Tag: law

Has Daryl Kelly Spent Twenty Years in Prison for a Crime That Never Happened? | The New Yorker

For the past twenty years, Daryl Kelly has been imprisoned in New York State for a crime that may never have happened. He was living with his wife and five children in Newburgh, New York, in the fall of 1997, when he was arrested for rape and sexual abuse. The supposed victim was his oldest child, Chaneya, who was then eight years old. Chaneya testified against her father at trial; the jury convicted him; a judge sentenced him to twenty-to-forty years in prison. At the time, Chaneya’s mother was addicted to crack cocaine, among other drugs, and Chaneya and her siblings went to live with her grandmother. The following year, when her grandmother asked her what exactly had happened with her father, Chaneya told her that, in fact, there had been no rape or sexual abuse.

In the fall of 1999, the judge ordered a hearing, and Chaneya returned to the witness stand. This time, Chaneya testified that she had lied during the trial. The judge did not believe her, however, and Kelly has remained in prison ever since. An attorney named Peter Cross agreed to represent Kelly, pro bono, five years ago, but he has been unable to get him out of prison. I wrote about Kelly’s case for New York, in 2013, and in January, for the first time, Kelly will appear before the state Board of Parole.

His attorney has sent the parole board a packet on his behalf, which includes a letter that Chaneya wrote to her father in prison in 2002, when she was thirteen years old. Her schoolgirl handwriting fills each line of a page of three-ring-notebook paper. “Dear Daddy,” she wrote. “I do feel bad about telling a lie. All I want to do is put it all behind. You want the truth. I’ll tell you the truth.”

Has Daryl Kelly Spent Twenty Years in Prison for a Crime That Never Happened? | The New Yorker

She Was Convicted of Killing Her Mother. Prosecutors Withheld the Evidence That Would Have Freed Her. – The New York Times

With concern about the case mounting — ‘‘Mystery Stabbing Death Unsolved,’’ local ABC news reported that August — the case went to Amy Weirich, who at 40 was a rising star in the Memphis prosecutor’s office. A long- distance runner and the mother of four children, Weirich was a former chief of the gang- and- narcotics unit and the first woman to be named deputy district attorney in Shelby County. She was considered a highly skilled trial lawyer.

A note that Andrew Hammack, Noura’s friend, gave to the police in the early days of the murder investigation. The note, which raises questions about his credibility, was not provided to Noura’s defense team. It turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence in her appeal.

Studying the case, she developed a theory: Noura was bridling under her mother’s rules and killed her for money that she could use to keep partying with her friends. Jackson’s estate was valued at $1.5 million, including a life insurance policy. Weirich also argued that Noura and her mother were struggling over whether to sell a few cars that Noura inherited from her father, Nazmi Hassanieh, a former Lebanese Army captain. After a long separation, Noura got back in touch with her father when she was 16, and he texted and called her often. Sixteen months before her mother was killed, Hassanieh was shot to death in a Memphis convenience store he owned. His murder was never solved.

The police came to arrest Noura that September as she was finishing up a babysitting job. She had no history of violence, and the case quickly became a local sensation. Weirich asked for a life sentence. The judge, Chris Craft, eventually set a bond of $500,000. Unable to pay, Noura spent a total of three and a half years in jail awaiting trial, on a heavy regimen of anti- anxiety and antidepressant medication.

She Was Convicted of Killing Her Mother. Prosecutors Withheld the Evidence That Would Have Freed Her. – The New York Times

What Makes a Parent? – The New Yorker

The next day, Wednesday, a shipping company collected Hamilton’s belongings. She had what she thought would be her final photo shoot in New York: a portrait of Emma Forbes, a British TV presenter, for Hello! Gunn later sent her pictures of Abush having fun at the beach.

At one o’clock on Thursday, Hamilton was at home cleaning, expecting to leave for Fire Island in the evening, when she got a call from a woman who introduced herself as Nancy Chemtob. A New York family and matrimonial lawyer, Chemtob founded her own firm in her twenties; in the two and a half decades since, she has represented such clients as Bobby Flay, Star Jones, and Diandra Douglas, the ex-wife of Michael Douglas, in divorce proceedings. Her style is amused and unsentimental, and she has a strong Long Island accent. (Today, when Hamilton and Chemtob refer to each other, they use inexpert, mocking approximations of the other’s accent.)

Chemtob told Hamilton that she represented Kelly Gunn. Hamilton only half-registered what came next. Chemtob recalls telling Hamilton that Gunn had just asked a New York court to recognize her as one of Abush’s parents and award her joint legal and physical custody. As an interim measure, Gunn was seeking a restraining order that would stop Hamilton from taking him out of the country. Chemtob told Hamilton that, at 2:30 p.m., she must appear before a matrimonial judge on Centre Street. She should bring Abush’s American and British passports.

What Makes a Parent? – The New Yorker

Outdated Laws, Unpunished Child Abusers – The New York Times

Beginning in 1997, and then for the next 13 years, Ama Dwimoh ran the Crimes Against Children Bureau in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, observing a theater of atrocities. Early in her tenure, Ms. Dwimoh told me recently, she handled a case involving a young man who had been sexually molested by his family’s landlord for a decade, starting when he was 5.

