy.

The authors point out that frequent crime incidents are typically concentrated in relatively few places. Property owners who take measures to prevent crime (better lighting and leases, for example) can also reduce crime at those locations, as well as places nearby. Too many times, the problems are exacerbated because a very few property owners take too little responsibility for the property, resulting in frequent calls to police for assistance. This increases the costs of crime to all taxpayers. The authors suggest that crime from these places is a form of pollution.

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Criminal justice: Was alibi ignored in '92 double murder?

In 2002, Cook County prosecutors undertook what then was a most unusual inquiry: the reinvestigation of a double-murder case that sent five young men to prison, even though one of them had records showing he was in a Chicago police lockup when the crime occurred.

About a year later, in March 2003, the office of then-State's Attorney Richard Devine announced that it was satisfied the convictions were sound in spite of a Tribune investigation that had uncovered new evidence suggesting that the young man, Daniel Taylor, was innocent.
Nearly a decade later, reports from that investigation — obtained by the Tribune from sources after State's Attorney Anita Alvarez's office refused to make them available to the newspaper — raise questions about how the investigation was done and whether it was evenhanded.


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Report: FBI Wants to Wiretap Facebook, Twitter, Google

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is pushing for a law that would force social networks, email providers, and other peer-to-peer services to become "wiretap-friendly" according to a CNET report.

Such legislation would expand an existing federal law that applies to cell phone operators and broadband networks. Under 1994's Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), carriers and broadband networks must have built-in backdoors giving law enforcement agencies direct access to user data during warranted investigations. CALEA began with carriers in 1994 and expanded to broadband providers in 2004. At the moment, Internet companies use their own slurping methods to provide user data to law enforcement during search warrants.

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Top judge proposes higher age of criminal responsibility for New York

A proposal that would effectively raise New York's age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18, bringing the state in line with almost every other state in the country, is one step closer to becoming law. The state's chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, formally submitted legislation last week that would create a special court to handle non-violent criminal cases against 16- and 17-year-olds. He first announced the initiative in February. New York and North Carolina are the only states whose courts treat 16-year-olds as adults, and Lippman said this week that he believes there is sufficient support in the state legislature to pass his proposal.
"It's going to happen, whether this year or next year," Lippman told reporters on Tuesday. Supporters of the proposal, which is a hybrid of procedures used in adult and juvenile courts, say it would go much further than the current system in addressing the circumstances that push young people to commit crimes. Instead of simply doling out punishment, judges would have access to a range of alternatives, including community service and therapy.

Under the proposal, a 16- or 17-year-old charged with a non-violent crime would be eligible to have a case diverted from court to a local probation office, which is currently what happens for children under 16. If probation officials are unable to "adjust" a case, a district attorney could then opt to file charges in the proposed Youth Division, where cases would proceed as they currently do in adult court. Youth Division judges would be specially trained in child psychology and the alternative resolution of juvenile cases.

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System routinely frees some burglars

Repeat criminals who burglarize homes, vehicles and businesses are slipping through the criminal justice system because of a gap in the law that forces prosecutors and judges to dismiss charges and let them go free. And as of now, very little can be done to keep them in jail. "They have a built-in get-out-jail-free card," Albuquerque Police Department Commander William Roseman told KRQE News 13.
A man who appeared in court late last month is the perfect example. Terry Cooke, 43, is currently facing charges in a burglary case. It is the same charge he’s faced in more than a dozen separate cases since the year 2000, but the charges were dropped each and every time. The reason is always the same. Based on the analysis of medical professionals, judges have repeatedly found Cooke mentally incompetent to stand trial.

"They let him go," Roseman said. "But they’re not putting him in a mental institution to try to keep him from committing these crimes."


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Cyberbullying Expert’s Research Links School Climate with Online Behavior

Sameer Hinduja, Ph.D., associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice within FAU’s College for Design and Social Inquiry, along with Justin Patchin, Ph.D., associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, have released new research linking school climate with online behavior. Their findings offer research-based strategies for improving school climate to counteract cyberbullying and sexting.

“There is little question that what goes on online affects what happens at school and vice versa,” said Hinduja. “While our research shows that most teens use technology in a safe and responsible manner, some do make mistakes or use technology in ways that create significant problems for others. These behaviors must not be ignored. With the right tools, educators have the power to creative a positive climate and even bully-proof schools at school and online.”


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Crime and Justice Trends in America: How We Got Here; Where We Go Next

The new Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota Law School has embarked on a daunting task: assessing the state of knowledge on crime and justice in the U.S. from 1975, projecting to 2025. Last week, the institute, with support from the Robina Foundation and National Institute of Justice, assembled eight leading scholars to discuss key issues in the field: guns, policing, rehabilitation, sentencing, race and crime, deterrence, drug policy, and youth violence.
Some highlights of what they said follow. Eventually, the institute will publish their papers. Michael Tonry of the University of Minnesota, who presided over the program, said a prime purpose was to understand trends over time. He presented a graph of crime data from the first modern period of rising crime rates in the U.S. in the 1960s, showing how three key categories--homicide, burglary and auto theft--had generally increased until the early 1990s, and now have receded to 1960s levels. The project seeks to examine what we have learned about the factors behinds crime trends--and draw implications for the next decade.

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