Beyond The Broken Spectrum

By Ryan Haggerty of the Journal Sentinel

A 76-year-old man’s right eye was surgically removed after he was beaten last week by a group of at least five people – including at least three teens – motivated by boredom and peer pressure, according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday against one of the accused attackers.

J.T. Downs was pushing a cart through an alley in the 3300 block of N. 26th St. about 6 p.m. Friday when he was attacked, according to the complaint against 18-year-old Leroy Bentley III, who is charged with being party to the crime of aggravated battery.

According to the complaint:

Downs told police he was walking home when a 13-year-old boy ran up from behind, hit him in the back of the head and ran away.

The 13-year-old told investigators that he attacked Downs at the urging of his older cousin because the cousin thought he was “soft.”

Downs continued pushing his cart and walked past a group of young males. One of the people offered to lend a cell phone so Downs could call police, but another person struck him near his right eye.

Downs told investigators he was then attacked by at least four other people, one of whom was later identified as a 15-year-old boy.

Downs went to the ground while he was beaten. All but one attacker eventually fled. According to the complaint, Downs said he told the remaining person, “Just go on and kill me!” The person told Downs to get up and go home, where he called police, the complaint says.

Bentley told police that he and others had chased and tripped people in the alley before.

Bentley “could offer no explanation for why he did this to those other people, and to J.T. Downs, other than boredom,” the complaint says.

Bentley cried when police told him that Downs would lose his eye, saying he did not realize the beating had been so severe, the complaint says. Bentley “emphasized that he punched (Downs) only once to the body, and admitted that he stopped after one punch because it was daylight and because a lady in a purple shirt threatened to call the police on them.”

Downs has lived in the neighborhood for years; many residents interviewed Wednesday said they are used to seeing him pushing his cart through the streets and alleys, gathering aluminum cans.

“He’s a guy that doesn’t bother nobody,” said Roy Fayne, 71, who used to play softball with Downs. “I always told him to be careful, but everybody knew him and no one bothered him. The (neighborhood) kids know him, too.”

Bentley’s cash bail was set at $50,000 Wednesday. He is in custody at the Milwaukee County Jail.

It couldn’t be learned late Wednesday if anyone else was charged.

I recently asked my friends’ little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day. Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, ‘If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?’

She replied, ‘I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people.’

Her parents beamed with pride. ‘Wow….what a worthy goal.’

I told her, ‘But you don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless
guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house. ‘

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ‘Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?’

I said, ‘Welcome to the Libertarian Party.’

And btw, her parents still aren’t speaking to me, which is cool with me.

-Author Unknown

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today joined state Rep. Brandon Creighton and sponsors of House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 50 in support of states’ rights under the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state,” Gov. Perry said. “That is why I am here today to express my unwavering support for efforts all across our country to reaffirm the states’ rights affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union.”

A number of recent federal proposals are not within the scope of the federal government’s constitutionally designated powers and impede the states’ right to govern themselves. HCR 50 affirms that Texas claims sovereignty under the 10th Amendment over all powers not otherwise granted to the federal government.

It also designates that all compulsory federal legislation that requires states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties, or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding, be prohibited or repealed.

HCR 50 is authored by Representatives Brandon Creighton, Leo Berman, Bryan Hughes, Dan Gattis and Ryan Guillen.

http://governor.state.tx.us/news/press-release/12227/ 

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera reported head of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, ranked 701st on Forbes’ yearly report of the wealthiest men alive, and worth an estimated $1 billion, today officially thanked United States politicians for making sure that drugs remain illegal. According to one of his closest confidants, he said, “I couldn’t have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you.”

According to sources in the Mexican government, President Calderon is begging American officials to, in the words of reggae great Peter Tosh, legalize it. “Oh yeah,” said an official close to the Mexican president, “Felipe is going crazy. He’s screaming at everybody who comes in, ‘Why don’t they make this sh*t legal already! You’re killing me here!’ Look, everyone knows, when you have Prohibition, you create gangsters. And the more you prohibit, the more gangsters you make. El Chapo is hero now to all those slumdogs who want to be millionaires. Kids in the street, when they play games, they all want to be El Chapo, the baddest man in the whole damn town.”

