Don’t put juveniles in jail for life

Dominic Culpepper has been sentenced to imprisonment until death in Florida for a crime committed at age 14.  – link

There are more than 2,500 people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for crimes they committed when they were juveniles. Some were as young as 13 when they were sent to prison.

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that life without parole for juveniles convicted of crimes other than homicide violated the Constitution’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, a ruling that extended the court’s logic in its 2005 decision to abolish the juvenile death penalty. In both of these cases, the court held that because adolescents are not as responsible for their actions as adults, they should not be punished as harshly, even for the same crimes.

The court relied in part on the research my colleagues and I conducted for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice showing that adolescents are less mature than adults in ways that make them more impulsive, more short-sighted and more susceptible to peer influence, all factors that make them less culpable.

On Tuesday, the court will hear appeals of two cases that ask whether life without parole is an appropriate sentence for juveniles convicted of homicide. Both cases involve people who were 14 at the time of their offense, but their crimes were very different. Kuntrell Jackson was part of a group of boys who shot a store clerk during a robbery of a video store in Arkansas; although Jackson did not do the shooting, he was found guilty of “felony murder,” because he was part of the group that committed a felony during which someone was killed. …

via Don’t put juveniles in jail for life – CNN.com.

There should he halfway communities where those being released are watched but can earn more freedom with good behavior.  If you commit a crime, you get placed in the rehab maze, the worse your crime, the deeper in the maze they put you. But, if you can adjust your brain, as verified by brain scans, then you can get out. I’d vote to use some new brain technology to help those convicted of crimes (only after fair trail and then only voluntarily) to adjust the reward and pleasure centers in their brains to be triggered by healthy things, things that are not crimes.

Science fiction movie idea: The world could end crime this way, not with mind control, but with a one time rewiring of your reward centers, and genetic modification to keep offspring of criminal minds from developing that way. What would the world be like if we had that level of control over our behavior as a society?

Crews find balloonist who fell from 17,000 feet amid storm

A search-and-rescue team on Monday found the body of a missing hot air balloonist who had crashed in Georgia three days earlier. Acting on a tip from a witness who saw an object falling Friday, authorities dispatched a helicopter in the direction she described and quickly found the body of Ed Ristaino of North Carolina, according to Ben Hill County Sheriff Bobby McLemore.

“We were relieved that we found him,” McLemore said. “But that still leaves recovery.”

Teams made up of state patrol officers, forestry units, neighboring sheriff’s department personnel and volunteers scoured areas east of Fitzgerald in south-central Georgia, where the balloon basket went down. At least seven helicopters and planes and more than 100 people on the ground participated in the difficult search, McLemore said. Ristaino had taken five skydivers up in his hot air balloon around 6:45 p.m. Friday when he noticed the wind picking up and realized he was driving the balloon toward a large incoming storm system, McLemore said.

“The storm was pulling the balloon closer towards it, so he asked the skydivers to bail out. He had them jump from about 5,000 feet.”

While the five skydivers landed safely and were picked up, Ristaino and the balloon continued heading southeast and rose another 2,000 feet, McLemore said.”He went up into the clouds and had radio contact with his ground crew and told them it was hailing on him, there was lightning and rain and heavy wind,” he said.An updraft carried Ristaino up to about 17,000 or 18,000 feet above ground before a downdraft collapsed the balloon and sent him plummeting. Ristaino stayed calm and talked to his ground crew on the radio the entire time he was falling.

“I’m in trouble. I’m falling. I don’t have anything above my head,” McLemore recalled from accounts told to him. The balloonist said he was falling at 2,000 feet per minute, but an altimeter reading says he may have been falling as quickly as 60 to 90 mph, McLemore said.

“As he was falling, he did a countdown. He couldn’t see anything because he was in the clouds. But when he broke through the clouds, he said, ‘I see trees,’ and that’s the last thing they heard.”

A friend of Ristaino’s called him an “accomplished balloon pilot” who had logged “many hours of safe balloon operation.”

“He was very much a gentleman and it doesn’t surprise me at all that he managed the situation and had his skydiver passengers get out of the balloon for their own safety,” said Bob Tettman, a fellow balloon pilot.

via Crews find balloonist who fell from 17,000 feet amid storm – CNN.com.

Sometimes you stay calm and you still don’t make it out alive.  Hats off to a brave pilot.

Al Jazeera obtains secret Syria files

Al Jazeera has gained access to confidential documents prepared for the Syrian president by the country’s intelligence and security chiefs on the current conflict.

The files provide an insight into President Bashar al-Assad’s strategy to suppress anti-government protests, including the lengths the government went to for protecting its strongholds.

The documents, running into hundreds of pages, pointed to a government that was desperate to keep control of the capital Damascus and included clear orders to stop protesters from getting into the city

They also revealed detailed security plans for crushing protests in the cities of Aleppo and Idlib.

