The New York State Senate recently passed a package of bills that would strengthen laws and toughen criminal penalties for certain sex offenses related to rape and child pornography. These heinous crimes scar the victims and their families for life and those convicted of such offenses should be dealt with in a severe manner. In addition, bills were passed to expand information on criminal background checks for individuals applying for employment in law enforcement and increasing penalties for the crime of criminally negligent homicide.
One bill, approved by the senate, would ensure those who commit multiple crimes pay for each. Often times the crime of first-degree rape, one of horrifying sexual violence, is repeated either against the same victim, or against multiple victims. Under current law, it is possible for a judge to issue concurrent sentences for multiple counts arising from separate and distinct acts. At this time, a rapist convicted of multiple counts could receive as little as five years in prison. The legislation (S.1826) I support would require that the sentences on each count run consecutively to ensure that no rape goes unpunished.
The senate also passed a bill (S.1417A) that would create graduated levels of criminal charges for large scale producers and distributors of child pornography. It would permit prosecution of internet pedophiles in proportion to the scale and danger of their criminal activity.
Anyone who commits a crime against a child should be punished severely. Criminals who prey on a child’s innocence and engage in child pornography on a larger scale should face even stiffer penalties. The current statutory system of “one-size fits-all” has an often unintended consequence of leniency for sexual predators. This legislation would provide law enforcement with penalties that better fit the level of the crime as they work to end this unconscionable abuse of children.
The senate also passed a bill (S. 1423) to expand the unsealing of criminal histories for the purpose of investigating applicants for employment by police departments and other law enforcement agencies. Under current law, law enforcement agencies are authorized to obtain records of sealed acquittals of the applicant, but not sealed convictions.
There is no doubt that before a police department hires an officer, they should be made aware of all previous arrest and prosecution records. Police officers hold a position of immense public trust and full disclosure is vital before they are allowed to put on uniforms and swear to serve and protect. Full background disclosure of a potential police officer ensures that departments are made up of men and women of the utmost character.
In addition, the senate approved the following criminal justice bills:
S.256 would make the crime of surreptitious surveillance a class B misdemeanor. A person would be guilty of this crime if he or she intentionally observes another person dressing or undressing or intentionally observes such person’s sexual or intimate parts without that person’s knowledge or consent when that person has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Current surveillance statutes encompass the use or installation of an imaging device to surreptitiously view, broadcast or record a person;
S.527 establishes that a person is guilty of grand larceny in the fourth degree when he or she steals property and is in possession of an anti-security item. An example would be possession of an item to remove security tags from clothing in a store;
S.943 increases the penalty for the crime of criminally negligent homicide from a Class E to a Class D felony;
S.487 would require that when a sex offender is sentenced to probation, and he/she violates that probation with another sex offense, that the sentences of incarceration imposed for the probation violation and for the new sex offense run consecutively and not concurrently.
Each of these bills serves to strengthen our criminal justice system by updating laws and closing existing loopholes. The result is a safer New York.
HOUSTON — Since a judge let him out of prison for a rape that prosecutors now say he did not commit, Michael A. Green has had trouble sleeping.
Michael A. Green
Late at night, he walks the neat, quiet sidewalks in the neighborhood where he is staying with an aunt, chain-smoking cigarettes, his mind spinning furiously with questions about why he was convicted 27 years ago and how to spend what is left of his life.
He also ponders, he says, whether to take a $2.2 million compensation payment from the State of Texas or file a civil lawsuit in the hope of exposing the truth about the investigation that led to his incarceration. To receive the compensation, he must waive the right to sue.
“What I really need to do is to make them pay for what they done to me,” he says. “Two-point-two million dollars is nothing when it comes to 27 years of my life, which I spent with mental torture and physical abuse.”
Mr. Green, 45, was set free by a state judge two weeks ago after DNA tests on the rape victim’s clothing proved that he could not have been responsible for the crime. His exoneration was the work of a new unit in the Harris County district attorney’s office dedicated to reviewing claims of innocence.
