The United States and India have signed a non-extradition pact, promising not to turn over each others' citizens to a third country or to an international tribunal. UPI reports:

"The two nations have agreed to stand by each other if a third country or an international tribunal seeks the extradition of the other's nationals to be tried in multilateral forums such as the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. Neither will surrender people of the other country to any international tribunal without the other country's express consent."

This sounds like a purely manipulative gesture to try and defeat the power of the International Criminal Court--had we signed on to the Rome Statute, we'd be in there with the other 139 countries right now, making up the rules. Instead we're left out. The Court will go on without us or our input. We were ambivalent about the ICC in the beginning, but last year we had a chance to review the draft guidelines under consideration, and heard a panel of military and international law professors and experts dissect and debate it, and we changed our mind. Here is the list of countries that are part of the Court.

From the overview section of the ICC's website:

An international criminal court has been called the missing link in the international legal system. The International Court of Justice at The Hague handles only cases between States, not individuals. Without an international criminal court for dealing with individual responsibility as an enforcement mechanism, acts of genocide and egregious violations of human rights often go unpunished. In the last 50 years, there have been many instances of crimes against humanity and war crimes for which no individuals have been held accountable. In Cambodia in the 1970s, an estimated 2 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge. In armed conflicts in Mozambique, Liberia, El Salvador and other countries, there has been tremendous loss of civilian life, including horrifying numbers of unarmed women and children. Massacres of civilians continue in Algeria and the Great Lakes region of Africa.

The Judgment of the Nürnberg Tribunal stated that "crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced" -- establishing the principle of individual criminal accountability for all who commit such acts as a cornerstone of international criminal law. According to the Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind, completed in 1996 by the International Law Commission at the request of the General Assembly, this principle applies equally and without exception to any individual throughout the governmental hierarchy or military chain of command. And the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948 recognizes that the crime of genocide may be committed by constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

In situations such as those involving ethnic conflict, violence begets further violence; one slaughter is the parent of the next. The guarantee that at least some perpetrators of war crimes or genocide may be brought to justice acts as a deterrent and enhances the possibility of bringing a conflict to an end. Two ad hoc international criminal tribunals, one for the former Yugoslavia and another for Rwanda, were created in this decade with the hope of hastening the end of the violence and preventing its recurrence.

Most perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity throughout history have gone unpunished. In spite of the military tribunals following the Second World War and the two recent ad hoc international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, the same holds true for the twentieth century. That being said, it is reasonable to conclude that most perpetrators of such atrocities have believed that their crimes would go unpunished. Effective deterrence is a primary objective of those working to establish the international criminal court. Once it is clear that the international community will no longer tolerate such monstrous acts without assigning responsibility and meting outappropriate punishment -- to heads of State and commanding officers as well as to the lowliest soldiers in the field or militia recruits -- it is hoped that those who would incite a genocide; embark on a campaign of ethnic cleansing; murder, rape and brutalize civilians caught in an armed conflict; or use children for barbarous medical experiments will no longer find willing helpers.

The business section of today's New York Times has an article on Ashcroft's directive to the Bureau of Prisons that white collar offenders with short sentences must serve their time in federal prison, not half-way houses. For the past decade, the BOP has been allowing such offenders to go directly to a halfway house.

"In a memorandum last week to Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the director of the Bureau of Prisons, Mr. Ashcroft said that the practice violated federal sentencing laws that require imprisonment and that it offered favorable treatment to white-collar criminals. The directive from the attorney general was first reported by Newsweek."

Because of Ashcroft's new policy, about 125 white collar offenders now in halfway houses will return to federal prisons.

The New York Times article also addresses in detail the proposed sentencing guideline changes for white collar offenders under the newly enacted Sarbanes-Oxley Act --changes with which the Justice Department is not happy.

When a law is enacted that increases penalties, the U.S. Sentencing Commission is directed to draw up new sentencing guidelines. They send them out for public comment. Then they vote on them. After that, unless Congress affirmatively takes action, the new guidelines automatically become law.

The Commission promulgated new guidelines on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and sent them out for comment. In two weeks, the Commission will vote on them. The Justice Department strongly objects to the proposed guidelines because they are not tough enough for low level fraud offenders. The two agencies have been feuding for months over this issue.

