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Video of the Week
Chapel Hill student, who wanted the world to see
how
smart Allah's servants are, gets 33 years
for running down 9 students
On Tuesday,
August 26, self-described freelance Muslim Jihadist Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar,
25, was sentenced to 33 years in prison for the attempted murder of nine
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill students on March 3, 2006 to
avenge, he said, "...the killing of believing [Muslim] men and
women under the direction of the United States government." 
In
a note left in his apartment at 303 Smith Level Rd., A-34, Taheri-Azar
said: "I did intend to use a handgun to murder the citizens and
residents of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but the process of receiving
a permit for a handgun in this city is highly restricted and out of my
reach at the present, most likely due to my foreign nationality."
He began his confession by saying that because he couldn't buy a gun,
he intended to use his car to run over people and then, if possible, to
stab them to death before he was martyred. He continued, "I have
chosen the particular location on the University campus as my target since
I know there is a high likelihood that I will kill several people before
being killed myself, or jailed and sent to prison if Allah will."
Taheri-Azar,
who claims to have read the all 114 chapters of the Qu'ran about 20 times
said the Muslim holy book mandates that Muslim men and women have an obligation
to murder anyone responsible for the deaths of other believing men and
women. That's why, he said in his March 3 "explanation" of his
actions, he made the decision to exercise "...the right of violent
retaliation that Allah has given me to the fullest extent to which I am
capable at present."
In
his confession, Taheri-Azar said he was avenging the deaths orchestrated
on "...my fellow followers of Allah in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine,
Saudi Arabia and other Islamic territories. I did not act out of hatred
for America but out of love for Allah instead. I live only to serve Allah
by obeying all of his commandments of which I am aware by reading and
learning the content of the Koran." In another letter to the
Chapel Hill Herald Sun, Taheri-Azar commented that "...[i]n
response to the 9/11/01 attacks, I have always believed that the US government
should have immediately seeked [sic] peace instead of war."
On campus at UNC-Chapel Hill, Taheri-Azar pledged Sig Ep, but the fraternity kicked him out because, even though Taheri-Azar was from a wealthy Iranian family (whose parents, Latif and Lily Taheri-Azar, divorced in 2003), he was an antisocial recluse who smoked marijuana and drank alcoholic beverages to excess. He had almost no friends and did not fit in with his peers. According to a couple of Chapel Hill students who knew him, it was only in the last few months that Taheri-Azar "got religion." At that time, he quit smoking pot and drinking. Police said Taheri-Azar planned the attack on the UNC-CH area known as "The Pit" for several months. In mid-February he went shopping for an SUV—a Porche Cayenne that cost more than $110 thousand—at Performance AutoMall in Chapel Hill. He told the sales manager, Scott Trombley, that he might one to buy one." It didn't get him the keys. Instead, Taheri-Azar rented a Jeep Grand Cherokee on March 3 and drove off to play pedestrian polo with his personal date with infamy.
Veteran
dies a month after being
denied treatment because he refused
to participate in an Alzheimer's experiment
When 74-year
old Army veteran Joe Fitzgerald begin experiencing a sudden loss
of motor skill function he did what most veterans do. He went to the Veterans'
Administration in May, 2007. In Joe's case, the VA hospital was the James
J. Peters VA Medical Center in Bronx, New York. Joe was
suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. You know it by a different
name. While the medical name is spongiform encephalopathy you know it
as Mad Cow Disease (although it can occur in humans without them eating
infected cows.) Of course, Joe Fitzgerald didn't know he was infected
with spongiform encephalopathy when he went to the James J. Peters
VA Medical Center. 
Nor,
for that matter, did he know it when he left the facility. He didn't know
because the VA didn't make any attempt to diagnose his condition as anything
other than advanced Alzheimers. Within a month, in June, 2007 Joe Fitzgerald
died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
According to his widow, Aimee Fitzgerald, it appears to her that military people are now guinea pigs and not patients in the VA facilities, and that human research testing has taken a priority over the health of veterans. Dr. Christine Bergmann, who was heading up a human research testing experiment on Alzheimer's Disease last year told the Fitzgeralds that that Alzheiner's study "...was a mandate." Aimee Fitzgerald said she expects the VA "...to be held accountable for this, to prevent this from happening to someone else. Nothing could have saved Joe," she added, "but the care there was hateful and incompetent."
Mrs. Fitzgerald
said that the VA researchers wanted Joe to enroll in the Alzheimers
study so they could observe "...the natural and ravaging course
of [Alzheimers] and his eventual death." Except that Joe Fitzgerald
was suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease and not Alzheimers.