Meanwhile, many speculate that rich and prominent Mexican families are in cahoots with American businessmen in the alcohol industry, wealthy industrialists who launder the unprecedented profits from the drug business with their legitimate enterprises, and lawmakers who get gigantic kickbacks and payoffs to make sure that these drugs remain illegal, so they can remain rich, fat and happy. According to sources on both sides of the border, tens of millions of dollars in payoffs and kickbacks are stashed in Swiss banks every year, blood money from the brutal business made possible by a corrupt system supported by laws that don’t, and have never, worked.

Rather than putting El Chapo and his kind out of business by modernizing outdated laws and in the process making billions of dollars from taxing drugs (as is done with cigarettes and alcohol), United States government has spent hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars chasing its tail, and offered a $5 million reward for the capture of El Chapo. Many have said that the offer is unofficially: Dead or Alive.

Meanwhile, as an epidemic of murderous violence rages on the Mexican-US border, and the American government wastes boatloads of badly needed money on the illegal drug business which results from the Prohibition laws, El Chapo is laughing all the way to the bank. “Whoever came up with this whole War on Drugs,” one of his lieutenants reports he said, “I would like to kiss him on the lips and shake his hand and buy him dinner with caviar and champagne. The War on Drugs is the greatest thing that ever happened to me, and the day they decide to end that war, will be a sad one for me and all of my closest friends. And if you don’t believe me, ask those guys whose heads showed up in the ice chests.”

http://www.HuffingtonPost.com

(CNN) — It began as horseplay, with two teenage stepbrothers chasing each other with blow guns and darts. But it soon escalated when one of the boys grabbed a knife.

The older teen, Michael Barton, 17, was dead by the time he reached the hospital. The younger boy, Quantel Lotts, 14, would eventually become one of Missouri’s youngest lifers.

Lotts was sentenced in Missouri’s St. Francois County Circuit Court in 2002 to life in prison without parole for first-degree murder in his stepbrother’s stabbing death.

It made no difference that at the time of the deadly scuffle, Lotts was barely old enough to watch PG-13 movie and too young to drive, vote or buy beer.

“They locked me up and threw away the keys,” Lotts, now 23, said from prison. “They took away all hope for the future.”

Lotts is one of at least 73 U.S. inmates — most of them minorities — who were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison for crimes committed when they were 13 or 14, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization in Alabama that defends indigent defendants and prisoners.

The 73 are just a fraction of the more than 2,000 offenders serving life sentences for crimes they committed as minors under the age of 18.

Across the country, most juvenile offenders and many adults are given a second chance. Charles Manson, convicted in seven notorious murders committed when he was 27, will be eligible for his 12th parole hearing in 2012. He’s been denied parole 11 times. Even “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz, who confessed to killing six people in the 1970s when he was in his 20s, has had four parole hearings, though he has said he doesn’t deserve parole and doesn’t want it.

But Quantel Lotts has no hope for a parole hearing. At least not yet. See which states have sentenced minors to life without parole »

Lotts is part of a trend that has developed over the past two decades. Numerous studies have shown that In the 1970s and 1980s, minors were rarely given life sentences, let alone life without parole, experts said. By the early 1990s, according to the Department of Justice, an alarming spike in juvenile homicides spawned a nationwide crackdown, including a movement to try kids in adult courts.

“Criminal court doesn’t care they are kids,” said Melissa Sickmund, chief of systems research at the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “Once they are there, it’s just another case.”

Today, there are only a handful of states — including Alaska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Oregon — that prohibit sentencing minors to life without parole, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Proponents of the strict sentencing laws said public safety should be top priority. They argued that judges give certain criminals, regardless of their age, life sentences because the crimes are so abhorrent.

“There are some people who are so fundamentally dangerous that they can’t walk among us,” said Jennifer Jenkins, who co-founded the National Organization for Victims of Juvenile Lifers. The Illinois-based group fights legislation that would remove sentences of life without parole.

In the past three years, attorneys at the Equal Justice Initiative have appealed cases involving 13- and 14-year-old offenders in state and federal court. Attorneys argue that the sentences are “cruel and unusual punishment” given the tender years of the offenders. Read the center’s report

Only 19 states punish children under 14 with life sentences without parole, according to a study conducted by the center.