The abuse had come to her attention through a photo developer, who had contacted the police when he noticed unseemly images in a roll of film brought in for processing. With a picture of someone who appeared to be the victim of various predations in hand, law enforcers went in search of the boy. When they found him and knocked on his door, Ms. Dwimoh recalled, he appeared to feel he was being outed; he got sick and vomited. He knew that what had happened to him was wrong, but he had also experienced his abuser in less monstrous moments. How was the child, or even the young adult he would become, to make sense of all this, of such horrors entwined with the semblance of affection?

A search of the perpetrator’s home revealed a trove of old photographs of many other children, indicating he had been a pedophile for years. Ms. Dwimoh, who is running to become the Brooklyn district attorney, realized that if the police had never knocked, it was unclear whether the boy would have come forward soon, or ever, and if he hadn’t, how many more children would have been imperiled?

Outdated Laws, Unpunished Child Abusers – The New York Times

Virginia Tech 10-Year Anniversary: Easier Now to Buy a Gun | Time.com

Ten years have passed since a Virginia Tech senior opened fire on campus, killing 32 students and professors before turning the gun on himself. At the time, it was the single deadliest shooting in U.S. history, and the toll shocked the country, eliciting an outpouring of grief, anger and prayers.
The massacre also set off a political battle over an issue that has now become a familiar coda to mass shootings: gun control. In Virginia’s Republican-controlled legislature, the shooting energized both sides of the gun debate, pitting those who believed guns were the problem against those who believed they were the solution. A decade after what is still the deadliest shooting on a college campus, the winner of that battle is clear: It’s easier than ever to buy and carry a firearm in the state.
In the past 10 years, Virginia has reversed many of its gun regulations, making it easier for residents to carry concealed guns in bars, getting rid of the state’s one-handgun-per-month purchasing law, and making it legal to keep guns in car glove boxes. Over the same period, the state has shrugged off pushes for expanded background checks and calls to toughen laws to prevent gun trafficking.

Virginia Tech 10-Year Anniversary: Easier Now to Buy a Gun | Time.com

Making a Killing

More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War. When an off-duty security guard named Omar Mateen, armed with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic rifle and a Glock 17 pistol, killed forty-nine people at a gay club in Orlando, on June 12th, it was historic in some respects and commonplace in others—the largest mass shooting in American history and, by one count, the hundred-and-thirtieth mass shooting so far this year. High-profile massacres can summon our attention, and galvanize demands for change, but in 2015 fatalities from mass shootings amounted to just two per cent of all gun deaths. Most of the time, when Americans shoot one another, it is impulsive, up close, and apolitical.

None of that has hurt the gun business. In recent years, in response to three kinds of events—mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and talk of additional gun control—gun sales have broken records. “You know that every time a bomb goes off somewhere, every time there’s a shooting somewhere, sales spike like crazy,” Paul Jannuzzo, a former chief of American operations for Glock, the Austrian gun company, told me.

New Yorker

The Shame Game

Officials appear to have designed Flush the Johns to maximize the potential for public attention—and to exploit men’s fear of being found out, not just by the police but also by their own families. “You’re going to be caught, and your mug shot could end up right like these men,” Rice warned during the press conference.

A slew of other cities have embraced john-shaming as a way to combat prostitution: Colorado Springs; Albany, New York; Flint, Michigan; Prince George’s County, Maryland, outside D.C.; and a number of places in California—Oakland, Richmond, Fresno, and Orange County. Some have published the names and photos of accused johns upon arrest on designated web sites and social media, or in press conferences; others have waited until they’ve actually been convicted. But the upshot seems to be the same: Shame isn’t just the side effect of catching and prosecuting criminals in an open society with an active press corps, but an end goal that is officially sanctioned.

Tapping into the new power of the internet, along with our very old obsession with transgressive sex, these officials hope to wield the fear of public judgment in the name of the public good, arguing that prostitution is linked to far more serious crimes than we ever thought. But by taking punishment out of the hands of law enforcement and placing it in the hands of the public, whose emotions and reactions lie beyond their control, shaming campaigns can also be messy and unpredictable. And the resulting stigma can last indefinitely. “Guilt punishments make the statement, ‘You committed a bad act,’ ” writes philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her book Hiding From Humanity. “Shame punishments make the statement: ‘You are a defective type of person.’ ” Or as Yale law professor James Whitman told me, shaming “allows the general public to do the dirty work.”

New Republic

One Simple Idea That Could Reduce Domestic Violence

A report released Tuesday is proposing a simple way to reduce domestic violence: Give victims free lawyers.

Lawyers are expensive, and women who need them often can’t afford them. Without legal counsel, it can be harder for women to get protective orders, leave their abusive partners and escape the cycle of violence. And women stuck in violent relationships tend to miss work because of injury or rack up hospital bills they can never pay off, according to the report by The Institute for Policy Integrity, a nonpartisan think tank.

With one in four women in the U.S. estimated to become victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime, this dynamic has major economic repercussions. As the report notes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that domestic violence costs the U.S. at least $9.05 billion each year.

Providing free or subsidized legal representation to victims, the report concludes, may reduce domestic violence and would be cost-effective as it would likely result in lower associated health care and legal costs.

HuffPost