Fitzgerald's VA physician, Dr. Ruth Walker, introduced him
to Dr. Bergmann, telling him that being in the program would lead
to a faster diagnosis. 
Dr.
Bergmann also suggested that Joe Fitzgerald's participation
in the Alzheimer's human research experiment would enable researchers
to more quickly diagnosis of his condition. Fitzgerald said that
"...Dr. Bergmann made it very clear to us that the benefit
of signing up for the study would be that she would develop an individual
profile of Joe that would help them to arrive at a diagnosis faster."
(The VA offered several members of the James J. Peters VA Medical
Center staff to the media by the VA to rebuff Fitzgerald's
position—except that they did not put Dr. Bergmann front and
center before the media.
VA officials, who appeared puzzled, said Dr. Bergmann did not have the authority to offer a diagnosis on Fitzgerald's medical condition since her concern was the human research experiment only. "The [Alzheimer's] study," MaryAnn Musumeci, Director of the James J. Peters VA Medical Center said, "has very little do with their diagnosis and it is not consistent with what occurred," suggesting that Fitzgerald was not told he could have his current medical conditions diagnosed and treated faster by joining the study. In point of fact, what happened when Fitzgerald declined to join the Alzheimer's experiment, he was discharged from James J. Peters VA Medical Center and sent home with instructions to return to his local physician at the Castle Point VA Hospital in Duchess County, NY.
Musumeci issued a statement saying that Fitzgerald did not come to the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in May, 2007 for treatment. The said he came specifically for testing and medical evaluation. Once the tests were done, she said, he was referred back to his physician at the Castle Point VA Hospital for further care. "He was released," Musumeci said, "because his work-up was complete. We did all of the tests we could have done." Fitzgerald was advised to keep up with future testing appointments with Castle Rock. Musumeci said the Bronx facility had recommended hospice care at Castle Rock for Fitzgerald since they knew the man's health was deteriorating and likely would not improve. When he left the James J. Peters VA Medical Center, his discharge papers noted, he was in stable condition. Aimee Fitzgerald said that while the Bronx hospital did advise her to make sure her husband kept future testing appointments but insists that the James J. Peters VA Medical Center did not recommend hospice care, or said that her husband's health was deteriorating.
Veterans
Affairs Secretary James B. Peake apologized to the Fitzgerald
family for what he termed "...Mrs. Fitzgerald's perceived
sense of callousness, or a sense that there was some additional diagnostic
or other measures..." that the VA could have offered her husband
that may have prolonged his life.
Clearly when Joe Fitzgerald walked into James J. Peters VA Medical Center in May, 2007 his life was ebbing from his body. Had the VA admitted him and monitored his vital signs for a couple of days they would have known that. They may not have diagnosed his Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease before it killed him. They certainly could not have saved his life since the degenerative neurological disorder is incurable. Fitzgerald's doctor mistook Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease for Alzheimers because both are characterized by rapidly progressive dementia. Fitzgerald would have been a classic example for the experiment, and at the rate his neurological functions were deteriorating, he appeared to be the perfect test case for Dr. Bergmann.
Joe Fitzgerald was going to die whether he was a test subject or not. But that does not mitigate the callous indifference of the VA since their constitutional function is to provide healthcare for men and women who fought and, many times, left limbs on the battlefields of the world—if not their lives or sanity. Their congressional mandate is not to function as paid guinea pigs for Big Pharma. Nor is that a conscionable right for the head of the Veteran's Affairs Administration—or any government agency. This has become a profitable, common practice with Big Pharma donating massive amounts of money to political campaigns in order to gain access to disabled veterans for the testing of new products.
In the United States, medical experimentation on humans is nothing new. The practice began with the Tuskegee Project in 1932 when the US Department of Health began studying the progression of syphilis in untreated black men. In 1941, with the outbreak of World War II, the US Army drafted the subjects of the Tuskegee Project and tracked the untreated progression of the disease until the test subjects died. In the 1940s, 400 convicts at Statesville Penitentiary in the Illinois penal system took part in a malaria experiment when they were inoculated with experimental vaccines and injected with malaria. In 1942, mustard gas experiments were done on 4,000 US servicemen to determine the effects of mustard gas on the human nervous system. In 1945, US serviceman were exposed to radiation poisoning. In the 1960s soldiers were deliberately exposed to herbicides like Agent Orange, and in the first Gulf War, soldiers were tasked with the responsibility of burning captured caches of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons. In none of these instances were the soldiers informed of the potential risk to their health. In fact, it is doubtful that any of the men—or their officers—knew that risks existed from exposure tp the weapons they were destroying.
