The Different Faces Of Plea Agreements

There is a problem in our legal system regarding plea bargaining. As a result of a plea agreement, some dangerous criminals are allowed to go free with just a slap on the wrist.

It does however depend on the jurisdiction: Some states are more tougher on those who commit crimes. It just amazes me on how it depends on what state a criminal commits his crime determines the severity of the sentence.

I feel that there needs to be some sort of across the board sentencing guidelines before our legal system accepts plea bargains.

Fraud On Myspace

There has been countless news stories about people using the online social networking site, Myspace, as a playground for child predators, burglars, scam artists and other social deviants. Several attorney generals have also battled with Myspace in order to obtain the records of convicted sexual predators.

Now Myspace may soon be viewed as a victim of its users' actions. Prosecutors are trying to bring fraud charges against Lori Drew, an unstable woman, who used the social networking site to harass a 13 year old girl. The girl later committed suicide, however, Lori Drew was never charged with committing a crime.

Can you imagine that Myspace is now being considered a victim? I hope that other fraudsters face the same fate.

What Will The Convicted Felon Do?

Will the convicted felon ask his wife for forgiveness once he gets out of prison?



Who knows; psychopaths are unaware of their behavior.

Jerry Seinfeld and Wife Gets Sued

You remember Jessica Seinfeld; the author who Oprah praised on her show? It turns out her words may not be her own:

Missy Chase Lapine, the author of “The Sneaky Chef,” a cookbook whose recipes camouflage puréed vegetables and fruits in comfort food for children, sued Jessica and Jerry Seinfeld on Monday, charging copyright infringement and defamation.

In the lawsuit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, Ms. Lapine accuses Ms. Seinfeld of “brazen plagiarism.” Ms. Seinfeld wrote a cookbook, “Deceptively Delicious,” that also employs hidden puréed vegetables in its recipes for children.

Guess what: Jessica Seinfeld's publisher is standing behind her work. I guess being married to a celebrity has it's advantages.

Widow Fights For Deceased Husband

This was such a touching article, I decided to copy it in its entirety:

In the 26 years since former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal gunned down her cop husband on a Philadelphia street, Maureen Faulkner has often felt like a reed in a tornado.

As death penalty opponents around the world rallied to win Abu-Jamal a new trial, contending that he had been framed by local police, Faulkner quietly fought back one hearing at a time.

She never missed a court hearing through the long appeals process, even after she moved from Philadelphia to suburban Ventura County. She's appeared at pro-Mumia events, handing out fliers to explain the evidence that led a jury to convict and sentence Abu-Jamal to death.

Now, with a new book that presents her view of what she believes is the misguided support that has made her husband's killer a global cause celebre, Faulkner, 51, says she is determined to remain the voice of her late husband, Danny.

"Here's a man who murdered another man with premeditation and malice. Why does he have a voice?" asked Faulkner, calm and articulate, from the sun-filled dining room of her hilltop home north of Los Angeles. "My husband has been silenced."

Jeff Mackler, a national coordinator of the Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, said he hadn't yet read Faulkner's book but planned to do so. What happened to her husband is a "terrible tragedy," Mackler said.

"But it's an equally terrible tragedy that an innocent man is going to be executed in the name of satisfying her grief."

To Faulkner, "Murdered by Mumia: A Life Sentence of Loss, Pain, and Injustice" is a way of countering misinformation that Abu-Jamal's supporters have distributed in a campaign to free him, or at least to win him a new trial.

But it's also a look at a woman who decided to honor her late husband by not running away from the controversy.

The Faulkners had been married a year when she got "the knock" in the middle of the night Dec. 9, 1981. Faulkner was a five-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department.

"With his shiny adornments glistening against the dark night, I thought maybe I was dreaming," Faulkner writes of the officer who stood outside her door that night. "My heart pounded furiously against my rib cage, and my knees felt weak as I opened the door."

