Rhode Island Culture
On his WPRO-AM website, Dan Yorke has posted the state’s sentencing recommendation in the Derderian brothers case. The sentencing memo casts serious doubt on whether defense efforts to shift the blame to the foam-manufacturer were at all credible. The prosecution investigated this issue thoroughly and would have made the case that no evidence supported the…
I wasn’t intending to post anything on the Station fire victims’ impact statements, but I feel the continuing judicial over-reaching by Judge Francis Darigan that now extends to today’s proceedings requires comment. According to the Projo’s 7-to-7 blog, Judge Darigan has told the victims that they cannot use their impact statements to comment on the…
It appears that much the Derderian brothers legal defense in a Station Fire trial would have focused on who was most responsible for the presence of flammable sound-proof foam in the building. The defense, according to Mark Arsenault et. al. in Sunday’s Projo, was going to argue that the Derderians believed they had installed fireproof…
1. According to Roger Williams University Law Professor David Zlotnick, as reported by Kate Bramson on the Projo’s 7-to-7 blog, a greater degree of secrecy is allowed in Rhode Island courts than is allowed in Federal courts…A law professor at Roger Williams University says the controversy swirling around the Derderians’ plea agreement highlights the downside…
There are at least four problems with Judge Francis Darigan’s statement regarding the Derderian pleas in the Station Fire case that Marc posted on earlier this afternoon.
One of the very first blog posts I ever wrote was in reaction to the Station Night Club fire. Now the ProJo and other outlets are reporting that the Derderian’s have agreed to a plea deal and that there will be no trial. The one big question is: Who offered the deal?
Item 1: On a quiet East Side street yesterday morning, police dug bullet slugs from the vinyl siding on a house and the fender of a nearby car. A teenager walked by with a bloody bandage on his elbow. And mothers complained about the stupidity of young people shooting each other for no good reason.…
At first, being of a cynical mind this morning, I wondered if Karl Rove (via Dale Light) had ever been to Rhode Island when I read his recent statements at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. But upon further consideration, I think he truly hit on one truism, which I’ve highlighted: “There…
Ben Leubsdorf interviewed me for an article about Rhode Island blogs that appeared in yesterday’s Brown Daily Herald. The resulting piece makes for interesting reading, although I probably didn’t express my idealism about blogs as well as I might have. I did, however, try to stress that Anchor Rising is not mine alone, nor can…
NB: I changed the original title of this post to reflect that Sen. Chafee has garnered funds for more than just the Narragansett school. It’s tempting to classify a lot of Federal spending as “pork,” and we at Anchor Rising have certainly done our part to call it like it is. However, not all Federal…
