Robert Lee Moone broke into a home in 1989, armed with a knife, and attempted to sexually assault a 13-year-old girl. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison because we can’t have people breaking into homes and sexually assaulting 13-year-old girls. In 2010 he was granted parole. Moone is so dangerous, though, that “[a]fter he was granted parole, he was placed on a “Super Intensive Supervised Program” with 24-hour monitoring.”

No worries, then. A Super Intensive Supervised Program must be not only intensive and supervised, but super intensive and supervised. Tuck your babies in bed and leave the windows unlocked. He’s monitored, like, 24 hours a day. Super intensively.

What’s that? Moone walked out of a Texas halfway house and cut off his electronic monitor on April 10th? Well, that kind of thing hardly ever happens. Not in Texas, anyway.

It was the second escape of a high-risk sex offender in Texas within a week.

Michael Elbert Young, 42, climbed over a barbed wire fence at the Southeast Texas Transitional Center in Houston on Thursday night after removing his electronic monitor.

Young served eight years in jail for aggravated assault and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, the Houston Chronicle reported. Both charges carried a sexual element, and Young also served time for the sexual assault of a child and attempted aggravated sexual assault convictions.

The Super Intensive Supervised Program and electronic monitoring don’t seem to be working. It might be time for a Superduper Intensive Supervised Program. Unless that’s going too far.

Tags: on the law by Scott Stein
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Conditions in Florida are dry and hot. General conflagration has not broken out but that is not from any lack of ignition. There has been a sudden squall but whether it delivers more rain than lightning remains to be seen. George Zimmerman is in custody, surrendering without incident with the public release of the charges against him.

This should be a moment of great relief, should it not? The Martin family has consistently said that what they want is Justice for Trayvon, as the copyrighted phrase has it. Further they have said that what they desire is an arrest and a REAL investigation inverting the usual order. The implication is that there has not been a real investigation until now, the one delivering charges of second degree murder on a set of facts that the original Sanford based prosecutors thought warranted no charges at all. It is easy to understand why observers might think that so but mostly because of faulty information or explicit DISinformation, all of which will now be hashed out in open court, as it should be, while much of it has been hashed and re-hashed in the public sphere. Here is another helping of hash, including leftovers that have since gone sour.

The initial cause of outrage has become moot as it has proven to be false. The Martin family advocates originally stated three untruths: first that Zimmerman never was taken into custody on that fatal night. That falsehood stood nearly unrebutted until the release of a security video showing Zimmerman in handcuffs at the cop shop. Team Martin also declared that the crime scene was never attended to in any meaningful way but we have since seen video of the usual technicians and procedures being performed promptly and as competently as we can tell. The third falsehood was that Zimmerman’s pistol was never taken in as evidence. This also we know to be a flat inversion of the facts.  [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, race & culture by Ken Watson
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As it is said, politics is showbiz for ugly people. The Judiciary, then, is largely a political field for those who don’t like shaking hands. This is no indictment against those on the Supreme Court or a lesser bench somewhere. It is a fact recognized at the Constitution’s writing and ratification. Without checking, I recall in the Federalist Papers on the matter of the Supreme Court, the clear problem of Justices being beholden to the President who nominated them and/or the Senators who confirmed them was to be addressed with lifetime appointment. The theory (which I think was from Madison) was that while a Judge may indeed be in debt to those who put him behind the bar it would be a debt never paid as the Judge is more protective of his own legacy as a fair-minded arbiter, however fictitious that may be, than he is eager to keep political accounts squared since he is now in his final office. As with the rest of the Constitution there is little reliance on having virtuous, capable figures at the highest positions in government, rather there are institutionalized incentives to persuade whatever rat-bastard winds up in there to do the right thing. So while the Court is allegedly above politics we know jurists to be subject to the same disabilities as Presidents and Legislators. They have power. It corrupts. Let’s forgive the President’s recent statements then for they are not as unprecedented as the appalled detractors would have it. FDR spoke against the high court in strident terms. He ran against them, something Obama clearly intends to repeat if he loses. Thank the gentleman for this unambiguous invitation to apply a bit of Crackology in the marbled chambers. [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were both about 19 years old when they created the character called “Superman,” in 1933. He was based upon the title character from a novel called Gladiator, by Philip Wylie, Hercules, and Samson. Also, interestingly enough, Siegel and Shuster seem to have swiped the name “Superman” from an ad for “The Man of Bronze,” Doc Savage:

(Image source)

He was not originally appreciated by editors:

But the two did still try to sell Superman and got back nasty replies from some editors. Bell Syndicate told them, “We are in the market only for strips likely to have the most extra-ordinary appeal, and we do not feel Superman gets into this category.” United Features said that Superman was “a rather immature piece of work.”

