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In New Orleans, you can get 5 years in prison for a joint of marijuana
Drug war defenders are indeed fond of pointing out how hard it is to actually get jail time for using drugs. So they should probably stop New Orleans District Attorney Keva Landrum-Johnson before she finishes filling Louisiana's prisons with the pettiest marijuana users she can find:
The flood of new felony charges didn’t target murderers, rapists or armed robbers — they targeted small-time marijuana users, sometimes caught with less than a gram of pot, and threatened them with lengthy prison sentences.
The resulting impact has clogged the courts with non-violent, petty offenses, drained the resources of the criminal justice system and damaged low-income African-American communities, [Orleans Public Defenders Office Chief of Trials Steve] Singer said.
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A first-time marijuana possession charge in Louisiana is a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison but typically results in a small fine. A second offense is a felony that can carry up to five years in jail and a third offense up to 20 years.
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Some say Landrum-Johnson’s decision to buck history and charge marijuana users with felonies is a political decision meant to assist in her run for Orleans Criminal District Court Section E judgeship. By prosecuting thousands of marijuana possession cases as felonies, Landrum-Johnson can then go to the voters of New Orleans and claim she is “tough on crime,” [Tulane University criminologist Peter] Scharf said. She can point to the massive increase in felony prosecutions under her tenure without explaining that those prosecutions were for people holding joints and not guns, he said. [New Orleans CityBusiness]
Only Landrum-Johnson knows what her motivations are, so I won't belabor that point. She is presiding over a deliberate effort to place large numbers of small-time marijuana users in prison for 5-20 years and there exists no noble motive for doing that. Whether she believes this can help her become a judge, or she possesses a virulent and vindictive animosity towards people who smoke marijuana, or she is merely detached utterly from the consequences of the authority she wields, the result is disastrous and the justification is a fraud.
This, I'm afraid to say, is the reality of America's war on drugs. Everyday our drug policies produce outcomes none of us intended and almost none of us support. The idea of imprisoning nonviolent drug users is so obviously unpopular that the DEA has a whole page arguing that it almost never happens. But will anyone in Washington, D.C. approach the New Orleans DA's office and tell them to stop? Of course not. The very people who so vigorously argue the scarcity of such injustices are the same ones who work tirelessly to conceal them and enable their continuation. Drug war defenders are indeed fond of pointing out how hard it is to actually get jail time for using drugs. So they should probably s... more -
Man dies after cop hits him with Taser 9 times
A police officer shocked a handcuffed man nine times with a Taser after arresting him on a cocaine charge, CNN reports.
Baron 'Scooter' Pikes, 21, was Tasered nine times by a police officer in January in Winnfield, Louisiana.
He stopped twitching after seven, according to a coroner's report. Soon afterward, he was dead.
Now the officer, since fired, could end up facing criminal charges in Pikes' death after medical examiners ruled it a homicide.
"It's taken several months for this case to even be properly addressed, so one has to wonder, why did it take so long?" said Carol Powell Lexing, a lawyer for the Pikes family. "Obviously, a wrongful death occurred."
Nugent's lawyer, Phillip Terrell, said his client followed proper procedure to subdue a man who outweighed him by 100 pounds. But Williams said Pikes was already handcuffed and on the ground when first hit with the Taser, after the 247-pound suspect was slow to follow police orders to get up.
Winnfield, a sleepy lumber town about 100 miles southeast of Shreveport, Louisiana, is best known as the birthplace of legendary Louisiana governors Huey and Earl Long. It's also about 45 miles northwest of Jena, Louisiana, where a racially charged assault case sparked a September 2007 demonstration by an estimated 15,000 people.
One of the teenage defendants in that case, Mychal Bell, is Pikes' first cousin -- and his lawyer was Powell Lexing.
Nugent is white; Pikes was black. His death led to demonstrations that drew several dozen people in Winnfield, where the population of about 15,000 is roughly half African-American.
