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CIA's Bin Laden 'Devil Doll' Up For Auction
Online bidding is open for a CIA-devised prototype doll meant to scare children away from the terror mastermind.
Gallery: CIA Considered Bin Laden Dolls
The doll's face peeled off to reveal a demon-like red complexion
An Osama bin Laden "devil doll" created almost a decade ago by the CIA is going on auction this month.
The agency came up with the idea of the action figurines as a way to scare children away from Bin Laden and counter his influence.
The plan, code-named Devil Eyes, was devised in 2005, when the terror mastermind was still America's most wanted man.
The 30cm (12in) dolls featured traditional clothing and had faces painted with dissolving material that would peel off and show a demon-like red complexion with black marks and green eyes.
Osama bin Laden was tracked down in Pakistan and killed on 2 May 2011
Three dolls are believed to have been created before the project was abandoned.
One of the figurines is going under the hammer at Nate D Sanders auction house on 20 November. Online bidding is already open.
The minimum bidding price was set at $2,500 (£1,500).
The dolls were created by the maker of the popular GI Joe toys and a veteran in the business, Donald Levine, according to The Washington Post, which reported the story last June.
The intended destination of the toys remains unclear. The Washington Post quoted one source as saying some dolls had been shipped to Karachi, Pakistan.
The minimum bidding price was set at $2,500 (£1,500) :O
Online bidding is open for a CIA-devised prototype doll meant to scare children away from the terror mastermind.
Gallery: CIA Considered Bin Laden Dolls
The doll's face peeled off to reveal a demon-like red complexion
An Osama bin Laden "devil doll" created almost a decade ago by the CIA is going on auction this month.
The agency came up with the idea of the action figurines as a way to scare children away from Bin Laden and counter his influence.
The plan, code-named Devil Eyes, was devised in 2005, when the terror mastermind was still America's most wanted man.
The 30cm (12in) dolls featured traditional clothing and had faces painted with dissolving material that would peel off and show a demon-like red complexion with black marks and green eyes.
Osama bin Laden was tracked down in Pakistan and killed on 2 May 2011
Three dolls are believed to have been created before the project was abandoned.
One of the figurines is going under the hammer at Nate D Sanders auction house on 20 November. Online bidding is already open.
The minimum bidding price was set at $2,500 (£1,500).
The dolls were created by the maker of the popular GI Joe toys and a veteran in the business, Donald Levine, according to The Washington Post, which reported the story last June.
The intended destination of the toys remains unclear. The Washington Post quoted one source as saying some dolls had been shipped to Karachi, Pakistan.
The minimum bidding price was set at $2,500 (£1,500) :O
TSA: Ice Skates OK on Plane; Fake Saw Stays Home
The Transportation Security Administration on Tuesday displayed thousands of items confiscated from carry-on bags over three months at Kennedy Airport. As the chaotic holiday travel season approaches, the agency wanted to remind the public what carry-on items are no-nos.
The takeaway: Knitting needles and ice skates are welcome on board planes, but not sparklers, nunchucks or fake chain saws.
Four tons of prohibited items are collected every year at John F. Kennedy International Airport alone.
Toy weapons of any kind, including grenades, are out. So are real knives, handcuffs and bullets.
Some items can go into checked bags, but not carry-ons. The details are on an app and the TSA's website.
"Say you've got a knife; this is something that you like to carry with you, as this person did," TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said, holding up the aforementioned knife at a press conference. "We are going to spot that in the X-ray machine or it's going to set off one of the detectors, the body scanners, and you are going to be given a choice: You can either put that in your checked baggage, you can go back and put it in your car, throw it in your trunk, put it in your glove compartment, put it under your seat."
Some airports also have mailing centers so you can send the item to your destination or your home. Otherwise, you can hand it off to the person who's dropping you off at the airport, or you can surrender it.
States get to take the surrendered items. New York and New Jersey "don't want to deal with that," Farbstein said, but Pennsylvania takes the items and sells them.
The blades of ice skates are perfectly harmless ...... :/ strange rules
(edited)
The Transportation Security Administration on Tuesday displayed thousands of items confiscated from carry-on bags over three months at Kennedy Airport. As the chaotic holiday travel season approaches, the agency wanted to remind the public what carry-on items are no-nos.
The takeaway: Knitting needles and ice skates are welcome on board planes, but not sparklers, nunchucks or fake chain saws.