The story of Mr. Green’s nightmarish imprisonment — and how a prosecutor, Alicia O’Neill, eventually unearthed biological evidence that led to the real culprits — throws a harsh spotlight on an uncomfortable reality in American justice: the identification of a suspect in a lineup or in an array of photos is not always reliable.
More than three-quarters of the 258 people exonerated by DNA tests in the last decade were convicted on the strength of eyewitness identifications, according to the Innocence Project, the Manhattan-based organization dedicated to freeing innocent prisoners.
In Texas, the problem is even more acute: identifications by eyewitnesses played a pivotal role in 80 percent of the 40 people who have been exonerated with DNA evidence.
Some states, among them North Carolina and Ohio, have passed legislation changing the way lineups are conducted to reduce the possibility of an error, but similar bills in dozens of other states, including Texas, have failed in the face of stiff opposition from prosecutors and law enforcement agencies, defense lawyers say.
In 1983, Mr. Green was a high school dropout who slept late every day, played video games at an arcade in the afternoons and stole cars at night to make money. “Life was one big party,” he recalled.
He was walking home on April 18, 1983, the night a white woman was abducted and raped in his neighborhood by four black men in a stolen Camaro. He was one of several young men stopped by the police, but the victim could not identify him.
A week later, however, he was arrested after stealing a car and smashing it up. Detectives showed the victim Mr. Green’s mug shot, along with several other photos, and she said he might be one of her attackers. Later the same day, she picked him out of a lineup of five men.
He heard her scream from behind the mirrored glass when it was his turn to step forward in the lineup. He began cursing and yelling at the police.
“I got so mad, because I recognized it was a setup,” he said. “Then one of the police said: ‘I don’t know what you are mad about. I didn’t rape her. You did.’ ”
Mr. Green spit in the officer’s face, the first of many defiant acts.
A few days later, he turned down an offer from a prosecutor to plead guilty and serve five years for the rape, Mr. Green said. He recalls the trial as a surreal experience. It was the victim’s word against his. On the stand, she pointed him out again. He told the jury that he was innocent, but they did not believe him.
At 18 years old, he was sentenced to 75 years.
In prison, he fought nearly every day with other inmates at the Ferguson Unit, in Midway, where he earned the nickname “Two-Gun” for his boxing skills. He was filled with rage, he said, and fought often with the guards, too, earning vicious reprisals. In 1985, he was placed in a segregated unit for unruly and dangerous prisoners, mostly gang members. “I was considered one of the bad boys,” he said.
In 1986, a white inmate tried to stab him, but wounded a guard instead. Mr. Green said the attacker, who belonged to a white supremacist gang, had wanted to kill him because he had allegedly raped a white woman.
Confined alone in a cell for all but two hours a day, he would ruminate endlessly about his trial, he said. “I lay back and thought over and over and over again, why did they find me guilty?” he said. In the late 1980s, he began to request books from the law library, looking for a way to overturn the conviction.
But he lost every appeal, and a public defender told him in 1988 that his case was hopeless, given the vehemence of the victim’s testimony. He saw no glimmer of hope until 2001, when Texas passed a statute granting inmates the right to request DNA tests on old evidence under certain conditions.
He wrote the motion himself on a typewriter in his cell and sent it to the trial judge in July 2005. The judge assigned a public defender to handle the request, but the motion languished for three years in a backlog of requests before the Harris County district attorney’s office.
Then in 2008, Patricia Lykos, a former judge and police officer, was elected district attorney, and one of her first acts was to reverse the office’s longstanding reluctance to admit mistakes. She assigned two assistant district attorneys and an investigator to do nothing but comb through about 185 cases involving requests for DNA tests as well as about 75 other innocence claims. So far, the unit’s work has led to the release of three men, including Mr. Green.