"Justice Department officials said in recent interviews that they plan to broaden their corporate investigations to focus more intensely on the professional "gatekeepers" - lawyers, accountants and others - who may have facilitated frauds."

Maybe now that Aschroft's actions are going to affect some prospersous people, some of whom undoubtedly must have "connections", we'll hear louder protests of Ashcroft and his brand of non-compassionate conservatism.

From today's New York Times:With Dog Detectives, Mistakes Can Happen

Experts on explosives detection say that when dogs' handlers are excited and stressed, the dogs may overreact and falsely suggest that explosives are present when they are not. False alerts are better than missing a live bomb, they say, but it is better for the dogs to be accurate. More rigorous training and certification standards and more research into the way dogs detect scents and the relationship between them and their handlers are needed to avoid these problems, said Dr. Lawrence J. Myers, an expert on dog olfaction at the Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine.

If true for explosive searching dogs, it should also be true for dogs searching for drugs following the routine traffic stop.

It takes a lot to surprise us these days, but this news articles about the Air Force providing combat pilots with speed certainly did.

"Not only is the Air Force making the amphetamines widely available to combat pilots, it also has informed them they could be considered unfit to fly certain missions if they don't voluntarily take the amphetamines."

It's not that we object to the pilots taking speed. It's the unbelievable hypocrisy of the goverment which on the one hand puts people in jail for taking amphetamines without a legitimate medical prescription, and now it appears, with the other hand, dispenses the pills for no reason other than to increase alertness and stamina--which is not a recognized medical use for the drug.

Terminally ill cancer patients can't smoke pot to relieve unbearable pain, but pilots can (must?) take an upper to do their job? Give us a break.

Does the Air Force give the pilots Xanax after the mission to calm down?

The Marijuana Policy Project has called for the ouster of U.S. Drug Czar John Walters "for alleged 'illegal and dishonest activities' in campaigning against Nevada's marijuana ballot initiative."

The organization has filed a formal complaint against Walters under the federal Hatch Act charging that he broke the law by using his office to conduct a political campaign that was "absolutely a campaign of lies and distortions designed to frighten people."

The complaint, filed with the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC), accuses Walters of visiting several Nevada cities on October 10 and 11, 2002, and advocating for the defeat of a marijuana legalization initiative there during press briefings and television appearances.

The OSC is an independent agency set up to investigate whistle-blower complaints and alleged wrongdoing by administration officials. The ballot measure, which failed 61% to 39%, would have decriminalized possession of less than 3 ounces of marijuana by adults.

Officials found guilty of Hatch Act violations can be permanently removed from office or suspended for not less than 30 days, according to the OSC Web site.

Walter's spokesman says cabinet officials are exempt from the Hatch Act.

MPP has also filed a complaint with the Nevada Secretary of State (Elections division), that you can read here.

Rob Kampia, Director of MPP, makes no bones about the organizations goals. He told Reuters, "We want him out of the picture. We want him excommunicated from the federal government forever."

Kampia will be discussing MPP's war on the drug czar Friday night on The O'Reilly Factor.

The F.B.I.'s Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January - June 2002 has been released .

Quick reading indicates that murder, rape, and property crimes are up, other violent crimes are down. It is likely too early to tell if we are in a turnaround period in which the declines of the late 1990s are reversing.

Keep in mind that this study includes only crimes reported to authorities.

The New York Times yesterday reported on the emerging Ambulance-Homicide Theory, as to why the murder rate is falling in some places. It seems that the correlation to lower homicides may not have anything to do with policing but rather, how close the attack takes place to a high-tech emergency room.

"for all the theoretical talk of ''broken windows'' and ''zero tolerance'' policing that has dominated the public discourse on crime during the past decade, research published this year suggests that the most significant factor in keeping the homicide rate down is something much more practical: faster ambulances and better care in the emergency room. That, in any case, is the intellectual hand grenade that Anthony Harris, director of the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has thrown into the polarized debate over crime prevention."

There is a discussion of this going on in the comments section of our post yesterday about the drug war catching minnows instead of big fishes.

Kevin Connors points out this article by libertarian Lew Rockwell. PG (BertramRussell) contributes as well.