It was the beginning of a new life that would take Faulkner from Philadelphia to California and cast her as the living symbol of her dead husband.

"I don't want people to think I'm angry, because I'm not. I've moved on in my life," said Faulkner, who has lived with her companion, Paul Palkovic, for 16 years.

"But there's just something inside of me that says I have to seek justice for Danny."

Faulkner's book covers the well-established events of that night. Her husband, a patrolman in the city's red-light district, stopped Billy Cook, Abu-Jamal's brother, for a traffic infraction. Cook punched Faulkner, and the two started to scuffle.

Abu-Jamal, who was driving a taxicab that night, saw the confrontation from across the street and leaped from his cab to intervene.

Several shots were fired, and police moments later found Faulkner face-up on the sidewalk with bullets in his back and forehead. Abu-Jamal had also been wounded and was taken to a hospital for surgery. After recovering, he was ordered to stand trial on a charge of first-degree murder.

Prosecutors produced four witnesses who said Abu-Jamal had fired on Faulkner as he approached and then straddled the officer to fire several more rounds.

Ballistics evidence tied the bullets to Abu-Jamal's gun, which was found beside him when police arrived.

A bullet from Faulkner's service revolver was recovered from Abu-Jamal's chest. Abu-Jamal did not testify at the trial, nor did his brother. A jury found him guilty and imposed the death sentence.

Maureen Faulkner, then 25, thought that was the end of her nightmare. In 1983, she moved to California, eager to get away from the trauma and to start a new life.

"My friends were married and having children," she said. "I was pretty much alone."

But she was pulled back repeatedly to Philadelphia and that cold December night.

A nascent "Free Mumia" movement picked up steam in 1995 with the publication of Abu-Jamal's first book, "Live From Death Row." A radio reporter before his arrest, he was articulate, charming and a prodigious writer.

He was frequently invited to contribute to respected publications, and with each one, support to free him grew.

In 1995, dozens of celebrities, including Mike Farrell, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sarandon and Paul Newman, paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times laying out a case for a new trial.

The next year, a British-made documentary, "Mumia Abu-Jamal: A Case for Reasonable Doubt?," aired on HBO. Abu-Jamal was invited to appear, via audiotape, at college commencements.

Each time, Maureen Faulkner responded. She would call the publisher and ask if they knew they were supporting a convicted cop killer. She and Palkovic flew to events at which Abu-Jamal's case was being made before students, and they would sit in the front row.

They handed out brochures, watching as some supporters torched the papers in front of them. Faulkner said she's been spit on and has received threatening phone calls. For that reason, she's reluctant to specify the city where she lives or other aspects of her life.

During a December book tour, Faulkner said, she was flooded with support from people who urged her to continue the fight. The book has sold about 70,000 copies and is in its third printing, said Khuong Phan, a spokesman for the publisher, Globe Pequot Press.

Faulkner, meanwhile, is waiting for the latest twist in a long appeals process.

In 2001, a federal judge upheld Abu-Jamal's conviction but threw out his death sentence, saying the jury had been improperly instructed.

Both sides appealed and are waiting a decision on whether Abu-Jamal should be granted a new sentencing hearing -- or even a new trial.

Faulkner, who took an early retirement from work in a medical office, says she isn't looking forward to another round of court hearings.

But she said she would be there.

It never ceases to shock me how people fight for the criminals.

Does Myspace Protect Online Predators?

With an estimated 100 million registered users, MySpace.com is reportedly the world’s busiest social networking Web site. Critics say the Web site’s operators don’t do enough to stop child predators from misusing it.

Last February, a federal judge in Austin, Texas, dismissed a $30 million lawsuit filed against MySpace by the family of a 13-year-old girl who said she was sexually assaulted by a 19- year-old man she met on the site. The man had falsely told the girl he was a high school senior and convinced her to give him her telephone number.

The judge said MySpace was protected under the Communications Decency Act and cannot be required to verify the age of every user. MySpace officials have said they have worked with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on security improvements, including free parental notification software.

