The local news is full of Jan Brewer's faux outrage at the Obama administration for daring to challenge the new immigration law, especially the part about Hillary Clinton apparently first spilling the beans during a trip to Ecuador.
This may play well with the Republican base that Brewer is trying to hang onto as she heads into a competitive primary contest but hardly anyone who knows politics is fooled by this. As evidence, just last week Brewer got into a fight with Terry Goddard, who would have to defend the law in his capacity as Attorney General over precisely this matter. So for her to now claim that she is surprised is the height of hypocrisy. Goddard for his part (and keeping in mind that if Brewer survives her primary she would be running against Goddard in the fall) did voluntarily step aside today (giving Brewer what she demanded from him last week) and wisely isn't going to be defending this law.
The immigration bill was certain to be challenged in court from the moment it was signed, not only because it places the state in the position of the Federal Government, but also because one can seriously question the constitutionality of requiring that all citizens (because it is not only non-citizens who will be questioned) carry identification with them in order to avoid possibly being detained as a 'suspected undocumented' immigrant. This seems contrary to the fourth amendment protection against unreasonable searches.
True that if you are driving a vehicle you need a drivers license with you but that is only while you are driving. If you are not driving a vehicle (such as if you are walking down the street, standing on the corner or only a passenger in a vehicle) there is no current requirement for I.D. but the Arizona law in fact if not in letter does now require I.D. (certainly for anyone-- read that Hispanics or people who may be mistaken for Hispanics such as American Indians-- who may be 'suspected' of being an undocumented immigrant.)
Brewer knew very well that this law would certainly be challenged in court, and virtually certainly by the Justice Department, so her expressions of shock are purely contrived. As to the matter of Secretary Clinton first disclosing this in Ecuador, it may have been a slip of the tongue, or it may have been intentional. Either way, official notification will follow when the Justice Department is ready to file their suit. Likely as not they are carefully wording their official court briefs in order to comply with all necessary legal requirements, whereas the Secretary of State, as she is not the one who will be filing the suit, is under no obligation to wait for them to file the official suit.
If she wanted to avoid a lawsuit there was an easy way to do that-- veto the law last month. But Governor Brewer made it clear which side she is on. Fine, but then don't turn around and claim to be shocked and surprised when the inevitable consequences roll around.
Showing posts with label Terry Goddard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terry Goddard. Show all posts
Friday, June 18, 2010
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Texas may lose their fight over FLDS children, and it will be an expensive loss.
I've in the past been quite critical of some of the aspects of the FLDS church, in particular their practices of forcing teenage girls into marriage (such as I blogged on here) and kicking out teenage boys (as I blogged on here.)
I've also made it clear that my problems with them have to do with child abuse in particular, not polygamy in general (what sexual relations consenting adults have with each other, and in what numbers, is not a matter which interests me, nor is it a matter which should warrant the interest of the state.)
However, following the recent raid in Texas, I wrote a post in which I expressed concern about civil rights violations by the state of Texas in their decision to remove hundreds of children from the FLDS compound, with no specific evidence that any of them in particular had been abused. The determining factor, in fact, was their religious identity and nothing other than that. It is true that several of the teenage girls were pregnant, but without being too blunt about it I suspect that if you go to any community in America you will find that a significant number of teenage girls are pregnant. My eldest daughter was pregnant when she was fifteen. I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it's not grounds to remove a child from their home in the absence of any specific evidence of rape, incest or another crime causing the pregnancy (and as noted, they had none about specific children who they removed.)
Since then, Texas' case has been unraveling and they have been embarrassed by a steady stream of bad news about their case. The first came when it turned out that the phone calls that Texas authorities had received, claiming to be from an abused teenager named, 'Sarah' inside the compound, actually turned out to be a hoax after they were traced to a woman named Rozita Swinton in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her motivation was apparently a progressive, but misplaced mindset. These phone calls had provided the original justification for the raid and the warrant to go in, in the first place. What is especially troubling is that it is not all that hard to reverse trace a phone call and verify the caller's location (in fact this was obviously done but the information was apparently not examined until after the raid.) This leads to two scenarios, both troubling: either that Texas authorities were looking for a pretext for a raid and jumped so fast that they didn't bother to check a basic fact like this, or even more troubling that they knew the calls were phony and went ahead anyway.
Texas authorities then claimed that they had reason to believe that a man named Dale Evans Barlow had abused some of the children at the ranch. Only problem is that there is no evidence that Dale Evans Barlow was ever at the ranch. In fact during the time period in question, Dale Evans Barlow was checking in weekly with his Utah probation officer. It is conceivable but a bit far fetched to suppose that every week he met his probation officer, drove for about 36 hours to the Texas compound, stayed there a couple of days to abuse some girls, then drove 36 hours back to Utah and met with his probation officer, and then repeated this pattern every week. Texas Rangers did travel to interview Dale Barlow on April 12, but left without making an arrest, and they have no evidence at all that he ever did travel to Texas during the time when he is alleged to have committed the crime (though no one can even name who made the allegation in the first place, unless perhaps it was made by Rozita Swinton while she was pretending to be 'Sarah.')