Ms. Lykos has been pushing for a new regional crime lab to help expedite the cases. Not only were innocent men imprisoned, she said, but the victims were denied justice and the actual culprits remained free to commit other crimes. “Whenever you have an innocent person convicted, you have a triple tragedy,” she said.
Ms. O’Neill immediately zeroed in on Mr. Green’s tale as one of the few in the stack of cases in which DNA testing could make a difference. “It was just a perfect case to see what the science had to say,” Ms. O’Neill said.
The trouble was that the county clerk said the records showed the evidence in the case had been destroyed, a standard practice for old investigations in which there are no pending appeals. But Ms. O’Neill kept searching, and it turned out one box of evidence had been preserved by mistake, and inside were the victim’s jeans. There were 32 semen stains on the denim.
It took a year and a half for a state crime laboratory to untangle the DNA markers on the jeans, but when it was done, Ms. O’Neill and her colleague, Baldwin Chin, had hit pay dirt. Two of the profiles found on the pants matched those of men who had been arrested for other crimes — Michael A. Smith, who was in prison, and David Elder, who was on parole. What is more, none of the three profiles matched Mr. Green’s genetic code.
Under questioning, Mr. Elder named two other people involved in the rape, writing the names on the back of a business card. One of the men, Lawrence Mosley, was serving time in Amarillo for another crime, and he confirmed that the fourth person was Timothy Washington. None of the four will be charged in the rape because the statute of limitations has expired, prosecutors said.
But the new evidence was enough to persuade a judge to release Mr. Green on $500 bond while the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals considers a final ruling on his innocence.
“It’s what you go to law school for,” Ms. O’Neill said of the moment Mr. Green walked out of jail.
Mr. Green, in the meantime, said the experience of freedom had “been a trip.” Just stepping in a grocery store or shopping for clothing at a mall overwhelms his senses, he said.
But the best years of his life are lost forever, he says. He wonders what happened to his girlfriend, whom he lost contact with after being sent to prison. He breaks down when talking about his mother’s death in 2006 and how he missed the funeral.
Then he pulls himself together. He has been offered a job as a paralegal with the Innocence Project of Texas, he says, and will dedicate his time to “getting more innocent dudes out.”
LOS ANGELES — A man who spent 24 years imprisoned for a murder he did not commit will receive $7.95 million from the City of Long Beach after he sued the police there for withholding evidence in his 1980 trial.
Thomas Lee Goldstein
The settlement, made public Thursday, is the largest pretrial settlement ever in California for a wrongful conviction and one of the largest in the country, said Barry Litt, a lawyer for the man, Thomas Lee Goldstein.
In 2004, Mr. Goldstein was freed from prison after the Los Angeles district attorney dismissed all charges against him in the 1979 killing of a Long Beach drug dealer. The move was based on new evidence that the police had coached the only witness in the case by pointing Mr. Goldstein out in a photo spread as a suspect who had failed a polygraph test.
Lawyers also presented evidence that the police had offered Eddy Fink, a heroin addict and police informant, leniency in a grand theft conviction if he testified against Mr. Goldstein.
At the trial, Mr. Fink told the jury that Mr. Goldstein had confessed to the killing when the two men briefly shared a jail cell. Mr. Fink, who has since died, lied in court when asked if he had made any deal with the police before testifying, Mr. Litt said.
But Monte Machit, the Long Beach deputy attorney who defended the city in the case, said the police had not provided Mr. Fink “with any benefit in exchange for the information he offered.”
“We don’t believe there was any wrongdoing” by city officials, Mr. Machit said. “This is a lot of money, but in light of the potential verdict,” which could have been $24 million to $30 million and lawyers’ fees, he said, “we thought it better to get it resolved.”
Mr. Goldstein, 61, said the settlement was the end of a 30-year-long “painful chapter” in his life.
He said he would spend his coming years trying to “rebuild my life, prepare for retirement and help others who have not been as fortunate as I am today.”