The official cite to Anthony Harris' report is:

Murder and Medicine: The Lethality of Criminal Assault, 1960–1999, Homicide Studies, May 2002, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 128–166, by Anthony R. Harris, PhD Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Stephen H. Thomas, MD MPH Division of Emergency Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Gene A. Fisher, PhD Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and David J. Hirsch, BS Emergency Medical Services, Lawrence Massachusetts.

The Houston Chronicle reports today that the war on drugs nets small-time offenders.

"Texas' war on drugs punishes few major importers and dealers but imprisons thousands caught with less than a sugar packet full of cocaine or other illegal drugs."

"The battle rages most fiercely in Harris County. Of the 58,000 drug convictions won by local prosecutors over the past five years, 77 percent involved less than a gram of a drug, according to district court data analyzed by the Houston Chronicle. Harris County sent 35,000 of these small-time offenders to jail or prison."

"The numbers suggest that these men and women are collateral damage in the war on drugs, arrested because they were easy targets rather than objects of a grand strategy. The impact is felt most harshly in black neighborhoods."

Nick Bergamo, a college student in LA got a DUI. He gave a blood test, and the results came out at twice the legal limit. But Bergamo knew he hadn't been driving under the influence. He got a lawyer, not just any law firm, but that of Lawrence Taylor, one of the foremost DUI gurus in the country. Turns out, the LAPD botched the test by mixing up his blood sample with someone else's. The case got dismissed.

So if you get a DUI in LA this holiday season, or really, anywhere, make sure your lawyer re-tests the sample.

"With the stakes so high, Bergamo's parents sought out the law offices of Lawrence Taylor, a firm that deals exclusively with DUI cases. Lawyers in that firm automatically retest blood samples tested by the police."

"Taylor, who has written books on the subject of DUIs, said test results from police labs are often unreliable. Sometimes the equipment is not calibrated correctly, he said, or sometimes police put too much or too little of a blood preservative in the sample, which can affect results."

"I'm not a real big fan of crime labs and their criminalists. They're clueless. But most attorneys know less, and that's why they can get by," said Taylor.

"In Bergamo's case, the test results from the LAPD showed that the blood alcohol level in the sample was 0.148. When Taylor's lab performed the test, the results were 0.13. For Bergamo, even the retested results seemed impossible. His attorney then conducted a blood-typing test to determine whether it was Bergamo's blood. That test failed to exclude him as a possible donor."

"The young man, however, was insistent that a mistake had been made. A DNA test was his last hope to prove it. His parents agreed to pay the additional expense of such a test, which runs about $1,200."

"The results finally cleared Bergamo. A judge earlier this month dismissed the case and made a factual finding of innocence on his behalf."

"Since the dismissal, word of Bergamo's case has spread among local defense attorneys in court hallways and legal chat rooms on the Internet."

"DUI practitioners dealing with blood analysis should be aware that crime labs continue to fail in their chain-of-custody record keeping," Taylor warned other lawyers in a recent e-mail message. "And the LAPD apparently remains a prime culprit."

We're spreading the word even further. Thanks to Ann Salisbury of Two Tears in a Bucket for sending us the link to the article.

There will be DUI checkpoints and lots of arrests this holiday season. If you want to brush up on the law and defenses relative to Driving under the Influence, check out our sister site CrimeLynx which has a section devoted to drunk driving defense here.

We rarely defend DUI cases, so please don't take this as a solicitation for our legal services. This is merely a public service announcement.

The Dec. 23 issue of U.S. News and World Reports takes a look at LA Police Chief Bill Bratton and the job ahead of him. The article notes how well his policies worked in New York and asks whether the same policies will work in LA or whether his script will read differently in the City of Angels?

In other Bratton news, the Chief is considering hiring ABC's John Miller--not as a public relations spokesman which many expected, but as an advisor on homeland security.

We spoke with Miller at Bratton's swearing in late October about whether he'd leave 20/20 to work with Bratton again, and he said, "I'm always up for an adventure."

"As a newsman, he is best-known for a 1998 interview in which Osama bin Laden threatened to launch attacks on U.S. civilians. A high level source at ABC News, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Miller was considering an offer to join the LAPD. "We know that John has spoken with the chief about the job and we have given him our blessing," the source said."

Bratton and Miller make a good combo and we bet its a done deal with just the details being ironed out.