Then we have the case of Pamela Jessop. Pamela Jessop was a pregnant teenager who was removed from the compound. She maintains that at the time told them that she is eighteen (legally an adult) and showed them her birth certificate to prove it. Records seized at the scene by the Texas authorities confirmed that her age was eighteen, so they knew how old she was. They forcibly kept her in custody anyway so that when she gave birth they were in a position to give her a choice of either returning to the compound without her newborn child (she also has a one year old) or to stay there with the newborn. Jessop has hired some attorneys and they are considering filing a Federal lawsuit against the state of Texas.
Which leads us to what happened earlier this week. State authorities returned to the compound, claiming that they believed there were more children inside. They were denied admittance despite having a search warrant.
Understandably after what happened last month, the FLDS at the ranch are not very welcoming of another search warrant. More to the point though this feels a lot like a 'CYA' situation. When a case starts to fall apart, and especially if it is a case that could result in expensive lawsuits, sometimes authorities will dig in and desperately start trying to find any evidence they can, no matter how flimsy, in order to manufacture a case when the original charges don't pan out.
So then today the Texas Court of Appeals ruled that the mass removal of the children of 38 mothers was wrong because the state failed to prove that the children were in 'imminent danger.' Though the court stopped short of ordering all of the children returned immediately (allowing Texas to maintain them in foster care until they decide whether to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court,) the Court of Appeals made it very clear that the raid and continuing detention of the children is, in the opinion of the court, not justified by facts or evidence and may be a gross violation of civil rights occurring on a massive scale.
What Texas did earlier this week, apparently realizing that the Appeals Court cas was likely to go against them in trying to launch a second raid was an act of desperation. They realize now that they overreached in seizing hundreds of children with no specific evidence that any one of them is in danger, and now they are starting to realize that Pamela Jessop's likely lawsuit is only the first of hundreds that could be filed-- likely costing the state of Texas hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars. So this is likely to be a very expensive and painful lesson for Texas to learn about respecting civil rights.
I'd also like to point out how the 'hang 'em high, cowboy' attitude of Texas contrasts to the strategy that is being employed cooperatively by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard (a Democrat) and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff (a Republican.) Goddard and Shurtleff have cooperated to seize and place the assets of the FLDS Church under the direction of an outside board of directors where they will be used for the benefit of the community and all its members, have put FLDS leader Warren Jeffs behind bars and recently held a joint meeting in St. George in which polygamists from Colorado City and Hildale were able to openly discuss their concerns and the concerns in their community. By focusing on enforcing the law against the leaders who pushed their flock into violating it but not punishing the members of the church, Goddard and Shurtleff have created an atmosphere of at least limited communication and understanding that it is safe to say after this episode law enforcement officials in Texas will never have. And with today's court decision, it doesn't look like they will have anything else to work with either.
I've also made it clear that my problems with them have to do with child abuse in particular, not polygamy in general (what sexual relations consenting adults have with each other, and in what numbers, is not a matter which interests me, nor is it a matter which should warrant the interest of the state.)
However, following the recent raid in Texas, I wrote a post in which I expressed concern about civil rights violations by the state of Texas in their decision to remove hundreds of children from the FLDS compound, with no specific evidence that any of them in particular had been abused. The determining factor, in fact, was their religious identity and nothing other than that. It is true that several of the teenage girls were pregnant, but without being too blunt about it I suspect that if you go to any community in America you will find that a significant number of teenage girls are pregnant. My eldest daughter was pregnant when she was fifteen. I'm not suggesting that this is a good thing, but it's not grounds to remove a child from their home in the absence of any specific evidence of rape, incest or another crime causing the pregnancy (and as noted, they had none about specific children who they removed.)
Since then, Texas' case has been unraveling and they have been embarrassed by a steady stream of bad news about their case. The first came when it turned out that the phone calls that Texas authorities had received, claiming to be from an abused teenager named, 'Sarah' inside the compound, actually turned out to be a hoax after they were traced to a woman named Rozita Swinton in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her motivation was apparently a progressive, but misplaced mindset. These phone calls had provided the original justification for the raid and the warrant to go in, in the first place. What is especially troubling is that it is not all that hard to reverse trace a phone call and verify the caller's location (in fact this was obviously done but the information was apparently not examined until after the raid.) This leads to two scenarios, both troubling: either that Texas authorities were looking for a pretext for a raid and jumped so fast that they didn't bother to check a basic fact like this, or even more troubling that they knew the calls were phony and went ahead anyway.
