At least in fair Norwich, CT, as this story leads me to believe. I can only imagine how this scene unfolded. Cops arrive at the scene of a fire. A building is destroyed, 14 people (including 7 children) are now homeless.

They arrest and charge the offender….who happens to be eight years old. That’s right. They arrested an 8-year old for recklessly starting a fire.

Not only that, they charged her with a felony. Now, this kid is either the devil incarnate or the whole damn thing was an accident.

The charge is Arson in the third degree, which states:

(a) A person is guilty of arson in the third degree when he recklessly causes destruction or damage to a building, as defined in section 53a-100, of his own or of another by intentionally starting a fire or causing an explosion.

Did the child’s acts fit the statute? Perhaps. Is it a crime? I really, really, really doubt it. However, since “accident” seems to have disappeared from the dictionary, this poor girl has been arrested at the age of eight, charged with a felony and will probably have some trauma from this.

Do we always have to assign blame for loss or damage? Have we become so focused on criminalization that we cannot see we are compounding these people’s misery? What is the point of this arrest? You’re going to send an eight-year old to jail? You’re going to ask her to complete probation or community service?

Reckless or not, I doubt she knows what the hell she’s doing or did.

It’s not like the Norwich police don’t have anything to do. Note that this is a Class C felony, which carries a maximum term of 10 years.

This led me to wonder: What sort of movie would The Problem Child be today? Then I realized it wouldn’t be a movie. It would be a Law and Order episode.

(Side note: Who is Law and who is Order in L A& O?)

From the Fail Blog

Apparently, Oregon is trying. The story goes thusly: Oregon sent a cease and desist letter to Justia and Public.Resource.Org. They claimed a copyright in the “arrangement and subject matter compilation of Oregon statutory law…” Thus, Oregon is asking these sites to take down the Oregon statutes they make available for free.

Most of the correspondence is available for view here. As Justia and P.R.O point out in this letter, the Oregon website is horribly W3C non-compliant (there are over 503,000 HTML errors!), is not “section 508” compliant, doesn’t use CSS (!!!) and even has a robots.txt file that blocks search engines!

How is that “accessible to the public”? The site lacks functionality and may not be accessible by all browsers and all operating systems.

So, what if a State decides to either charge for access to its statutes or makes it publicly available on a crappy website where not all can view the pages. Do we have a legitimate notice problem? I know we are all presumed to know the law, but if the State is charging for access to the actual text of the Statutes, or makes them difficult to access, what are the chances of successfully defending a prosecution on due process grounds?

Also, what the hell is wrong with Oregon? Why, in this day and age, would you be so stubborn and so stupid? What is really the point of “protecting” the Code? I don’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish, other than look foolish.

Anyway, anyone see a potential notice problem here?

H/T: HaveOpinionWillTravel

This is some of the oddest “testimony” before a legislative committee. From CT News Junkie:

“From liquor and smoking in a state facility, from sex in actual offices to kickbacks from lobbyists…” [Michael] Marsulo said.

More than one legislator joked that they would like to know where the sex is happening so they could get some and many were asking each other if they were part of the 80 percent or the 20 percent.

Former Lt. Gov. Kevin Sullivan of West Hartford told the intern Tuesday that in 1970 he started his internship at the Capitol and it lead him to want to run for public office. He said the bulk of the people here are good people. “There are some bums, but there aren’t very many,” Sullivan said.

“This is what you get from politicians,” Marsulo responded.

Earlier during the exchange Marsulo said, “I can’t reveal a lot of where my sources are right now. I will in the future.”

Heh. The video is here and fast-forward to 1:15 to see it.

Update: Video below

Some interesting CT stories from today that I’m really just too lazy to make into full-fledged posts.

First, New Haven public defender Tom Ullmann gives the New Haven police department a piece of his mind and takes a few swings at the State’s Attorney’s office too:

Defense attorney Thomas Ullmann has charged that some members of the New Haven Police Department’s Detective Bureau are “incompetent, unprofessional and untruthful” in handling witnesses and investigating crimes. Ullmann, said the detectives’ performance is “at its lowest level in the 30 years I’ve been here.”

Ullmann accused the detectives of “a rush to judgment, not being thorough, not following up on obvious leads.” He said there was “a shocking lapse of asking witnesses investigative questions, such as who had been drinking or doing drugs.” Ullmann added, “Their attitude was ‘the less we know, the better.’ This feeds into their tunnel vision on the case.”

He alleged the Detective Bureau has “a history of suggesting information and providing facts to witnesses and failing to investigate facts pointing in a different direction.” He said in some cases witnesses have been “harassed.”

Moreover, Ullmann charged, “This culture doesn’t exist without some enabling by the state’s attorney’s office. This doesn’t happen without the prosecutors winking and nodding and looking the other way.” He added, “There are some really good prosecutors here, but sometimes people close their eyes to this stuff.”

Yowza!

Second, the Appellate and Supreme Courts might be in danger of losing heating and cooling May 1st onwards. The Supreme Court recently rejected emergency appeals filed by the State to compel the service provider to continue providing past the expiration of the contract on May 1.