"The family wants justice," Lexing said. "This is just another example of why it's very important to stay vigilant with these types of cases, on the injustice that's been perpetrated on the disadvantaged."
But Winnfield police Lt. Chuck Curry said race "isn't an issue at all" in the matter.
"This has come down to a police officer that was trying to apprehend a suspect that they had warrants for," he said. "He done what he thought he was trained to do to bring that subject into custody. At some point, something happened with his body that caused him to go into cardiac arrest or whatever."
Does it seem feasible that race could have been an issue in this case? Are particular groups of people, like those in disadvantaged communities, extra-vulnerable to misuse of weapons like Tasers by police? And knowing that they can kill, and that police officers aren't always using them correctly, should Tasers be outlawed? Just how much power should an armed officer have over a non-armed suspect?
A police officer shocked a handcuffed man nine times with a Taser after arresting him on a cocaine charge, CNN reports. ... more -
Man dies after cops tase him 9 times
A police officer shocked a handcuffed Baron "Scooter" Pikes nine times with a Taser after arresting him on a cocaine charge. Baron Pikes, 21, was Tasered nine times by a police officer in January in Winnfield, Louisiana.
Baron Pikes, 21, was Tasered nine times by a police officer in January in Winnfield, Louisiana.
He stopped twitching after seven, according to a coroner's report. Soon afterward, Pikes was dead.
Now the officer, since fired, could end up facing criminal charges in Pikes' January death after medical examiners ruled it a homicide.
Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner, told CNN the 21-year-old sawmill worker was jolted so many times by the 50,000-volt Taser that he might have been dead before the last two shocks were delivered.
Williams ruled Pikes' death a homicide in June after extensive study. A police officer shocked a handcuffed Baron "Scooter" Pikes nine times with a Taser after arresting him on a cocaine charge. Baron Pi... more -
Smoke Screen - New Orleans
This is the second story in a three-part series on how police and prosecutors are spending
public resources seeking lengthy sentences for non-violent, low-level crimes.
Shortly after Keva Landrum-Johnson took over as district attorney following Eddie Jordan’s resignation Oct. 30, hundreds of new felony cases flooded the public defenders office, overwhelming the 29 defense attorneys.
After New Orleans regained its title as the nation’s murder capital, the public demanded its city leaders crack down on violent crime. By filing hundreds of new felony cases each month, it appeared as if the new DA heeded their call.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case, said Steve Singer, chief of trials for the Orleans Public Defenders Office.
The flood of new felony charges didn’t target murderers, rapists or armed robbers — they targeted small-time marijuana users, sometimes caught with less than a gram of pot, and threatened them with lengthy prison sentences.
The resulting impact has clogged the courts with non-violent, petty offenses, drained the resources of the criminal justice system and damaged low-income African-American communities, Singer said.
“We hardly have enough lawyers to handle the serious, violent cases, and now we’re jamming up the entire system with marijuana cases,” Singer said. “We never used to see this happen, then all of a sudden every second and third marijuana offense starts coming in as a felony.”
Change in tactics This is the second story in a three-part series on how police and prosecutors are spending ... more -
Taser death ignites racial tensions
What happened in the 39 minutes in between--during which Pikes was handcuffed by local police and shocked nine times with a Taser device, while reportedly pleading for mercy--is now spawning fears of a political cover-up in this backwoods Louisiana lumber town infamous for backroom dealings.
Even more ominously, because Pikes was black and the officer who repeatedly Tasered him is white, racial tensions over the case are mounting in a place that's just 40 miles from Jena, La. Jena is the site of the racially explosive prosecution of six black teenagers charged with beating a white youth that last year triggered one of the largest American civil rights demonstrations in decades. And in a bizarre coincidence, Pikes turns out to have been a first cousin of Mychal Bell, the lead defendant in the Jena 6 case.
No novelist could have invented Winnfield, a place so steeped in corruption that they built a local museum to try to sanitize it all.
Here in the birthplace of two of Louisiana's most colorful and notorious governors—Huey and Earl Long—the police chief committed suicide three years ago after losing a close election marred by allegations of fraud and vote-buying.