Four tons of prohibited items are collected every year at John F. Kennedy International Airport alone.
Toy weapons of any kind, including grenades, are out. So are real knives, handcuffs and bullets.
Some items can go into checked bags, but not carry-ons. The details are on an app and the TSA's website.
"Say you've got a knife; this is something that you like to carry with you, as this person did," TSA spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said, holding up the aforementioned knife at a press conference. "We are going to spot that in the X-ray machine or it's going to set off one of the detectors, the body scanners, and you are going to be given a choice: You can either put that in your checked baggage, you can go back and put it in your car, throw it in your trunk, put it in your glove compartment, put it under your seat."
Some airports also have mailing centers so you can send the item to your destination or your home. Otherwise, you can hand it off to the person who's dropping you off at the airport, or you can surrender it.
States get to take the surrendered items. New York and New Jersey "don't want to deal with that," Farbstein said, but Pennsylvania takes the items and sells them.
The blades of ice skates are perfectly harmless ...... :/ strange rules
(edited)
Death by Deadline
In 1992, Kenneth Rouse, an African-American man with an IQ between 70 and 80 - "borderline intellectual functioning," in the clinical parlance - prepared to stand trial in North Carolina on charges that he had robbed, murdered and attempted to rape a white, 63-year-old store clerk.Rouse's lawyers questioned the prospective jurors to try to expose any racial or other bias they might have against the defendant. But several years after the all-white jury convicted Rouse and recommended a death sentence, his defense team made a stunning discovery.
One of the jurors, Joseph S. Baynard, admitted that his mother had been robbed, murdered and possibly raped years before. Baynard had not disclosed this history, he said, so that he could sit in judgment of Rouse, whom he called "one step above a moron." Baynard added that he thought black men (“niggers” was the term he was quoted as using) raped white women for bragging rights.As claims of juror bias go, the evidence could hardly have been stronger. But Rouse's final appeal was never heard. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Rouse's lawyers had just one year after his initial state appeal to petition for a last-resort hearing in federal court.They missed the deadline by a single day.
A federal appeals judge wrote that it was "unconscionable" for her court to reject Rouse's case because of such a mistake by his court-appointed lawyers. But dozens of lawyers have made the same mistake, and most of their clients, like Rouse, have not been forgiven by the courts for missing the deadline.An investigation by The Marshall Project shows that since President Bill Clinton signed the one-year statute of limitations into law - enacting a tough-on-crime provision that emerged in the Republicans' Contract with America - the deadline has been missed at least 80 times in capital cases. Sixteen of those inmates have since been executed -- the most recent on Thursday, when Chadwick Banks was put to death in Florida.By missing the filing deadline, those inmates have usually lost access to habeas corpus, arguably the most critical safeguard in the United States' system of capital punishment. "The Great Writ," as it is often called (in Latin it means "you have the body"), habeas corpus allows prisoners to argue in federal court that the conviction or sentence they received in a state court violates federal law.For example, of the 12 condemned prisoners who have left death row in Texas after being exonerated since 1987, five of them were spared in federal habeas corpus proceedings. In California, 49 of the 81 inmates who had completed their federal habeas appeals by earlier this year have had their death sentences vacated.The prisoners who missed their habeas deadlines have sometimes forfeited powerful claims. Some of them challenged the evidence of their guilt, and others the fairness of their sentences. One Mississippi inmate was found guilty partly on the basis of a forensic hair analysis that the FBI now admits was flawed. A prisoner in Florida was convicted with a type of ballistics evidence that has long since been discredited.Just last month, Mark Christeson, a Missouri inmate whose lawyers missed the habeas deadline in 2005, received a stay of execution from the Supreme Court just hours before he was set to die by lethal injection.In a court brief filed on Christeson's behalf, 15 former state and federal judges emphasized that he had not even met the appellate attorneys handling his federal case until after the filing deadline had passed. "Cases, including this one, are falling through the cracks of the system," they wrote. "And when the stakes are this high, such failures unacceptably threaten the very legitimacy of the judicial process."