Texas authorities then claimed that they had reason to believe that a man named Dale Evans Barlow had abused some of the children at the ranch. Only problem is that there is no evidence that Dale Evans Barlow was ever at the ranch. In fact during the time period in question, Dale Evans Barlow was checking in weekly with his Utah probation officer. It is conceivable but a bit far fetched to suppose that every week he met his probation officer, drove for about 36 hours to the Texas compound, stayed there a couple of days to abuse some girls, then drove 36 hours back to Utah and met with his probation officer, and then repeated this pattern every week. Texas Rangers did travel to interview Dale Barlow on April 12, but left without making an arrest, and they have no evidence at all that he ever did travel to Texas during the time when he is alleged to have committed the crime (though no one can even name who made the allegation in the first place, unless perhaps it was made by Rozita Swinton while she was pretending to be 'Sarah.')
Then we have the case of Pamela Jessop. Pamela Jessop was a pregnant teenager who was removed from the compound. She maintains that at the time told them that she is eighteen (legally an adult) and showed them her birth certificate to prove it. Records seized at the scene by the Texas authorities confirmed that her age was eighteen, so they knew how old she was. They forcibly kept her in custody anyway so that when she gave birth they were in a position to give her a choice of either returning to the compound without her newborn child (she also has a one year old) or to stay there with the newborn. Jessop has hired some attorneys and they are considering filing a Federal lawsuit against the state of Texas.
Which leads us to what happened earlier this week. State authorities returned to the compound, claiming that they believed there were more children inside. They were denied admittance despite having a search warrant.
Understandably after what happened last month, the FLDS at the ranch are not very welcoming of another search warrant. More to the point though this feels a lot like a 'CYA' situation. When a case starts to fall apart, and especially if it is a case that could result in expensive lawsuits, sometimes authorities will dig in and desperately start trying to find any evidence they can, no matter how flimsy, in order to manufacture a case when the original charges don't pan out.
So then today the Texas Court of Appeals ruled that the mass removal of the children of 38 mothers was wrong because the state failed to prove that the children were in 'imminent danger.' Though the court stopped short of ordering all of the children returned immediately (allowing Texas to maintain them in foster care until they decide whether to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court,) the Court of Appeals made it very clear that the raid and continuing detention of the children is, in the opinion of the court, not justified by facts or evidence and may be a gross violation of civil rights occurring on a massive scale.
What Texas did earlier this week, apparently realizing that the Appeals Court cas was likely to go against them in trying to launch a second raid was an act of desperation. They realize now that they overreached in seizing hundreds of children with no specific evidence that any one of them is in danger, and now they are starting to realize that Pamela Jessop's likely lawsuit is only the first of hundreds that could be filed-- likely costing the state of Texas hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars. So this is likely to be a very expensive and painful lesson for Texas to learn about respecting civil rights.
I'd also like to point out how the 'hang 'em high, cowboy' attitude of Texas contrasts to the strategy that is being employed cooperatively by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard (a Democrat) and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff (a Republican.) Goddard and Shurtleff have cooperated to seize and place the assets of the FLDS Church under the direction of an outside board of directors where they will be used for the benefit of the community and all its members, have put FLDS leader Warren Jeffs behind bars and recently held a joint meeting in St. George in which polygamists from Colorado City and Hildale were able to openly discuss their concerns and the concerns in their community. By focusing on enforcing the law against the leaders who pushed their flock into violating it but not punishing the members of the church, Goddard and Shurtleff have created an atmosphere of at least limited communication and understanding that it is safe to say after this episode law enforcement officials in Texas will never have. And with today's court decision, it doesn't look like they will have anything else to work with either.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Terry Goddard is a great A.G. He's also a great guy.
This week I've been incredibly busy (which is why I have only put up one posting since last Saturday.)
The high point of the week politically was a reception in Winslow for our Attorney General, Terry Goddard. Like many other politicians, he was just elected to another four years this past November. Unlike many other politicians, now that he is out of campaign mode he is taking the opportunity to travel around the state and actually talk to people, both to let them know what his office is doing and to hear what their concerns are.
I've had quite a few opportunities to talk to Terry, and he is the same unflappable mixture of wit, class, charm and a good listener that he has always been.
What I'd like to do is pass on some of the things he is working on.