Do you think Myspace protect predators?

Domestic Violence Is An Alarming Statistics

TWENTY-FIVE thousand Victorian children a year see horrific family violence attacks, mostly between their parents.

How could anyone expose their children to this?

Two out of five of them are aged under five.

A Herald Sun analysis of Victoria Police figures shows an average of 25,000 children a year are directly exposed to domestic outbursts so violent that police are called.

Over the past five years, 124,022 children were at family violence incidents attended by police. Of those, 46,937 were under five.

Last year, 20,816 children under 18 saw attacks and more than 8300 of them were under five years old.

At least one child is present at every second domestic incidents police attend, figures show.

Maybe the drug addicted Katrina evacuee should wake up.

Gauging Online Prostitution

I found this article intriging and I thought about a New Orleans evacuee who left the "Big Easy" after Hurricane Katrina, in order to perform "Oral Sex Acts" on a prostitute. That same evacuee was later convicted of residential burglary in Pierce County Superior Court in the State of Wash9ngton. He took the long ride to find a prostitute. He did not use craiglist for his ventures but he later used Myspace and a chatline, In Tacoma, to find other prostitutes to perform oral sex on.

When it comes to finding clients, the modern streetwalker lets her fingers do most of the work, the click clack of a computer keyboard replacing the sound of stiletto heels pacing the pavement.

Just how much illicit e-commerce is going on in the area is hard to measure. But after Fife drew attention to the issue recently when it passed an ordinance targeting online sex solicitation, we decided to set up an experiment to attempt to find out.

The Fife ordinance is the first in Washington to target Internet sex ads. And there are a lot of them. A quick check one day last week turned up more than 1,000 “escort” ads in the South Sound on one Web site, the free online bulletin board Craigslist.

Told of the large numbers of Internet solicitations we found, law enforcement agencies in other local jurisdictions said they’re aware of online flesh peddling, but have mainly chosen to target their limited resources at “real world” prostitutes who are disruptive to local businesses and residential neighborhoods.

Spokesman Lt. Dave Guttu said Lakewood police had done a couple of stings using Craigslist, but made relatively few arrests considering the time and manpower required.

“And there’s a lot of down time,” he said.

The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department tried a Craigslist operation, but also found it labor intensive, spokesman Ed Troyer said. With only limited funding for vice operations, such operations won’t be a priority in the future, he said.

Tacoma police spokesman Mark Fulghum said, “We get a lot more complaints about prostitution on the streets.”

Police in other jurisdictions have set up sting operations on Craigslist. In Seattle last year, officers using a covert ad arrested 71 people, including a bank officer and a surgeon. A recent Cook County, Ill., operation rounded up 60 women.

So what The News Tribune wondered was: How many people in the South Sound are using the Internet to find pay-for-play sex? |Read on|

What Do One Do On House Arrest?

Ask Stan "Pampy" Barre, III. The expert crime offender who spends his days thinking up new schemes to lick the pros... between the legs.



Hey Stan..They do have prostitutes in New Orleans.

Crime Stories

ALTHOUGH scores of them are published every year, mystery anthologies are harder to assemble than you might think. Maybe it was easier for 1920s editors who had to contend with a smaller, albeit rich, universe populated by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As the number of writers expanded, later anthologists narrowed their focus -- to the P.I. novel, the police procedural or standout work by women, gay and lesbian or African American crime writers.

But in recent years, mystery anthologies with original premises are like variations of those darned green bean casseroles -- there's only so far you can take them. Houghton Mifflin's annual "Best American Mystery Stories" are reliable exceptions as is small press Akashic Books' city-themed Noir series, including this year's "Los Angeles Noir," which gives readers a far-ranging, multicultural view of crime from Los Feliz to Belmont Shore. But after reading the fifth single-sport mystery collection or the detective anthology featuring White House pets (sad to say), a reader can become a little jaded. |Read more|