Finally, in 1938, the pair of impractical dreamers managed to sell the character and an initial 13 page story to Detective Comics, which is now known as just DC. The total value of their first check was $412 and, as it turns out, that supercheck is now up for auction by a company called ComicConnect, which features a suitably purple description:

On March 1, 1938, DC Comics gave two young men from Cleveland $130 for the rights to a comic character named Superman. That $130 check essentially created a billion dollar industry and set in motion nearly 70 years of legal battles that continue to this day. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, on the law by Ricky Sprague
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There has been a spark in Florida. Whether it proves igniting depends on the condition and volume of the available fuel. It has been hot and dry across the nation for some time so we should be cautious with cigarette butts and any other sort of burning. In that case, maybe Al Sharpton should have stayed home. Too late for that now. He has broken out the tropical suits and the high-humidity hair treaments. Rev Sharpton has been one of the leading voices championing Justice for Tayvon as this movement is aptly known, calling for patience and support for the Martin family as they brace for the possibly imminent arrest of their son.  [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, race & culture, trusted media & news by Ken Watson
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Proposition 8 was a heartbreaker for those who loved Candidate Obama the second best. His greatest admirers were those like Samuel Jackson who saw in him an ethnic reflection of themselves. His “message” didn’t mean shit to them. But a close second in devotion is that other bulwark of Democratic politics, the gay community. Though they tended towards Hillary (a known fan of sensible shoes), like many other key groups they saw in Obama a champion of their cause. They were as disappointed as the young hemp enthusiasts but much sooner. They knew on Election Day that Prop 8 had passed adding an Amendment to the California Constitution defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman.

The dissappointment was to some extent their own fault. Candidate Obama had never publicly supported literal gay marriage any more than President Bush had. Rather, like those who took cannibis for medical reasons and hoped to be able to take it legally in any setting, the gay marriage advocates assumed that a President Obama would indeed be actively on their side though his stock response to questions always was, “My position is the same as the President’s (Bush), civil unions.) No one believed it. I don’t believe it. What are the odds that Obama TRULY does not favor absolute equality of gay marriage? As an issue it is uniformly supported by his demographic; elite university graduates/government bigwigs. But an alliance of gays and their  more numerous allies is far from a majority; not even in a Democratic primary. It might be different if the balance of the electorate were, like me, flagrantly apathetic to marriage, gay or sullen. That is not the case. Mr. Hillary knew it although he clearly was hostile to all marriage. He made his accommodations with his own base on gay issues, recognizing two powerful blocks were and are opposed to “gay rights” as we know them. That would be the Catholics and the blacks. [Read more →]

Tags: family & parenting, his & hers, on the law by Ken Watson
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Society forgives a lot. Don King killed two people — yes, he really did kill one person, then decide this wasn’t enough so he later killed another — before he pulled his life together and entered that most honorable of professions: boxing promotion. (And in fairness, in the first case he was trying to protect one of his illegal gambling houses and in the second the guy owed him money.) Likewise, Mike Tyson served time for rape, but now most people tend to ignore that in favor of the nobler moments from his life, like when he sang along to “In the Air Tonight” in The Hangover or beat the hell out of Don King. Perhaps the only crime you can’t redeem yourself from over time is child abuse. And this may be why there doesn’t seem to be a measured response to it: it is an offense that seems either to get ignored completely or for which everyone connected in any way must be destroyed immediately, disregarding the possibility that they might actually be innocent. [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, sports by Sean Cunningham
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Maybe we shouldn’t have the end of the year during the holidays. Yes, it is one of the holidays itself but maybe they are too concentrated here on the long tail of the annum. Legislative and other periods link to the end of the calendar year causing deadlines to loom just when offices are empty or emptying. Once phones rang unanswered from Thanksgiving Wednesday to January 2nd. Now they roll over to voice. Which is more cruel? There are a few folks still on the job although they eye the clock nervously and jostle their keys. They are trying to “get things done” and whatever that means it apparently means the same thing two days before Christmas as it means on any other day at the Capitol and the White House. [Read more →]

Tags: money, on the law, politics & government by Ken Watson
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As we withstand the informational deluge from Penn State, we are faced with the possibility of another case of institutional child abuse, in which a whole group of people, a whole structure, contributed to the horrific abuse of children. It is clear that we are just not getting it. [Read more →]

Tags: on the law, virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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Tags: on the law, politics & government, terror & war by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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