Lawmaker who’s also RN wants to mandate background checks
State Sen. Patricia L. Miller, R-Indianapolis, plans to introduce legislation that makes background checks mandatory for Indiana nurses.
Miller said she has asked the Legislative Services Agency to draft such a bill in response to an Indianapolis Star report showing Indiana is one of only a handful of states that do not require background checks for nurses.
The Star’s investigation found nurses who had been charged or convicted of crimes involving prescription drugs, alcohol and violence. Licensing officials did not find out about those charges or convictions, however, and the nurses’ licenses were not affected.
“There ought to be a simple way to do this that is really fair and effective,” Miller, a registered nurse, told The Star on Tuesday. “Often the information is available; it’s just not getting to the state.”
Miller, who chairs the Health and Provider Services Committee, plans to introduce the bill in the next legislative session. She is gathering suggestions from nurses and others but is considering three main provisions:
Requiring hospitals, nursing homes and other kinds of health facilities to conduct pre-employment criminal background checks on nurses. They are currently required to perform such checks only on unlicensed professionals.
Requiring employers to pass information they learn about nurses’ criminal activity on to licensing officials.
Requiring law enforcement officials to pass information about nurses’ criminal history on to licensing officials on an ongoing basis (rather than checking nurses’ backgrounds only when they change jobs or renew their licenses).
“If something happens the day after you have your last criminal history check and the police know it,” Miller said, “they ought to report it then.”
If everyone intends to look up out about someone living near you will consequently it would be appropriate for the public to find out about important tips on a site to investigate someone on the internet. Sometimes when people shift to a new place consequently people involve knowing about the individuals living on our street. Sometimes people think about finding any old lost college friend or any relative. In these cases one can use the Net. Although for performing a perfect research on the Net, the public would involve discovering important tips on a site to investigate someone on the internet.
A few months ago when I was researching on the Net to find out about important tips on a site to investigate someone on the internet consequently I come to know that a lot of on the internet directories are obtainable on the Net which keep the records data for the individuals against their contact info or social security number. So if the public have the contact info like phone number, address or the social security number of any person consequently the public can use these things to locate the person the public have been hunting for. Numerous reverse address research services and reverse phone number research services would be helpful for the public to look up out the new contact info of any old friend or lost relative.
By discovering important tips on find out about someone, the public would be able to know whether your lost friend or relative is alive or not likely because these on the internet databases keep the birth records data and death records due to the fact that well. Moreover the public would also be able to locate the marriage and divorce records data of any person with the help of on the internet databases. The on the internet databases would be helpful for the public to obtain the records data of any person immediately then again for that you would involve paying the payments specified by the aid.
By discovering important tips on a site to investigate someone on the internet you would be able to become a great person who specialized in private investigations. This would be helpful for you in your own life and even if you intend to become a professional investigator consequently you can also do it. If you intend to become an investigator consequently you would have to register yourself on a couple of resources which you think are reliable and you also can use for getting the records data for your research. Most for the resources charge you between $20 and $50 for buying its membership for a specific time period. The paid members of different resources also enjoy other facilities offered by the resource to its paid members.
Benken draws on years as police officer, attorney
Brian Benken carries natural charm and a gun. The first keeps the latter in its holster.
Benken is the most sought-after private investigator in Houston for criminal cases from murder to health care fraud to financial scandals. He’s a blond mix of obsessive attention to detail and laid-back calm. He’s a hybrid — an attorney and private investigator who looks like a classy cop but thinks like a criminal defense lawyer.
“He has this gift. He makes people so comfortable they want to talk to him,” said Kent Schaffer, a criminal defense attorney who recently used Benken on the R. Allen Stanford financial fraud case and attributes some 10 grand jury no-bills of his clients to Benken. “He’s unassuming, low-key and likeable and he gets turned away very rarely.”
