The Real CSI: What Happens at a Crime Scene?:
From the diver who finds the body parts, to the forensic specialist who identifies flecks of paint on the victim and the handwriting expert who examines the killer’s notes. What happens behind the yellow tape of one crime scene?
via readwriteweb.comMeet the data brokers. There’s a whole industry full of companies who make their money buying and selling our personal information. The FTC is working on busting this dark racket wide open, but in the meantime, they’re out there. Who are they? Can we stop them? Read on to find out.
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Legal experts said [Angela] Corey chose a tough route with the murder charge, which could send Zimmerman to prison for life if he’s convicted, over manslaughter, which usually carries 15-year prison terms and covers reckless or negligent killings.
The prosecutors must prove Zimmerman’s shooting of Martin was rooted in hatred or ill will and counter his claims that he shot Martin to protect himself while patrolling his gated community in the Orlando suburb of Sanford. Zimmerman’s lawyers would only have to prove by a preponderance of evidence – a relatively low legal standard – that he acted in self-defense at a pretrial hearing to prevent the case from going to trial.
There’s a “high likelihood it could be dismissed by the judge even before the jury gets to hear the case,” Florida defense attorney Richard Hornsby said.
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– Prosecutors face hurdles in Trayvon Martin case (via ryking)
George Zimmerman’s second legal team quits, admitting that they’ve never met him in person (they’ve communicated with him via email/text/phone calls) and they have no idea where is.
No grand jury investigation in Trayvon Martin shooting
The special prosecutor in the investigation of the shooting death of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin has ruled out using a grand jury to investigate the case, meaning her office alone will decide whether to charge shooter George Zimmerman.
The case has captured national attention, largely because of race. Martin was black and Zimmerman, who has not been charged, is white and Hispanic. The state attorney who was previously investigating the shooting, Norm Wolfinger, had said the case would go to a grand jury on April 10, but Wolfinger removed himself from the case on March 22 and was replaced by Angela Corey.
“State Attorney Angela Corey has decided not to use a grand jury in the Trayvon Martin shooting death investigation,” her office said in a statement.
READ MORE: Prosecutor rules out grand jury in Trayvon Martin case
The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm
Photograph by Steve Liss.
Economic crisis means the Mafia is now ‘Italy’s number one bank’: report
Organized crime has tightened its grip on the Italian economy during the economic crisis, making the Mafia the country’s biggest “bank” and squeezing the life out of thousands of small firms, according to a report on Tuesday.
Extortionate lending by criminal groups had become a “national emergency,” said the report by anti-crime group SOS Impresa. Organized crime now generated annual turnover of about €140-billion ($178.89 billion) and profits of more than €100-billion, it added.
“With 65-billion euros in liquidity, the Mafia is Italy’s number one bank,” said a statement from the group, which was set up in Palermo a decade ago to oppose extortion rackets against small business.
Extortionate lending had become an increasingly sophisticated and lucrative source of income, alongside drug trafficking, arms smuggling, prostitution, gambling and racketeering, the report said. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images/Files)
