Crime and Punishment

[Samson]

Police use rape kit DNA to arrest victims

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Monday that his office has recently learned that the city's police force has been using DNA taken from sexual assault victims to link them to crimes, potentially discouraging people who've been raped from coming forward.

Boudin, who revealed details of his findings in an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, said his office became aware of the practice last week when the San Francisco Police Department used DNA it had collected from a woman years ago as part of a rape exam in order to connect her to a recent felony property crime.

Rape kits are collected when a victim comes forward about a sexual assault crime. In the process of compiling the kit, an examiner gathers bodily fluids from the survivor to test for any evidence their attacker may have left behind.

Boudin says SFPD has been entering survivors' DNA into a database to compare it to evidence from other crime scenes. His office is not aware of how many times a victim's rape kit DNA has been used to arrest them, he said, but added that the database may hold thousands of victims' DNA information collected over "many, many years."​

 

[EnglishEdward]

I don't have a problem with that.

 

[Samson]

I did not think I needed to spell out the downside that is in the article:

Police Chief Bill Scott told the Chronicle that he agrees that the issue Boudin raised is "sufficiently concerning" and said his staff is reviewing the matter.

Authorities "must never create disincentives for crime victims to cooperate with police," he said​

 

[EnglishEdward]

Not sure how the authorities are committing disincentives.

It would seek to me that the women who commit the crimes are creating the disincentive by leaving their DNA behind.

Science is supposed to be neutral regarding data and evidence, and police procedure should follow that and not agree that DNA
only be used one way, to progress the women's complaint of rape while being barred from its use for investigating other crimes.

 

[Farm Boy]

Oh, your just screwed in the is US with regard to DNA. You don't own it under the law and there is no right to privacy in crime. They'll compile you from a 2nd cousin that uses one of those dipweed ancestry testing companies. This probably has an expansive future, the rape kit test linkage thing.

It'll seem less misogynistic when public schools collect samples from all students by default for the missing child database or whatever the police name it.

 

[Samson]

Texas government does something good????????????

Texas sued Facebook parent company Meta for exploiting the biometric data of millions of people in the state - including those who used the platform and those who did not. The company, according to a suit filed by state Attorney General Ken Paxton, violated state privacy laws and should be responsible for billions of dollars in damages.

The suit involves Facebook's "tag suggestions" feature, which the company ended last year, that used facial recognition to encourage users to link the photo to a friend's profile.

Paxton alleged the company collected facial recognition data without their consent, shared it with third parties, and did not destroy the information in a timely manner — all in violation of state law.

Paxton said at a news conference outside of the Harrison County Courthouse on Monday that the fine for each violation of the Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act and the Deceptive Trade Practices Act is $25,000. There could have been literally billions of violations.

Last year, Facebook settled a class action suit brought by users who said their data had been used without their consent for $650 million.

Texas filed suit on Monday in a state district court in the small city of Marshall. It's unclear why the attorney general's office selected that specific jurisdiction. The state hired two outside law firms to argue the case.​

 

[Samson]

Prince Andrew settles US civil sex assault case

Prince Andrew has settled a civil sexual assault case brought against him in the US by Virginia Giuffre, court documents show.

Ms Giuffre had been suing the Duke of York, claiming he sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was 17, allegations he has repeatedly denied.

A letter filed to the US district court on Tuesday said the duke and Ms Giuffre had reached an out-of-court settlement.
The duke's representatives said he had no comment beyond the court statement.

A statement in the letter to US judge Lewis A Kaplan, said the duke would make a "substantial donation to Ms Giuffre's charity in support of victims' rights".

Asked for comment on the latest development, Ms Giuffre's lawyer David Boies told the PA News agency: "I believe this event speaks for itself."​

 

[El_Machinae]

Not sure how the authorities are committing disincentives.

Your DNA is not germane to whether you've been sexually assaulted or not. With regards to a DNA swab during a rape kit, that detail should fall under 'medical privacy'.

A good lawyer should be able to get the entire property crime charge tossed, which is unfortunate because it should lose in a precedent-setting fashion.

 

[Samson]

Pressing F12 may not be illegal after all, but a Missouri County Prosecutor thinks it may be

This month, Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson announced no charges would be filed in conjunction with the revelation that Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education's (DESE) website exposed the Social Security details of educators.

"There is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law," said Thompson in a statement [PDF]. "However, upon a review of the case file, the issues at the heart of the investigation have been resolved through non-legal means."

Last October, Josh Renaud, a reporter for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, found that a website run by the DESE exposed the Social Security numbers of school personnel. He did so by examining the client-side source code of the website, which is publicly viewable by anyone with a web browser.

After Renaud filed a story to this effect, Missouri Governor Mike Parson (R) said the state would investigate and explore legal options, and claimed the incident might cost the US state's taxpayers as much as $50m.