Benken won’t do divorce cases, he’s not interested in what he calls “fighting over salt and pepper shakers.” This sometime sleuth and sometime criminal defense lawyer likes to take a police offense report and dissect it to find more about everything such as puttied-over gunshot holes, alternative ways the drugs might have gotten in the car, why witnesses might lie, Facebook photos that tell a different story and on and on.
Lawyers who hire him these days praise his ability to get more detail than the police did, to zero in on lying witnesses and to unravel discrepancies, as he did in the Galveston case of Robert Durst, the eccentric millionaire who tossed a neighbor’s body parts into the Gulf but was acquitted of murder.
In that case Benken test-fired a gun inside Durst’s duplex to find that it was loud enough that more people likely heard the fatal shots than had admitted it. He also found South Carolina witnesses to detail the threatening nature of the man who died, bolstering his client’s self-defense claim.
A career in curiosity
A graduate of Sam Houston State University, Benken landed a job as a financial investigator in the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in 1983. He was interested in what the lawyers did, so he went to law school at night to become one in 1987. He was curious about what police officers did, too, so he went to the police academy and became a peace officer in 1989.
He also became a prosecutor, then a criminal defense attorney, often defending police and deputies. Then he started doing more private investigations. Right now, sometimes he’s the attorney, more often he’s the investigator, but often he uses both his law and investigator licenses.
“People sometimes ask ‘What are you today?’ ” said Benken. His Heights Boulevard office is furnished with antiques, but features a little red chalk-outline-like dead body, stabbed in the heart with a pen.
‘I just like the hunt’
Benken said putting the puzzle together is more fun than arguing in court. He favors murder cases because “there is always something to work with” — like alibis, witnesses who haven’t yet told all, and accidents. He carries a gun but doesn’t feel in danger, except from the occasional growling pit bull.
“I just like the hunt,” Benken said. And many of Houston’s best criminal defense attorneys — Schaffer, Mike Ramsey, Chip Lewis, Dan Cogdell and George “Mac” Secrest among them — like sending him after quarry.
Between his time in the DA’s office and his time out of it, he has quietly gotten his hands on many of the biggest criminal cases in Houston. They range from investigations into corruption at the Hermann Hospital Estate and construction contractors paving private roads for a county commissioner in the 1980s, through the Enron and Stanford financial scandals, and to high-profile cases such as what turned out to be false charges against police in the death of Pedro Oregon, who was shot 12 times by police in a highly publicized and controversial drug raid.
His methods are often creative. In one case, in which a 280-pound client was accused of assaulting a woman in a Suzuki Samuri, Benken taped a re-enactment that showed how difficult it would have been for his large client to maneuver inside the cramped vehicle.
In another case he played a female laundromat owner in a courtroom re-enactment that helped convince the jury she was shot in self-defense.
From client to colleague
When Benken suspected a testifying witness really needed a wheelchair though she said she didn’t, he got video of the FBI wheeling her from her home the next morning to bring her back to court.
Cogdell said that when other investigators come back with a sentence or two saying someone worked at a restaurant, Benken reports on their shift hours, their favorite customers, work enemies and the kind of detail that can make a cross-examination work.
“A lot of investigators are ex-cops, many in the twilight of their careers, and they don’t really believe in the innocence of their clients. Their attitude is: ‘I’ll get around to it when I finish with my cheeseburger and beer.’ But Benken is uniquely reliable, professional and helpful. He gets into the weeds,” said Cogdell, who used Benken to investigate the case against fallen judge Don Jackson and to look into health care fraud by a doctor couple who pleaded guilty last week.
It was in winning freedom for accused Houston police officer Jim Willis in the Pedro Oregon case that Benken found the Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. The men bonded during the ordeal, and Willis later started investigating with Benken.
Willis says his years as a policeman and his understanding of being wrongly accused makes him a good complement to Benken’s legal mind. “We don’t have to be good cop-bad cop when we interview people. We show them all respect,” Willis said. “I’d say it’s more like good cop-better cop.”