The Canadians want to decriminalize pot possession, as we reported here. U.S. Drug Czar John Walters is opposed to the idea and suggests it will present a problem with border crime. He went to Buffalo last week to make a speech about it.

How did the Canadians respond to Walters? Butt out, it's none of your business.

The czar of anti-drug enforcement in the U.S. told us Thursday that we in Canada shouldn't lower the penalties for possession of pot because marijuana is bad for us, especially if we're thinking of crossing the border.

Just to make sure we heard him, John Walters came all the way from Washington to Buffalo to deliver his message, just as a committee of MPs was recommending that people who possess or cultivate less than 30 grams of pot should not face criminal prosecution, but a fine.

Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, should have saved himself the trip. How we deal with drugs or any other domestic issue is up to us, not the White House. The laws we pass apply to our citizens, and how they are perceived in the U.S. or anywhere else has nothing to do with it.

Walters would like us to deal more harshly with the traffickers and big-time growers, and we should. But we're dealing with our recreational pot-smokers the way we think is appropriate, and Walters should butt out.

"The Los Angeles City Council gave initial approval Friday to a law that would allow police to seize and sell vehicles used by motorists while soliciting prostitutes."

"The ordinance, which was given unanimous council approval but requires a second vote next Tuesday, was endorsed by Police Chief William J. Bratton as a way to address a problem plaguing some Los Angeles neighborhoods."

"Bratton said a similar law proved effective in New York City when he headed the department there. "It's intended to be another tool to discourage people from using their cars to solicit prostitution," Bratton said after the vote. LAPD officials said the department has primarily targeted prostitutes and pimps for enforcement action in the past. Friday's vote represents the city's most ambitious effort to go after their customers."

Police intend to use the law in sting operations in which "female police officers pose as prostitutes and tape solicitations before making arrests. Proceeds from car sales would be divided between the Police Department and the city attorney's office."

The ACLU charges that the law is unconsitutional. But a similar ordinance in Oakland was upheld by the California Supreme Court.

In Bennis v. Michigan, 116 S. CT. 994 (1996), the Supreme Court upheld the seizure and forfeiture of a wife's interest in a car she owned jointly with her husband after her husband used the car without her knowledge to patronize a prostitute. The car was declared a "public nusiance" under Michigan law, which did not have an innocent owner defense.

The Supreme Court ruled neither 14th Amendment's due process nor the unjust takings clause of the 5th Amendment was violated by the law's failure to include a defense for innocent owners--an innocent owner being one who could establish that they had no knowledge or reason to know the vehicle would be used illegally. Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion. Justices O’Connor, Scalia, Thomas and Ginsburg joined in the result.

Justice Ginsberg and Thomas wrote separate opinions, agreeing with the result. Ginsberg said:

“Michigan has decided to deter Johns from using cars they own (or co-own) to contribute to neighborhood blight, and that abatement endeavor hardly warrants this Court’s approbation”.

Justice Thomas said:

“This case is ultimately a reminder that the Federal Constitution does not prohibit everything that is intensely undesirable” ....

“The limits on what property can be forfeited as a result of what wrongdoing- for example, what it means to ‘use’ property in crime for purposes of forfeiture law- are not clear to me”.

Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Souter and Breyer, dissented:

“The principal use of the car in this case was not to provide a site for petitioner’s husband to carry out forbidden trysts. Indeed, there is no evidence in the record that the car had ever previously been used for a similar purpose. An isolated misuse of a stationary vehicle should not justify the forfeiture of an innocent owner’s property on the theory that it constituted an instrumentality of the crime”.

“Apart from the lack of a sufficient nexus between petitioner’s car and the offense her husband committed, I would reverse because petitioner is entirely without responsibility for that act. Fundamental fairness prohibits the punishment of innocent people.”

Justice Kennedy also dissented, arguing:

“This forfeiture cannot meet the requirements of due process. Nothing in the rationale of the Michigan Supreme Court indicates that the forfeiture turned on the negligence or complicity of petitioner, or a presumption thereof, and nothing supports the suggestion that the value of her co-ownership is so insignificant as to be beneath the law’s protection.”

****
The moral of the story is that if you live in a county or city that has a public nuisance abatement law, check and see if it provides a defense for an innocent owner. If not, contact your legislator or city councilperson and ask them to draft remedial legislation.