Law and Order

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…

Governor Donald Carcieri has asked the state police to begin an investigation into the state’s Department of Transportation contract staffing practices. From Mike Stanton and Katherine Gregg in today’s Projo…Governor Carcieri yesterday asked the state police to “begin a preliminary review” of the way business has been conducted by the state Department of Transportation… Bottom…

“Tom Paine” takes the Brits to task for their “smug” and “gleeful” take on the recent Virginia Tech massacre. He also makes this acute observation about comparing British and American homicide rates: Britain’s only statistical advantage in the field of crime is that our homicide rate is lower. That’s largely because we only count convictions,…

Our prayers go out to the victims of yesterday’s Virginia Tech shootings. No political commentary here, obviously. But what purpose is being served by investigators’ seeming coyness about admitting whether there is the possibility of a second shooter or not…Virginia Tech’s president said Tuesday that a student was the gunman in at least the second…

Speaking of proposals with gaping holes, if not blatant contradictions, in their reasoning, “key lawmakers and other major players in the state’s law and order community” offered Governor Carcieri some suggestions as to how he might free up some space in the ACI as part of attempts to decrease the state government’s deficit. Apparently: 31…