The CIA has used military personnel as toxicology guinea pigs—with and without their consent—testing the affects of both chemical and biological weapons at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland and at the Edgewood Arsenal (now known as the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center), in Aberdeen, Maryland. The use of uninformed guinea pigs by the military and the CIA was outlawed after the CIA was caught experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) in an attempt to create mind control drugs that could be used to either interrogate or terrorize the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese regulars during the Vietnam War.
Today, agencies of the US government, or research facilities involved in testing new drugs, cannot use human guinea pigs who have not been informed of the risks, and who have not signed medical releases stating they are aware of the health risks. But even then, the Veterans Administration is still involved in an Inspector General's investigation of Chantix© study that was initiated in the VA by November, 2007.
US
Attorney keeps man in jail 4 years, then
decides not enough evidence to prosecute.
Forty-six
year old Carlton John Brown, a security officer at the former Dream
nightclub in northeast Washington DC had a heated confrontation with two
men in front of the club at 2:30 a.m. on May 15, 2004. They parked their
vehicle in front of the "no parking" entrance of the club. The
argument took a dangerous twist when guns were drawn. According to DC
police who investigated the incident, Brown began firing. He hit
the two men with whom he was arguing. He also hit a third man who was
approaching the club to meet up with two friends. The third man, Derrick
Potts, was on off-duty DC police officer. And that's what sparked
Brown's four year odyssey in the DC lockup—sans trial.
As he approached the club, Potts said he could hear them arguing about the vehicle parked in front of the nightclub. He heard one guy tell Brown, "Well, make me move my truck! You make me move my truck!" Potts said he saw some shoving, but couldn't tell who pushed whom. Then, Potts said, he heard the first gunshot followed by four or five others in quick succession as he dived for cover behind a truck. He was struck in the leg by one bullet. In the split second when the gunfire started, Potts was diving for cover and not watching those engaged in the confrontation. The two men who got into a fight with the Dream's security officer swore that Brown fired first and they acted in self-defense. Brown argued they fired first and he reciprocated in self-defense.
DC cops, rallying around one of their own, decided Brown was good for the crime. They arrested the security guard and locked him up on a 13-count federal indictment. The most serious charge, carrying and discharging a firearm, would mete the most serious jail time. It violatied DC's unconstitutional gun ban which was overturned by the US Supreme Court on June 28, 2008—four years and five lawyers ago. In the interim, the three shooting victims filed lawsuits against the Dream nightclub. The claims made by two of the men were quickly settled. The third lawsuit is still pending.
The "ironclad" case appeared not to be quite so ironclad after a second, third, fourth and fifth glance. As Brown fired four of his lawyers, or they lost interest in his case because Brown refused to accept plea deals from federal prosecutors looking for an easy win, he continued to sit in jail even though the wounds suffered by those shot on May 15, 2004 were minor. Brown's 5th attorney, A. Eduardo Balarezo a criminal lawyer practicing in Baltimore and Washington noted, first, that he was Brown's fifth attorney in over four years. "It's a shame it took four years of Mr. Brown sitting in jail pending trial for the government to do the right thing and dismiss the case. It was apparent," he said, "upon my initial review of the file that the evidence did not support the charges. Thankfully, the government finally realized this also." The government made no attempt to drop the gun charges in the indictment even though the Supreme Court threw out the DC gun ban law as unconstitutional. In the minds of the prosecutors, when the incident happened, the gun ban was construed to be legal, therefore Brown could still be sentenced to prison for violating it even though the high court ruled it violated the Constitution.
Had Brown not hired Balarezo—who has a good percentage of wins against the federal prosecutors in DC and Baltimore—its likely that his prosecution would have commenced and concluded on August 12, 2008 as scheduled—with Brown being railroaded by the US Attorney as a favor to the DC Metropolitan Police. Instead, realizing it was not likely that they would get a conviction of any of the charges against Brown, the US Attorney for Washington, DC dropped the charges and released Brown from custody. Channing Phillips, spokesman for the government issued a brief statement: "The bottom line is that we no longer believed we had sufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. We, therefore, were compelled to move to dismiss the charges." What Phillips really meant was because they couldn't force Brown to accept a plea deal that would put him behind bars for four or five years (probably for "time served"), the government was forced to let him go.
Brown's four year jail stay violated his right to a speedy trial under the 6th Amendment. The fact that, in the end, all charges against him were dropped is a stigma on the US Department of Justice because it shows that the abuse of the Constitution persists with the agency of the federal government sworn to uphold its tenets. Because of the Constitution, it is incumbent on the government to expedite the trials of those accused of crimes, not confine the accused where they can be pressured into accepting plea agreements because the government lacks the evidence to secure a conviction.