Elad Gross, an attorney representing Shaji Khan, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who was contacted by Renaud to verify his findings, wrote a letter [PDF] to Missouri officials a week after Parson threatened prosecution. He explained how the only law violation with regard to the data exposure was committed by the state when it failed to secure its employees' personal information.

"This decision is a relief," said Renaud in a statement [PDF] published through his website. "But it does not repair the harm done to me and my family.

"My actions were entirely legal and consistent with established journalistic principles. Yet Governor Mike Parson falsely accused me of being a 'hacker' in a televised press conference, in press releases sent to every teacher across the state, and in attack ads aired by his political action committee. He ordered the Highway Patrol to begin a criminal investigation, forcing me to keep silent for four anxious months.

"This was a political persecution of a journalist, plain and simple."

Renaud further expressed concern that Parson's actions will have a chilling effect on those trying to report on security and privacy flaws in Missouri.

In a statement, Governor Parson's office maintained that Renaud had unlawfully hacked the school website: "The hacking of Missouri teachers' personally identifiable information was a clear violation of Section 569.095, RSMo, which the state takes seriously. The state did its part by investigating and presenting its findings to the Cole County Prosecutor, who has elected not to press charges, as is his prerogative."​

 

[TheMeInTeam]

"There is an argument to be made that there was a violation of law," said Thompson in a statement

Lolno, there was not.

The governor's retention of the office should not survive the next election. What a display of incompetence.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Bernie Madoff's sister and her husband have died in a suspected murder-suicide
February 21, 20228:10 AM ET
BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The sister of Wall Street fraudster Bernie Madoff and her husband were found dead in what investigators said was an apparent murder-suicide in Florida, according to news reports. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office on Sunday identified the couple as 87-year-old Sondra Wiener of Boynton Beach and her 90-year-old husband, Marvin. They were found unresponsive with gunshot wounds Thursday afternoon inside their residence. "Detectives from the Violent Crimes Division arrived on scene to investigate further. After further investigation it appears to be a murder/suicide," the Sheriff's Office statement said.

Officials said the cause of death will be determined by the Medical Examiner's Office. A woman who identified herself as the wife of son David Wiener asked for privacy "at this time of grief." Contacted by phone, she said: "We are not making any comment at this time."

Madoff was infamously known for orchestrating a massive Ponzi scheme that wiped out people's fortunes and ruined charities. He was sentenced to 150 years in prison after pleading guilty in 2009 to fraud and other charges and died while incarcerated at age 82 last year.

 

[Samson]

International law = colonial law?

While non-state corporations are increasingly accorded sovereign powers, non-state peoples living under state terror – from Kashmir to Standing Rock – are denied sovereignty and effaced.

Under this paradigm, the Rohingya people are not considered a party in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) case on the Rohingya genocide, itself a legacy of British colonial ethno-politics in Myanmar. At the ICJ, the Rohingya as non-state actors are entirely dependent on states such as the Gambia to represent their interests; the case is officially called The Gambia v Myanmar.

Absurdly, Myanmar’s military coup government – widely denounced and opposed within the country as illegitimate – has more legal standing in the upcoming hearings than the Rohingya, who have no standing at all. Unlike state parties, they have not even been permitted access to the periodic reports produced by Myanmar – regarding its implementation of court-ordered “provisional measures” to safeguard Rohingya lives and rights, which are subject to ongoing flagrant assault. The Rohingya are erased, in the very legal process meant to rectify their genocidal erasure by the Myanmar regime.

For the Palestinians, the denial of their self-determination – the source of injustice – is perversely used to bar them from justice: a colonial catch-22. For instance, the US is attempting to disqualify Palestine’s current case against it at the ICJ (for wrongfully legitimising Israel’s illegal claim to sovereignty over Jerusalem), by arguing that Palestine cannot bring a complaint because it is not a sovereign state.

In contrast, Israel’s statehood was recognised in spite of the crimes of the Nakba – and possibly in part because of them. Advocating for recognition of Israel at the UN in 1948, the US representative pointed to the “extreme homogeneity” of Israel’s population – achieved by the extreme method of expulsions and massacres of Indigenous Palestinians at Deir Yassin, Tantura, and hundreds of other depopulated villages across what is now Israel.

This is “the form of political agency now ordained by the West – sovereignty as the right to colonise,” scholar of structural racism Sunera Thobani observes. Resistance to the state’s “right to colonise” is condemned as “terrorism” – or racism, as in a statement last month from four UN Special Rapporteurs equating criticism of Israel’s foundations with antisemitism. Meanwhile, terror inflicted by the state itself is excused, exceptionalised, or excised from the law altogether.

