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Deputy who fired had done so before
Matthew Eisley
08 Dec 2006 3:14 am
One of the New Hanover County deputies thought to have shot and killed college student Peyton Strickland in a police raid last week shot two teenage drug dealers five years ago during a confrontational traffic stop.
Cpl. Christopher Long, 34, said after the February 2001 shooting that the driver, Gregory Donnell Miller, 17, was trying to run over him, but Miller later denied it. Long shot him and his friend inside the car, Terry Lamar Green, 18.
Miller and Green were wounded.
The county's then-district attorney decided not to bring charges against Long after reviewing a State Bureau of Investigation report on the incident. He refused to release the report.
A jury convicted Miller of assault with a deadly weapon (the car) on a law enforcement officer. He and Green were convicted of possessing marijuana with the intent to sell it. Green later died in what police said was a drug-related shooting.
Following standard procedure, New Hanover County Sheriff Sid Causey has put Long and two other officers on paid leave while the SBI investigates the Dec. 1 shooting death of Strickland, a Durham native who was attending Cape Fear Community College.
Long, a full-time member of the sheriff's heavily armed Emergency Response Team, was most recently assigned to provide security in New Hanover public schools, Causey said. The 10-year veteran of the Sheriff's Office is paid $43,323 a year, Causey said.
State and local authorities have not yet explained exactly what happened during the raid of Strickland's home off Long Leaf Acres Drive in Wilmington or why the unarmed student was shot.
War on Drugs denounced by former law enforcement officials
Adra Cooper
27 Oct 2006 12:00 am
Of the 1.5 million people in U.S. federal prisons, 59.6 percent are drug offenders, according to the Department of Justice.
Is this overwhelming majority because drug trafficking is extremely high in this country, or is it because our government over-criminalizes drug offenders?
This question has fueled the debate over the war on drugs for years. However, some of the people who promote the decriminalization of drugs are those that you would least expect: law enforcement professionals.
Former policemen, DEA agents, prison wardens and FBI agents have formed the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). This non-partisan group advocates the regulation of illegal narcotics at the same level as tobacco and alcohol.
LEAP members travel around the country and discuss their first-hand experiences with the inadequacy of current drug enforcement.
"The thing I remember most is, no matter what we did, no matter how hard we worked or how many hours we put in, there were always more drugs at the end of the day than at the beginning of the day," Jack Cole, executive director of LEAP, told the New Haven Advocate.
This movement of legal officers, who were involved with the war on drugs and now so strongly oppose it, speaks volumes about how truly ineffective our U.S. drug policies are.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy says that federal spending on drug control has increased 34.4 percent since 2001. However, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, illicit drug rates since 2001 have remained constant.
It would be a completely different story if the only people the government was putting behind bars were huge, murderous drug lords who dealt hundreds of pounds of cocaine, but this is hardly the case.
According to FBI reports, 81 percent of the drug-related arrests in 2005 were for possession of controlled substances while only 18.3 percent were for sale or manufacturing of drugs.
The government is simply going after the wrong people. Imprisoning citizens who use drugs but do not traffic them punishes the effects, not the cause, of the problem.
Novel Police Tactic Puts Drug Markets Out of Business
MARK SCHOOFS
27 Sep 2006 12:00 am
For over three months, police investigated more than 20 dealers operating in this city's West End neighborhood, where crack cocaine was openly sold on the street and in houses. Police made dozens of undercover buys and videotaped many other drug purchases.
They also did something unusual: they determined the "influentials" in the dealers' lives -- mothers, grandmothers, mentors -- and cultivated relationships with them. When police felt they had amassed ironclad legal cases, they did something even more striking: they refrained from arresting most of the suspected dealers.
In a counterintuitive approach, police here are trying to shut down entire drug markets, in part by giving nonviolent suspected drug dealers a second chance. Their strategy combines the "soft" pressure from families and community with the "hard" threat of aggressive, ready-to-go criminal cases. While critics say the strategy is too lenient, it has met with early success and is being tried by other communities afflicted with overt drug markets and the violence they breed.
Overt drug markets -- street-corner dealing, drug houses, and the like -- constitute one of the worst scourges of poor communities. Such markets foment violent clashes between dealers, as well as robbery by addicts desperate for drug money. Property values suffer. Businesses and families move out -- or avoid moving in. Many residents who remain feel under siege. Police often rely on sweeps -- mass arrests of street-level dealers -- to eradicate drug-related crime. But those rarely provide more than short-term relief. In High Point, police believe that the combination of extensive investigation of the entire market and community involvement has helped solve the problem.
Police in neighboring Winston-Salem, N.C., as well as Newburgh, N.Y., have deployed the strategy with success, and word is spreading. Encouraged by the National Urban League, which wants to see the approach replicated nationwide, police departments in Tucson, Ariz., Providence, R.I., Kansas City, Mo., and elsewhere are gearing up to try it.