Trials that take place two or more years after the "crime" is commonplace in the federal system. If those delays are not caused by the petitions from the defendants, the federal judiciary should throw those cases out with prejudice regardless of the criminal offense since the practice of suspending the life of the accused while the State takes an inordinate amount of time to build its case violates the inherent liberty of every US citizen. It is incumbent on federal and State authorities to leave at liberty those suspected of a crime until the State of federal government has sufficient tangible, not circumstantial, evidence to secure a conviction.
On July 24, 2008 another Balarezo client who was held in a federal lockup for over two years while the US Attorney's Office built their case against him was found not guilty when a federal jury rejected the allegation of the DEA that the man, Jaime Micolta, a Colombian citizen who was arrested in the United States, had conspired with Colombian druglord Pablo Rayo-Montano to ship tons of cocaine into the United States. Micolta's role in the drug smuggling, according to the DEA was to open bank accounts in US banks and find real estate in the United States for Rayo-Montano. Micolta was accused of opening accounts in the names of other people and using those accounts to launder drug money by purchasing real estate which could then be sold legitimately. The federal jury failed to buy the government's circumstantial yarn that was lacking physical evidence of wrongdoing. Instead, all of the witnesses against Micolta came from unreliable people who were part of the drug ring and who offered to testify against Micolta in exchange for a reduced sentence in their own case.
In 1966 the US Supreme Court called the 6th Amendment "...an important safeguard to prevent undue and oppressive incarceration prior to trial, to minimize anxiety and concern accompanying public accusation and to limit the possibility that long delays will impair the ability of an accused to defend himself."
In this age of radical, extremist terrorism and an increase in horrific sex crimes committed by perverted career offenders, the general public is inclined at times to turn a blind eye on those accused and incarcerated as the perpetrators of hideous crimes, believing those people would not be incarcerated if the government did not have the evidence to detain them. But that is not the point. The right to a speedy trial, first mentioned in the Magna Carta, and chiseled into the Bill of Rights, guarantees that all men have an inherent right to face their accusers in a speedy trial since the longer the accused awaits his fate in a prison cell, the less likely it will be that he actually gets a fair trial. Much of the physical evidence is gone. Witnesses for the defense may die or move away from the area where the crime occurred, becoming unavailable to the defense when the trial actually occurs. And, of course, memories fade after time. And, the longer the defendant sits in a jail cell awaiting trial, the less ability the accused has to prepare for trial.
To circumvent the 6th Amendment, law enforcement agencies and the judicial system now construe that the "right to a speedy trial" is "activated" once the prosecution process of a suspect has begun, not based on the indictment or formal charging of a suspect. Theoretically it begins with the restraints of arrest. In the case of Carlton John Brown, he was under restraint for four years, three months. We need to blame the US Supreme Court because although they have made pithy statements about preventing undue and oppressive incarceration prior to trial, the high court has never made any attempt to define a specific length of time that should be construed as too long to be considered "a speedy and public trial." By anyone's yardstick, four years is too long.
Yet the Supreme Court has adopted the position that each case is considered on its own merits, leaving the door open for federal and State abuse of power by denying suspects a fair and speedy trial. If a prosecutor delays the trial of a defendant to gain an advantage, that clearly violates the 6th Amendment. And, where the American Bar Association believes the absence of witnesses is considered an appropriate reason for delaying the trial of a suspect, the reverse is true. If the witnesses are not available, the defendant should not be a defendant until they are. A suspect, maybe. But not a defendant. The Supreme Court noted that "...we can do little more than identify some of the factors which courts should assess in determining whether a particular defendant has been deprived of his right. Though some might express them in different ways, we identify four such factors: length of delay, the reason for the delay, the defendant's assertion of his right, and prejudice to the defendant."
The only time a delay is merited is when it is needed by the defendant to prepare an adequate defense. Since defendants are [a] generally not lawyers, and [b] come from a variety of societal and economic circumstances, there is no way to gauge how much time is needed to retain competent counsel, secure the witnesses for the defense and prepare his case to prove his innocence. Even though the burden of proof, theoretically, is on the State to prove guilt, prosecutors today successfully argue to juries, in summation, that the defendant failed to prove his innocence—and although the jury knows the burden is on the State, those statements in summation weigh heavily in their decisions, and many times cause wavering jury members to vote "guilty."
The right to a speedy trial to those accused of crimes in this country, and its implications on the defendant, the jury—and society —makes the Constitutional application of the 6th Amendment crucial to the survival of the United States as a sovereign nation.