Just four months later, the district attorney killed himself after allegedly skimming $200,000 from his office budget and extorting payments from criminal defendants to make their cases go away.
The current police chief is a convicted drug offender who got a pardon from Edwin Edwards, the former Louisiana governor who is serving time in federal prison for corruption convictions.
All of that tangled history is now wrapped up in the Pikes case, because Scott Nugent, the officer who Tasered him, is the well-connected son of the former police chief who killed himself—and the protégé of the current chief, who hired him onto the force.
"A lot happens in this town and it just gets swept under the rug," said Kayshon Collins, Pikes' stepmother, who has participated in several local protests over the case. "What the police did to Scooter just isn't right. They would never have Tasered a white kid like that." The official police version of what happened to Pikes on that brisk January afternoon reads like a sad but familiar story in Winnfield's local newspaper.
Nugent spotted Pikes walking along the street and attempted to arrest him on an outstanding warrant for drug possession, according to Police Chief Johnny Ray Carpenter. Pikes took off running, but another officer cornered him outside a nearby grocery store. Pikes resisted arrest and Nugent subdued him with a shock from a Taser.
Then on the way to the police station, Carpenter related to the newspaper, Pikes fell ill and told the officers he suffered from asthma and was high on crack cocaine and PCP. The officers called for an ambulance, but Pikes later died at the hospital.
Six months later, the Winnfield police are standing by that story. Meanwhile, the Louisiana State Police are investigating the case, and no charges have been filed against Nugent or two other Winnfield police officers who assisted him in arresting Pikes, although the City Council did decide to fire Nugent from the force in May.
Winn Parish District Atty. Chris Nevils says he expects to present the case to a grand jury after he receives the results of the state police investigation.
But there is already abundant evidence contradicting the official police version of the incident.
An autopsy determined there were no drugs in Pikes' system and that he did not have asthma, according to Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner.
Moreover, Pikes did not resist arrest, and he was handcuffed while lying on the ground, according to Nugent's police report of the incident. It was only after Pikes refused Nugent's command to stand up that the officer applied the first Taser shock in the middle of his back, Nugent wrote.
***story continues, click link to read*** What happened in the 39 minutes in between--during which Pikes was handcuffed by local police and shocked nine times with a Taser devi... more -
Intelligent Design Needs to Be Stopped!
"On May 21, 2008, Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southern Louisiana University, testified in the Louisiana state legislature on the dangers hidden in the State’s Science Education Act.
According to Forrest, the Act allows teachers and school boards across the state to teach non-scientific alternatives to evolution including ideas related to Intelligent Design (ID). Forrest says the bill is a backhanded way to get creationism back into schools.
She states the wording of the Act names evolution along with global warming, the origins of human life and human cloning as worthy of “open and objective discussion” -- suggesting that evolution is scientifically controversial topic.
A U.S. Supreme Court case in 1987 barred creationism from being taught in U.S. public schools. The justices ruled state aid to religious teachings violated the Establishment Clause of First Amendment. Since then, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute has successfully lobbied that intelligent design is not only scientifically sound, but also that it differs from creationism barred from schools.
Despite Forrest’s testimony, the bill passed easily in Louisiana with a majority House vote of 94 to 3, followed unanimously in the State Senate. Louisiana's conservative Christian governor Piyush Jindal signed the bill, making it law on June 28.
Supporters of evolution say that the new legislation is nothing more than a new maneuver in the war to challenge the validity of Darwinian evolution. Forrest was also a figure in a 2005 trial in Dover, where she presented leaked Discovery Institute documents that demonstrated intelligent design school books were in fact creationist schoolbooks with the names replaced.
Immediately following Forrest's comments to New Scientist, the Discovery Institute wrote a blog on its Evolution News website, claiming Forrest and the publication needed "a reality check."
"Intelligent design is currently not in the Louisiana state science standards and so could not be taught. But this allows scientific criticisms of Darwin's theory to be taught," said Discovery Institute fellow John West in a recent Reuters interview."