The initiative hasn't eradicated illegal drug use -- and it doesn't aim to. "This is not a war on drugs," says Chief Fealy. Rather, he says, the goal is to shut down overt drug markets because "street-level dope-dealing is what drives a significant amount of crime."
The police had been trying to drive dealers out of the West End for years. "We were actually doing a sting every month in [West End] making dozens of arrests," says High Point Assistant Police Chief Marty Sumner. "But the market persisted."
The High Point strategy was the brainchild of David Kennedy, a 48-year-old professor at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In the 1990s, when he was at Harvard University, Mr. Kennedy helped develop Boston's anti-gang strategy, a community-involvement approach credited with drastically reducing violent crime.
But the drug initiative was a much harder sell. Mr. Kennedy says he had been trying for more than five years to convince police departments across the country to try it. When Mr. Kennedy first approached Winston-Salem, "We all told him he was crazy," says Police Chief Patricia Norris. Mr. Kennedy says he would ask, "When do you think what you're doing now is going to start working?"
Families relocate gang members to save them
Kevin Johnson
07 Sep 2006 12:20 am
Last spring, a member of Pastor Kenneth Hammond's congregation at Union Baptist Church came to him with a desperate plea for help: A 15-year-old boy in the community was trying to get out of a local gang, and gang members who had learned of the plan were threatening the boy's life.
Hammond says he didn't hesitate. He got a few hundred dollars from his church's ministry fund and helped the boy's family secretly move him more than 400 miles away, to Ohio. Hammond says he had done the same thing last year to help another youth escape gang life here and wouldn't hesitate to do it again.
"We've been involved with a number of tragedies here," Hammond says, leafing through the church's funeral registry, where the names of six victims of gang-related violence have been recorded in the past two years. "Sometimes, there is just too much danger to keep them here."
Hammond is among three Durham pastors whose churches have sponsored secret "relocations" of youths seeking to escape gangs, which often try to kill or harm those who go back on pledges to be gang members for life.
At a time when gang-related violence is boosting crime rates in Durham and many other cities, a few clergy, parents and even police in troubled communities across the nation quietly have been helping to relocate youths in last-ditch efforts to extricate them from gang life.
Sex Offender Accused Of Molesting Child In Cumberland County
06 Sep 2006 9:14 am
A search is on in Cumberland County to find a homeless sex offender accused of molesting a 4-year-old child.
Detectives are looking for 81-year-old Richard Gallagher. According to authorities, the crime happened after the child's family took in Gallagher as a gesture of kindness.
Gallagher was last seen in the Spring Lake area driving a gold 1994 Ford Thunderbird with North Carolina license plate TXS-3265.
If you have any information, you are asked to contact the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office at 910-323-1500.
Sterile victims stand up, decry legacy of eugenics
Dahleen Glanton
06 Sep 2006 12:00 am
It is hard for Elaine Riddick to talk about how the state of North Carolina sterilized her without her knowledge at the age of 14, changing her life forever. But she manages to wipe away the tears and garner the strength to tell her story to anyone who will listen.
After Riddick became pregnant from a rape, doctors on the Eugenics Board of North Carolina decided in 1968 that she was too "feeble-minded" to ever be a good mother and wanted to ensure that she never would get pregnant again. So doctors tied her tubes and didn't tell her.
Thirty-eight years later, Riddick, a 52-year-old with a quiet demeanor, has emerged as a voice for thousands of victims of state-sponsored sterilizations that were part of the eugenics movement in the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s. Riddick and others are coming forward and forcing states to address their roles in a controversial social experiment that went awry.
"What they did to me was totally inhumane. Death would have been better because it would have been over," said Riddick, who has battled depression. "This is a story that must be told. So I pulled myself up from the hole . . . where I had hidden for many years. And when I told the story, I could hold my head up high for the first time."
The idea behind eugenics, a concept embraced by Nazi Germany, was to wipe out future poverty, crime and other social ills believed to result from genetic flaws.
By sterilizing the feeble-minded, mentally retarded, insane and epileptic, eugenicists believed they would ensure that undesirable traits would not continue through generations.
'It was welfare reform.'
North Carolina had one of the most active and long-running programs. At least 7,500 poor African-Americans and whites, many of them welfare recipients, were tricked or forced to undergo sterilizations from 1929 to 1975. Throughout the United States, an estimated 65,000 people -- overwhelmingly women -- were involuntarily sterilized, Lombardo said.
"This was really genocide," said North Carolina state Rep. Larry Womble, who has fought unsuccessfully to get the General Assembly to provide financial reparations to 2,800 North Carolina victims believed still alive. "It cut off their bloodline and took away all of their dignity."
For decades, few spoke of the practice that targeted unwed teenagers, women with multiple children and some men, most of whom were on welfare, poor and illiterate and who lived at a time when authority was less likely to be questioned.