During the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention, states concerned that it would “inhibit their ability to wage war and to repress dissent at home or in their colonies” ensured that “measures like population transfer, cultural genocide, and the liquidation of political groups were excluded,” as genocide historian A Dirk Moses has documented. Apartheid South Africa and New Zealand, for instance, worried that prohibiting cultural genocide would interfere with their efforts to civilise “primitive or backward groups.”

This logic continues to be invoked in the present, even by some avowed anti-imperialists who defend China’s policies to dismantle Uyghur peoplehood as simply the “price” to be paid for development – similar to that exacted by other supposedly uplifting enterprises, such as the British Empire in India, the US, and Australia.

Even with the proposal for a new international crime of ecocide, the underlying subjugation of ecological need to service (some) human’s greed remains. The definition of ecocide developed by a panel of legal experts only covers damage that is already unlawful or “wanton” – that is, “clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated.”

Like “terrorism” and genocide, ecocide is cast as an irrational aberration; not the economically rationalised plunder for profit that has turned ancient forests into infernos, rivers into fish poison, seas and lakes into mass animal graves, thousands of species into extinction statistics, the climate into a catastrophe-generator, centuries-old glaciers and icebergs into meltwater (to be bottled up and sold at luxury prices), Indigenous homelands into extractive wastelands, and the communities impeding this “progress” into “collateral damage.”

As the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil exhorts in a dossier of complaints against the Bolsonaro government submitted to the International Criminal Court: “Given the urgent need to slow down patterns of nature’s destruction and consumption … we must rescue and preserve knowledge, relations, ways, techniques and technologies that may offer us the chance to live a different world” – precisely what the “civilising offensive” sought to eradicate.​

 

[Farm Boy]

Lolno, there was not.

The governor's retention of the office should not survive the next election. What a display of incompetence.

My faith in the voters of the great state of Missouri is not so high. See, I'm familiar with the voters next door.

 

[IglooDame]

Oh, your just screwed in the is US with regard to DNA. You don't own it under the law and there is no right to privacy in crime. They'll compile you from a 2nd cousin that uses one of those dipweed ancestry testing companies. This probably has an expansive future, the rape kit test linkage thing.

It'll seem less misogynistic when public schools collect samples from all students by default for the missing child database or whatever the police name it.

One reason I'm happy that I'm adopted, with unknown (at this point) biological parentage.

 

[Farm Boy]

The state(s) kept records when we adopted ours. No escape. The gentle auspices of the state are so populated with kind and not malice sodden souls.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Damn gummint interfering with our freedumb and bodily autonomy.

Southwest passenger put the ‘P’ in plane

Man’s behavior on board forced the flight headed to California to divert to ABQ

Copyright © 2022 Albuquerque Journal
BY MATTHEW REISEN

Part of Southwest Airlines’ slogan is: “Low fares. Nothing to hide.”

One passenger apparently took the second part a little too seriously during a f light over New Mexico on Friday. The man, who allegedly exposed himself, urinated in a corner and tried to fight two flight attendants, got a first-class ticket to jail when the plane was diverted to the Albuquerque International Sunport. Samson Hardridge, who is 33 or 34 years old, is charged in federal court with interference with f light crew members and attendants in the Feb. 18 incident. Hardridge’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

According to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court: Hardridge was a passenger on a Southwest f light from Dallas to Burbank, California, when he got up to use the bathroom, which was occupied. A flight attendant asked him to wait in the aisle and, Hardridge, with his hands in his pants and a question of his own, asked if she wanted to see his genitals; “to which they declined.” Hardridge then went to the galley door and began to urinate “in the corner of the aircraft” before the flight attendant told him that was not allowed. Hardridge became “very hostile,” yelling and threatening two flight attendants, calling them “dumb (expletive).” The flight attendants asked Hardridge to clean up his urine and, as he continued to yell, told him to go back to his seat. The flight attendants “feared for their safety and that of the flight” due to Hardridge’s unpredictable behavior and alerted the pilot, who landed the plane in Albuquerque.

 

[Sommerswerd]

I'd dispute the claim that his seat, presumably in the back of a police squad-car, on his trip to jail, constituted a "first-class" ticket. Those seats suck and there is no beverage or meal service whatsoever.

 

[RobAnybody]

Depends on your race. Some mass murderers get taken to Burger King.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

i don't get the reference to burger king wrt mass murderers, was there a specific incident for that?

though that kind of sounds like a punishment in its own right, lol. it certainly wouldn't be a "first class" ticket

 

[Bamspeedy]

Dylan Roof wasn't taken TO a Burger King. An officer brought him food FROM a burger king.

He was being held and interviewed at the police department waiting for federal officials to arrive. The police department isn't the jail, so they didn't have the facilities to feed him.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2015/06/22/dylann-roof-burger-king/