One leaked paper spelt out clear orders to top officials to give financial and moral support to Assad’s supporters in Aleppo, the second major city.

Whistleblower

The documents were passed on to Al Jazeera by Abdel Majid Barakat, who until recently was one of the government’s most trusted officials.

The former Baath party member, who was in charge of collating information from across Syria at the secret joint crisis management cell in Damascus, has fled to Turkey.

“For months, the opposition had a mole at the heart of Assad’s security apparatus working in this joint co-ordination cell that co-ordinates the work of all the intelligence agencies across the country, “ Al Jazeera’s James Bays, reporting from Turkey, said.

In one leaked cable marked confidential, the government cautioned the Syrian foreign minister about countries trying to influence Syrian diplomats to defect.

“Every evening at 7:00 pm Damascus time, there is a meeting of all the intelligence and security chiefs looking back at what happened across the country during the day, making their plans, making their orders for the next day,” Bays said.

“These orders then go to the office of the president the next morning and he himself signs all the orders, the final go ahead,“ he said.

The documents indicate that the government spied on the Arab League monitoring mission, which was in Syria at the end of last year.

They also spell out where protests have been taking place, and how many people were involved. They show that some of the biggest rallies have been in the province of Idlib.

Barakat, the whistleblower, told Al Jazeera “any person reading these reports will be shocked, will realise that Syria is living a true crisis: killings, criminality and suppression of protesters”.

“However security chiefs paint beautiful picture in their reports. They ignore many substantial facts on the ground, simply to boost the president’s morale,” he said. …

Read more

Fidel Castro and the assassination of President John F Kennedy

…It is one of history’s most enduring mysteries and has kept conspiracy theorists buzzing for half a century: did Fidel Castro have a hand in the assassination of President John F Kennedy? Officially, the Cuban dictator was cleared of involvement in the shooting of his fiercest adversary. The inquiry into the murder concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist sympathiser, acted alone.

Now a retired CIA officer claims to have proof that Castro knew the murder was about to happen – an allegation certain to refuel speculation before next year’s 50th anniversary of a pivotal moment of the 20th century.

Brian Latell, who studied Cuban affairs as a CIA analyst in the 1960s and became the agency’s chief intelligence officer for Latin America, says in a book that he is certain Castro knew.

On the morning of 22 November 1963, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Castro ordered a senior intelligence officer in Havana to stop listening for non-specific CIA radio communications and to concentrate on “any little detail, any small detail from Texas”, Latell claims in his book Castro’s Secrets – the CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine, due to be published next month.

Four hours later came news that Kennedy was dead. Latell claims Castro was aware that Oswald, who had been denied a visa to visit Cuba at the embassy in Mexico City, told staff there he was going to murder Kennedy to prove his communist allegiance. “Fidel knew of Oswald’s intentions and did nothing to deter the act,” Latell writes.

In an interview published on Sunday in the Miami Herald, Latell, now a senior lecturer on Cuba at the University of Miami, said he discovered the information in interviews with Cuban former intelligence officers, backed up by declassified US government documents.

“I don’t say Fidel Castro ordered the assassination, I don’t say Oswald was under his control. He might have been, but I don’t argue that, because I was unable to find any evidence for that,” he said.

“[But] everything I write is backed up by documents and on-the-record sources … Did Fidel want Kennedy dead? Yes. He feared Kennedy. And he knew Kennedy was gunning for him. In Fidel’s mind, he was probably acting in self-defence.”

Latell’s book, billed as the first in-depth study of Castro’s intelligence operations in the years after the Marxist revolutionary seized power in a coup in 1959, says there is strong supporting evidence. It claims that CIA wiretaps of Cuban intelligence agents after the assassination revealed they had a surprising knowledge of Oswald’s background when only scant details had been reported by the media.

But it is Latell’s interview with the Cuban former intelligence officer, Fiorentino Aspillaga Lombard, who was in charge of Castro’s listeners at his Havana compound, that will raise eyebrows.

Aspillaga, who defected to the US in 1987, told Latell that he told the CIA at his debriefing that Castro personally issued the order to listen for anything about Texas. That information was never revealed publicly and he never repeated it until he was interviewed for the book.

After his defection, Aspillaga lifted the lid on Castro’s lavish lifestyle, giving details of his luxury yachts, lavish properties in each of Cuba’s provinces and a secret Swiss bank account containing millions of dollars.

The claim that Castro was aware of Oswald’s promise to Cuban embassy officials to murder Kennedy comes from several sources, including a former FBI informant and “superspy” Jack Childs, who infiltrated the dictator’s inner circle.

Childs said Castro told him Oswald “stormed into the embassy, demanded the visa, and when it was refused to him headed out saying, ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy for this’.”

Castro claimed in public that Oswald’s visit to the embassy was “a minor matter” that had not been noticed by senior officials in Havana.