But in recent years, as victims have put aside their shame and broken their silence, several states, including Virginia, South Carolina, California and Oregon, have acknowledged their roles.
Easy lie stymied sex crime registry
Andrea Weigl
05 Sep 2006 7:07 am
Four months ago, convicted sex offender Antonio Davon Chance gave his father's Garner address to the local sheriff's office when he moved from Chapel Hill -- except his father said he never lived there.
Advocates say Chance's lie illustrates a common flaw with sex offender registries across the country -- their reliance on convicted criminals to participate and to tell the truth.
Chance, 29, is charged with the Aug. 22 kidnapping of Cynthia Moreland of Wendell. Police say Moreland, 48, was abducted from the Progress Energy parking deck in downtown Raleigh on Aug. 22. Her car was found several hours later in Southeast Raleigh, and her body was found Friday in Harnett County.
About 24 percent of the nation's sex offenders fail to comply with registration requirements, according to Parents for Megan's Law, a nonprofit group aimed at preventing and treating childhood sexual abuse. Shortly after federal lawmakers enacted Megan's law, which led to registries being created in many states, advocates realized defendants could not be trusted to provide information, said Marc Klaas, the father of Polly Klaas, a 12-year-old who was abducted and murdered in California in 1993.
"We were asking people who were inherently unlikely to voluntarily comply to voluntarily comply," said Klaas, adding that light penalties for failing to register or update addresses also contribute to the problem. "You have these guys who led a life of crime, and the penalties for noncompliance were usually minimal at best."
A new state law that goes into effect Dec. 1 will allow deputies to more easily verify the addresses of sexually violent predators, who will be monitored by GPS technology. The new law will also require all offenders to register twice a year in person at the sheriff's office. But the law does not require deputies to do anything more to verify those addresses.
Idle Comment
L.E. Brown Jr.
24 Aug 2006 11:27 am
Where will it end?
Every state in the Union has laws harassing convicted sex offenders by maintaining Internet registries which include offenders’ addresses and photos.
Apparently publishing that database has been so successful — crimes by sexual predators are nearly at zero across the nation — it is being followed by the creation of Internet registries to publicize the names of people convicted of making and selling methamphetamine. Four states have approved the registry; six more are considering it.
One of the weakest arguments put forth by proponents of either the registries for sex offenders or meth offenders is that they might return to crime after they’re released from prison.
The same goes for speeders, drunk drivers, muggers, robbers and politicians.
Is it possible that setting up the registries is simply a way to cover up for the failures of law enforcement agencies and the judicial system?
Jails are the new growth industry
Asheville Citizen-Times
19 Aug 2006 11:29 pm
What’s wrong begins long before the overcrowded court system finds itself dealing with drug dealers and prostitutes and vicious spouses.
It starts with young people who grow up without learning the skills they need to earn a living, to manage their finances, to resolve conflict peacefully, to find gratification in their accomplishments and service to others. In some cases, it starts with young people who suffer from undiagnosed mental or emotional problems.
The number appears to be increasing, not only numerically but as a percentage of the population, as well. The overcrowded jail is just a symptom of a larger problem, and it’s one that should cause us and our leaders to do some soul-searching.
Would it not be better from almost every point of view to spend more money identifying youngsters who are in need of serious help and providing that help than to wait for them to grow into maladjusted adults who will cost society far more in the long run?
The innocent do get convicted
BARRY SMITH
13 Aug 2006 12:00 am
A joke often told by people who work with inmates is that everyone behind bars is innocent. If you don’t believe it, just ask them.
But it’s not a funny joke to Lesly Jean, a former Camp Lejeune Marine wrongly accused of rape by Jacksonville police in the 1980s. Or Leo Waters of Jacksonville who suffered the same fate. Both were later exonerated and freed from North Carolina prisons.
Their cases illustrate that sometimes innocent people do get convicted and serve time in prison.
Beginning Nov. 1, people who profess their innocence will have an additional tool in their effort to win freedom and get their record cleared. They’ll be able to ask for a review by the new North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, which could lead to their exoneration.
Sex offender up for parole this week
MELISSA MANWARE
19 Jul 2006 12:00 am
A sex offender in prison for killing a 10-year-old Charlotte girl 27 years ago this week is scheduled to go before the N.C. parole commission Friday.
Fred Coffey, now 61, is serving a life sentence for murder in the death of Amanda Ray, a fourth-grade Chantilly Elementary School student who disappeared from her Eastcrest Drive home on July 18, 1979.
Her body was found the next day. Amanda had been strangled or smothered, an autopsy showed.
Police charged Coffey with her murder 7 1/2 years later. Police linked hair and carpet fibers found on Amanda's body to Coffey's dog and his van.
He was twice sent to death row for the killing but ultimately won a life sentence on appeal. He has been eligible for parole since August 1995 and goes before the commission each year.