On March 27, Hartford Superior Court Judge John J. Langenbach ruled that TEN Company has no obligation to supply the state buildings with heat, or the chilled water that runs air-conditioning systems, after its contract expires.

Langenbach said he could find no legal authority to “force TEN to continue a business relationship with the State that it wishes to end because the State may suffer harm as a result of its failure to plan for the expiration of that relationship.”

The State apparently figured that there’s no way TEN wouldn’t provide heat and a/c, so they have done absolutely nothing to prepare for this.

TEN offered to sell the piping system to the state, but officials didn’t make an offer. Wrote Langenbach: “The State has not taken a single step to begin the process of procuring an alternative source of heating and cooling for the eight buildings.”

Actually, it’s not entirely true that the state has failed to act. “Well, we filed an injunction. We also sought some legislative relief. So those are the things we’ve done,” one state official told Langenbach.

Public Works officials contend that a permanent system would take six years to install, and even a temporary solution would take two years to implement. But Langenbach gave credence to TEN’s general manager, Derek Rudd, who testified that temporary heating and cooling could be put in place “fairly quickly.”

Luckily, the current term of the Courts ends on April 30 (although the next one starts mid-May!). This should get interesting.

Attack a federal prosecutor. Seems pretty logical, no? Yet Victor Wright decided to buck conventional wisdom and make a lunge for the prosecutor with a razor.

Sucks for him that two people in the courtroom were former military personnel: His lawyer and the court reporter. He was tackled to the ground (and roughed up a bit, I bet).

“Why don’t you try me instead of her?” stenographer Ron Tolkin shouted at the cowardly criminal as he leaped on Wright, before the group fell to the ground in a heap.

Both the elderly lawyer and Tolkin, 60, are former military men who served in Vietnam.

The “elderly lawyer” is 72 years old. Tolkin wasn’t so polite with his words, either. Legal Antics has a scan of the transcript (warning: lots of cursing).

photo credit: CJ Sorg

In this world of indiscriminating sex offender registries, violent offender registries, lifetime registration, neighborhood notification and posting of pictures, names and offenses online for everyone to see, it was a bit amusing when law enforcement got their collective panties in a wad over a website called ratemycop.com. Reason Hit and Run explains:

The premise is simple: Sesto wrote to police departments across the country, and obtained a list of the names and badge numbers of their officers. He then posted the names online in a format broken down by state and city, and encouraged users to rate their experiences with individual officers. All of the information he posted was already open to the public. He didn’t post the identities of any undercover officers.

Law enforcement agencies freaked out, saying that making public information available on this website threatened their safety. The site does not post home addresses or information about undercover officers, so that claim seems hollow.

Chief Jerry Dyer, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, voices what sounds like a more honest concern: that officers will face “unfair maligning” by the citizens they serve.

Chief Dyer wants to get legislation passed that would make RateMyCop.com illegal, which, of course, wouldn’t pass constitutional muster in any court in America.

Oh the irony. It’s coming down in buckets. But that’s not all. Godaddy, the service he chose to host this website, took it down with barely 60 seconds notice for “suspicious activity” and then changed its tune to exceeding bandwith or some such nonsense.

He then took the site to another host, which initially accepted his down payment. Then:

They turned him down. After initial accepting his down payment for hosting services, a RackSpace lawyer sent a letter to Sesto stating that, “We believe that the website to be found at www.ratemycop.com as described to our sales representative could create a risk to the health and safety of law enforcement officers.”

By allowing people to write about their experiences with particular officers? I’m not buying it.

Curiously, police agencies have no problem with Cops Writing Cops, which is a site for cops to trash other cops for not showing them “professional courtesy”.

So a website where cops can complain about, essentially, getting ticketed, arrested and charged for breaking the law is okay, but a website where the public they serve does that is unacceptable.

I’m not saying this website should be used to harass people or disclose their personal information or any such thing (just like the ban on vigilante action using information obtained from sex offender registries), I just think their reaction is funny, that’s all.

HT: SOI

Your eyes are not deceiving you.

Deputies said a woman in western Kansas sat on her boyfriend’s toilet for two years, and they’re investigating whether she was mistreated.

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple said a man called his office last month to report that something was wrong with his girlfriend.

Whipple said it appeared the 35-year-old Ness City woman’s skin had grown around the seat. She initially refused emergency medical services but was finally convinced by responders and her boyfriend that she needed to be checked out at a hospital.

Two years. Sitting on a toilet.

“We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital,” Whipple said. “The hospital removed it.”

Whipple said investigators planned to present their report Wednesday to the county attorney, who will determine whether any charges should be filed against the woman’s 36-year-old boyfriend.

“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” Whipple said. “It is hard to imagine. … I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”

He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.

“And her reply would be, ‘Maybe tomorrow,”’ Whipple said. “According to him, she did not want to leave the bathroom.”

Now I’ve seen everything. Thanks to The Saucy Vixen for bringing this to my attention.

If you can figure it out.

Actually, if you do figure it out, let me know. I’ve been listening to this song for over 15 years now and I have no clue what he’s saying. That’s what happens when a Canadian does reggae.