WE CAN NOT LET INTELLIGENT DESIGN BE TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS AS A SCIENCE! THIS IS A STEP BACKWARDS FOR OUR SOCIETY!
"On May 21, 2008, Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southern Louisiana University, testified in the Louisiana state legisl... more -
Louisiana passes castration law for sex offenders
BATON ROUGE, La. — The most serious sex crimes should be punishable by castration, with drugs or surgery, the Louisiana Senate voted on Tuesday.
The bill by Sen. Nick Gautreaux, D-Meaux, would give judges the option of imposing chemical castration on those convicted of sex crimes including aggravated rape, simple rape and indecent behavior with a juvenile. Chemical castration would be mandatory on second offenses, and the offender would have the option of choosing physical castration instead.
Senators voted 32-3 to send the measure to the House.
BATON ROUGE, La. — The most serious sex crimes should be punishable by castration, with drugs or surgery, the Louisiana Senate voted ... more -
Is the length of a jail term just a suggestion?
Not that I support violent sex offenders but I am a little disturbed by the sentences being overridden by state legislatures and state governors. In twenty years will we even have a judiciary system? ... more -
Louisiana only state to get ethanol correct
"Yesterday Louisiana state governor Bobby Jindal signed into law revolutionary ethanol legislation that embarks in a totally new direction that could save the US economy while actually making us less dependant on foreign oil ..." "Yesterday Louisiana state governor Bobby Jindal signed into law revolutionary ethanol legislation that embarks in a totally new direc... more
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Louisiana 's 1st black Supreme court Justice dies
we don't know where we're going unless we know where we've been...may his memory live on!
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FEMA’s deadline to close trailer parks leaves many hopeless
Nearly three years after the Hurricane Katrina made thousands of victims, leaving thousands others without houses, the Federal Emergency Management Agency succeeded to meet its deadline and close all six trailer parks by Sunday, but said it would still take a few more days to move everyone into apartments or motels.
The decision to close the parks came after an investigation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between Dec. 21 and Jan. 23 found that formaldehyde fumes from hundreds of trailers and mobile homes were on average about five times what people are exposed to in most modern homes.
Formaldehyde is a common preservative and embalming fluid and a chemical used in the manufacture of the trailers. It can cause respiratory problems such as bronchitis and is known to cause cancer. In fact, formaldehyde has been classified as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Following this investigation, the FEMA established May 31 (a day before the start of the hurricane season) as deadline for closing the parks. However, many people have shown concern about where they will live and how they will be able to pay their rents. The FEMA has been under fire for its decision to empty the parks before they have found permanent housing. Also, there are many people who cannot afford a place to stay given the high prices after Katrina stroke New Orleans in 2005.
While some of the people that have lived in the FEMA trailer parks will benefit of housing subsidies until March 2009, those of them who can’t prove where they lived before Katrina destroyed their homes will benefit of the aid for another month only. After that, they’re on their own.
“I’m under more stress now than in the hurricane. They don't even do me the courtesy of responding. It's just, ‘When are you going to leave? When are you going to leave?’ They don't seem to care where we end up,” Ghulam Nasim, 79, a retired doctor who packed his things, but remained in his trailer said, according to the LA Times. And like him are many other residents who lack alternatives.
By Saturday, a day before the deadline, the former largest FEMA trailer park, Renaissance Village, had only 40 still occupied trailers out of the 575 that housed the Katrina victims until a few days ago. Nearly three years after the Hurricane Katrina made thousands of victims, leaving thousands others without houses, the Federal Emergen... more -
Clay spill in New orleans tunnel
18 people taken to hospital in New orleans iccident
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NEW... NEW ORLEANS.
Years after the devastating Hurricane Kitrina, a group of university students travels to New Orleans to help the continuing rebuilding efforts. This is NOT a look back but a step forward as this once amazing city welcomes the volunteers who will help rebuild her.
