Law and Order
Question for anyone who drives a pickup truck. Would a pipe bomb in the back of your truck escape your attention as you drove to work? Overreaching for an explanation now, how if someone dropped it in while you were stopped at a red light? The Palo Verde nuclear power plant, the largest in the…
And the winner of this year’s Alinsky award for staying on-message, no matter what facts, common sense and common decency all indicate, is Ali Noorani, the executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition. Mr. Noorani receives this award for his quote appearing in Amanda Milkovits’ and Karen Lee Ziner’s story in today’s…
Dr. Thomas P. Gilson, Rhode Island’s Chief Medical Examiner, has just issued a press release as to the cause of Mr. Araujo’s death: “The cause of death for Edimar Alves De Araujo, a 34-year-old male from Milford, MA, who expired in Providence, RI, on August 7, 2007, after Federal Immigration agents took him into custody,…
The case of the contaminated soil a Tiverton neighborhood just down the hill from me is beginning to exemplify everything that is wrong with our current mix of government ubiquity and the cultural knee-jerk reaction to litigate: Fiscal woes notwithstanding, the DEM went into the red in the fiscal year that ended in June to…
Nobody should die as the result of a traffic stop. But the timeline of events leading to the unfortunate death of Edimar Alves de Araujo while in Federal custody, as assembled from witness testimony and audio/visual evidence provided by the Woonsocket Police and Providence Fire Departments, points to a tragedy that was sudden and unforeseeable,…
Senate President Joseph Montalbano’s claim of immunity from four Rhode Island Ethics Commission charges directly involving his Senate votes is based on a supposedly expansive view of speech-in-debate immunity recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of United States v. Brewster…It is beyond doubt that the Speech or Debate Clause protects against inquiry…
The Bloomberg wire service is carrying this terrorism-related legal story that has a Rhode Island connection… The Iranian government must designate an official to answer questions under oath from a lawyer seeking to seize Persian artifacts in the U.S. on behalf of victims of a 1997 Jerusalem terror bombing, a judge ruled. A lawyer for…
Have we lost our minds? In McMinnville OR, two middle school boys have been charged with five counts of felony sexual abuse after being observed swatting some of their female classmates on the butt. They were arrested and jailed. The District Attorney, Bradley Berry, has pledged to have the two boys registered for life as…
Your tax dollars at work (double entendre intended). The police say that Joanna “Rosa” Gonzalez, a 28-year-old mother of two in Wanskuck, was employing dozens of people including her mother, her sister, their boyfriends, and their children in a crack-cocaine enterprise that covered the city from the North End to the West Side. The operation…
This one is cute. The lawyer for Senate President Joseph Montalbano is arguing that requiring public officials to file any mandatory conflict of interest disclosure is unconstitutional. From W. Zachary Malinowski in today’s Projo…[Max Wistow] has said that Montalbano’s failure to disclose the income was inadvertent, and he has raised several defenses against the other…