Last week, the state of Missouri dismissed Quantel Lotts’ case in St. Francois County Circuit Court. The Equal Justice Initiative will challenge the decision in the Missouri Court of Appeals. A separate petition, filed in 2007, is pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri.

Lotts remains in prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri, and he is hopeful. He has new dreams of going to college and maybe even becoming a lawyer.

“My family motivates me,” he explained. “Because I want to be out there with them so I can never give up.”

He wishes he could start over, but not at the beginning. He grew up in a crack house with a mother who used and sold drugs. In Lotts’ case, court documents reveal that he was sexually abused as a child.

When child welfare officials took Lotts from his mother at the age of 8, they noted that he “smelled of urine and had badly decayed molars as well as numerous scars on his arms, legs and forehead.”

“Quantel had a lot of anger because of all he has been through,” said stepmother Tammy Lotts, 45, whose son Michael Barton was Lotts’ victim.

At the time of the crime, Tammy Lotts said she left her children for several days with her husband to get high on crack cocaine.

“But I don’t believe that Quantel did it,” she added. “They took care of each other. They didn’t see each other as stepbrothers; they considered them brothers.”

Most young offenders serving life without parole were exposed to poverty, violence or drugs during childhood, the Equal Justice Initiative reported.

Some victims’ families say that’s exactly why the juveniles should stay locked up.

“They will come back to my community and your community and repeat,” said Harriet Salerno, president of Crime Victims United of California, a group trying to block the passage of laws that would ease sentencing for juveniles.

She founded the victim’s group after her daughter, a pre-medical student, was murdered at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California in the 1979. “Many of them have dysfunctional homes, and the crimes will escalate because there is no place to put them.”

Two cases where juvenile offenders got life without parole didn’t even involve murder.

Antonio Nunez was 14 years old when he committed a crime that gave him life without parole. The crime was an armed kidnapping that occurred in 2001. He spent his childhood in a gang-ridden neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, California. He was shot in the stomach multiple times while riding his bike at age 13. See stories of other inmates who were sentenced to life in prison without parole »

In Florida, Joe Sullivan, who case will be heard soon by the U.S. Supreme Court, was sentenced to life without parole for 1989 rape of an elderly woman. He was 13 at the time of the crime and is mentally disabled.

In 2005, groups that opposed life sentences without parole for young people, began to gain traction after the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for crimes committed by 16 and 17 year olds in the landmark case Roper v. Simmons.

A year later, Colorado abolished life without parole for minors who commit crimes. At the federal level, Rep. Robert C. Scott, D-Virginia, will introduce legislation this year to give youthful offenders the option of parole. In California, Democratic Sen. Leland Yee has proposed a law that grants young offenders a chance at parole after ten years.

“Children aren’t just little adults, and it’s starting to resonate with people,” said Ashley Nellis, an analyst at the Sentencing Project, a research organization tracking sentencing patterns. “There has been a general momentum of changing juvenile law in the last few years.”

Nearly a decade later, Lotts, now a grown man, still cries himself to sleep over the loss of his stepbrother. To ease the pain, he reads novels or listens to the tunes of R&B group Dru Hill.

One sleepless night in prison, Lotts found himself reading the book “Lightning” by Dean Koontz. The novel, about time travel, has become one of his favorites. He often thinks about what it would be like to turn back time.

“This would have never happened,” he said. “My brother would be here today.”

Recent statements made by various government officials have claimed that 90% of all weapons in Mexico originated in the US and were smuggled in. However a new light has recently been shed on the subject, and the figures are closer to 17%, a far cry from the figures currently being tossed around. The figure of 90% is actually derived from the amount of traced guns that were sent back to the US to be examined. In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced — and of those, 90 percent — 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover — were found to have come from the U.S.

Leave it to our government officials to misuse a figure for their political gain, likely to garner support for the assault weapons ban. Just another case of propaganda from the government that uses that tactic the best. A full article can be found here http://www.foxnews.com/politics/elections/2009/04/02/myth-percent-guns-mexico-fraction-number-claimed/