We will travel to the part of town where water was up to the rooftops, we will look at a levee and do some roofing in the lower 9th ward. We will watch this group take the molded walls out of a house while preserving the studs and framework and watch as the same group gets into a heated argument about something as trivial as an ice cream run.
NEW... NEW ORLEANS will put you on ground level with the hope and triumphs of the volunteers!
RUN TIME: 05:10
BY: Kelly King
Years after the devastating Hurricane Kitrina, a group of university students travels to New Orleans to help the continuing rebuilding... more -
Man who lost homes in Katrina wins $97 million
A construction company owner who lost two homes in Hurricane Katrina claimed a $97 million Powerball prize, a jackpot won off a ticket he bought at a convenience store where he stopped to buy his wife a gallon of milk.
Seems his luck has turned around. A construction company owner who lost two homes in Hurricane Katrina claimed a $97 million Powerball prize, a jackpot won off a ticket... more -
Photo of the Day: And Now She Got Pearls
"Photo of the Day: And Now She Got Pearls." This is a wonderful and absolutely touching vintage B&W New Orleans, French Quarter, photograph by Jill Freedman, the acclaimed documentary photographer. Every now and then, a picture will unexpectedly tug at your heart strings. And this just happens to be one of them. Please take a closer look at the high resolution photograph that is presented for you on my site!! "Photo of the Day: And Now She Got Pearls." This is a wonderful and absolutely touching vintage B&W New Orleans, French Quarter, ... more
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Rosie Ledet & Zydeco Playboys - Dallas, TX 04/12/08
Rosie Ledet is one of the most entertaining Zydeco performers on the road today. Captured at Poor David's Pub in Dallas, TX 04/12/08.
From Rosie's website at www.rosieledet.com:
"Zydeco Music is most identified by the accordionists who lead the band. Chenier. Chavis. Delafose. A male-dominated music, but over the last 12 years, a sultry, sexy female voice has risen through the ranks and established herself as one of the leading voices in Zydeco. Rosie Ledet wouldn't be denied.
Rosie has carved out a unique spot in the Zydeco pantheon, a spot that is defined more by her special style than that she is one of a handful of female accordionists.
Singing in both Creole French and English, Rosie is known for her songwriting ability, as well as her bluesy, sexy singing voice. In fact, her music has often been described as "blues with an accordion."
Enjoy your time on the site and hopefully, get to know us better. Eh Toi!!" Rosie Ledet is one of the most entertaining Zydeco performers on the road today. Captured at Poor David's Pub in Dallas, TX 04/12/08.... more -
Death strikes New Orleans heroin users circle
Seven heroin-addicted youths have died of overdoses within the past few months in New Orleans. The oldest was 27, the youngest 16. "So much for the indestructibility of youth."
http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/death_struck...
Seven heroin-addicted youths have died of overdoses within the past few months in New Orleans. The oldest was 27, the youngest 16. ... more -
The Untold Story of Gun Confiscation After Katrina
Video and testimonials on the travesty that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when police and law enforcement confiscated lawfully-owned firearms--at precisely the time citizens needed them most for self-defense! Video and testimonials on the travesty that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when police and law enforcement confiscated... more
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No New Plans, Same old Disaster
This is big. With all the reporting thats being done about the importance of being better prepared come our countries next big disaster, its a shame to see FEMA let a congressionally mandated deadline like this pass. Whose supposed to keep these people in line. This is big. With all the reporting thats being done about the importance of being better prepared come our countries next big disast... more
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Marlon Brando: Shirtless, Wet and Hot!!
"Photos of the Day: A Shirtless, Wet and Hot Marlon Brando." Yes, these are stunning photographs that serve as reminders of the young sexy Brando, shown here in all of his shirtless, hot wetness! The photographs are accompanied by a very erotic scene of Brando in one of his most memorable, sensually seductive performances, a video clip from "A Streetcar Named Desire." "Photos of the Day: A Shirtless, Wet and Hot Marlon Brando." Yes, these are stunning photographs that serve as reminders of the young... more
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