He is making fighting hard against both meth labs and the drug itself a top priority. Meth labs in a neighborhood are a hazard, not only to the occupants of the lab (which distressingly often includes the children of the meth cooks or of other residents of the domicile). The fumes from its production are toxic, and an explosion can start a fire which quickly consumes a trailer and everyone inside, and possibly spread from there. In the last legislature, Goddard and others pushed for a bill that would require stores to limit the amount of pseudoephedrine they sell at a single purchase and keep it under lock and key. The pharmaceutical industry worked behind the scenes to defeat it (Senator Barbara Leff will always have meth labs in your neighborhood as part of her resume). So since then, many cities and local jurisdictions have circumvented the legislature and passed the law themselves. Goddard met earlier on Tuesday with the Navajo county board of Supervisors and urged them to put together such a bill that would cover unincorporated areas of the county (and he was joined at the reception by supervisor Jesse Thompson.) But getting rid of meth labs is only a small part of the battle. After all, it is true that most meth here comes from Mexico and as long as there is a market, it will continue to come.
I noted in the post on my Grand Jury experience about how about half the cases we saw were drug cases, and the large majority of those involved methamphetamine. Meth is also very dangerous because people who get jacked up on meth don't just get mellow or go to sleep (like marijuana) or even get hyper but mainly a threat to themselves (like cocaine.) Meth users get paranoid, and imagining they are in danger try to 'protect' themselves, often by lethal violence. I was living in Moriarty, New Mexico in the mid 1990's, when not even a mile from my home there was a man who had been using meth that was driving on I-40 and when he imagined that his son was the devil, he stopped his van, cut off his son's head and threw it out onto the freeway and then drove on with the lifeless body in the van. That's what meth users do-- not just ordinary hallucinations, but hallucinations that often cause them to attack and murder other people. So the Attorney General found a hard-hitting program that he likes called, 'Montanameth' run by the state of Montana where they describe exactly to school age kids what meth is and what it can cause, and doesn't sugar-coat it at all. He is in the process of adapting it to Arizona so we can start whacking at the addiction rate here.
He also discussed his work on educating kids about on-line sex predators and on consumer fraud issues.
As I said before though, it was really nice to have a politician come to town AFTER the election and talk with people about what he is doing and what they think he should do.
The high point of the week politically was a reception in Winslow for our Attorney General, Terry Goddard. Like many other politicians, he was just elected to another four years this past November. Unlike many other politicians, now that he is out of campaign mode he is taking the opportunity to travel around the state and actually talk to people, both to let them know what his office is doing and to hear what their concerns are.
I've had quite a few opportunities to talk to Terry, and he is the same unflappable mixture of wit, class, charm and a good listener that he has always been.
What I'd like to do is pass on some of the things he is working on.
He is making fighting hard against both meth labs and the drug itself a top priority. Meth labs in a neighborhood are a hazard, not only to the occupants of the lab (which distressingly often includes the children of the meth cooks or of other residents of the domicile). The fumes from its production are toxic, and an explosion can start a fire which quickly consumes a trailer and everyone inside, and possibly spread from there. In the last legislature, Goddard and others pushed for a bill that would require stores to limit the amount of pseudoephedrine they sell at a single purchase and keep it under lock and key. The pharmaceutical industry worked behind the scenes to defeat it (Senator Barbara Leff will always have meth labs in your neighborhood as part of her resume). So since then, many cities and local jurisdictions have circumvented the legislature and passed the law themselves. Goddard met earlier on Tuesday with the Navajo county board of Supervisors and urged them to put together such a bill that would cover unincorporated areas of the county (and he was joined at the reception by supervisor Jesse Thompson.) But getting rid of meth labs is only a small part of the battle. After all, it is true that most meth here comes from Mexico and as long as there is a market, it will continue to come.
I noted in the post on my Grand Jury experience about how about half the cases we saw were drug cases, and the large majority of those involved methamphetamine. Meth is also very dangerous because people who get jacked up on meth don't just get mellow or go to sleep (like marijuana) or even get hyper but mainly a threat to themselves (like cocaine.) Meth users get paranoid, and imagining they are in danger try to 'protect' themselves, often by lethal violence. I was living in Moriarty, New Mexico in the mid 1990's, when not even a mile from my home there was a man who had been using meth that was driving on I-40 and when he imagined that his son was the devil, he stopped his van, cut off his son's head and threw it out onto the freeway and then drove on with the lifeless body in the van. That's what meth users do-- not just ordinary hallucinations, but hallucinations that often cause them to attack and murder other people. So the Attorney General found a hard-hitting program that he likes called, 'Montanameth' run by the state of Montana where they describe exactly to school age kids what meth is and what it can cause, and doesn't sugar-coat it at all. He is in the process of adapting it to Arizona so we can start whacking at the addiction rate here.
He also discussed his work on educating kids about on-line sex predators and on consumer fraud issues.
As I said before though, it was really nice to have a politician come to town AFTER the election and talk with people about what he is doing and what they think he should do.
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