The 80 death-penalty cases reviewed here were largely culled from databases of federal court opinions, but they also include other, unpublished rulings that were known to capital defense attorneys and advocates interviewed around the country. They represent just a fraction of the habeas appeals foreclosed by the 1996 law, which also applies to non-capital cases.Like Rouse, who is still awaiting execution in North Carolina, two other inmates missed the habeas deadline by a single day, and for the most banal reasons. One attorney made the mistake of using regular mail instead of an overnight courier; another relied on a court's after-hours filing system, which turned out to be broken.But many of the other habeas petitions from condemned inmates were late by hundreds of days, or even thousands. (On average, those lawyers missed the deadline by 853 days, or more than two years and four months.) In one case, the attorney was more than 11 years late.Some of the lawyers' mistakes can be traced to their misunderstandings of federal habeas law and the notoriously complex procedures that have grown up around it. Just as often, though, the errors have exposed the lack of care and resources that have long plagued the patchwork system by which indigent death-row prisoners are provided with legal help.The right of condemned inmates to habeas review "should not depend upon whether their court-appointed counsel is competent enough to comply with [the] statute of limitations," one federal appeals judge, Beverly B. Martin, wrote in an opinion earlier this year. Allowing some inmates into the court system while turning others away because of how their lawyers missed filing deadlines was making the federal appeals process "simply arbitrary," she added.Meanwhile, the problem that the habeas deadline was intended to solve - the ever-lengthening delays in the carrying out of death sentences - has grown steadily. In 1996, the average time from sentencing to execution was 10 years and five months, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2012, the latest year for which the same figure is available, the delay had stretched to 15 years and 10 months. Average Years from Sentence to Execution, 1984—2012
Passing habeas reformThe 1996 law that set the one-year statute of limitations on habeas appeals was one of the signal compromises that Clinton forged on domestic policy in the aftermath of the sweeping Republican victory in the 1994 midterm elections. Some Republicans had advocated for habeas corpus reform for years, mainly as a way to streamline and limit death-row appeals. The idea struggled to gain traction, but it became a small element of the Contract with America championed by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who was on his way to becoming House speaker. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the proposal found new life as part of antiterrorism legislation embraced by both parties.That pairing created political tension, both between the major parties and within them. Some Democrats supported the antiterrorism measures but viewed the habeas restrictions as the unnecessary circumscribing of a fundamental right. Some Republicans backed the habeas restrictions but feared the possible government excesses that might come from expanding surveillance authorities and other law enforcement powers also included in the measure."Why is it necessary to link the death penalty and the constitutional guarantees of habeas corpus to a terrorism bill?" Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.) asked during the debate in the House. "This is just a political deal. It is a political deal to get votes on the right." By the mid-1990s, American support for the death penalty had climbed to 80 percent, its highest point since Gallup began polling on the issue in the 1930s. Public patience with the appeals process also was waning as the typical time between sentencing and execution stretched to more than a decade."Somehow, somewhere, we are going to end the charade of endless habeas proceedings," the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), declared in the debate over the antiterrorism law. "And this bill is going to do it."But important changes in the legal landscape already were raising concerns among some civil libertarians. One opponent of the habeas proposal, Rep. Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat, cited the advent of DNA evidence and the fact that some prisoners were being exonerated up to 15 years after their trials. Congress, he said, was proposing "to compromise the most basic thing - innocence - for political expediency."Four former U.S. attorneys general who were opposed to the legislation - two Democrats and two Republicans - wrote to Clinton to urge that any filing deadlines on habeas petitions take effect "only upon the appointment of competent counsel."As supporters of the bill lined up four competing attorneys general behind their position, Hyde announced that he had a "celebrity to trump all of those attorneys general" on the matter. "His name," Hyde said, "is President Clinton."Clinton, who had initially opposed linking habeas reform to the antiterrorism measures, changed his mind - as he had on key facets of welfare reform, criminal sentencing and other domestic policies. As he began campaigning for reelection, he described the delays in death-penalty litigation as "ridiculous." The streamlining of appeals should begin with the Oklahoma City bombing cases, he announced.The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden of Delaware, introduced amendments to soften several of the habeas restrictions in the bill. At one point, he proposed to limit the one-year deadline to only federal prisoners, but he eventually supported the bill that came to the floor without that change.The legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 8, and it cleared the House by a margin of more than two to one.Myriad mistakesThe hurried and often convoluted draftsmanship of the law's habeas provisions began to come under criticism almost as soon as it took effect. The ambiguities of the measure left a host of questions for the courts to answer, and with each passing year, the relevant case law has grown more complex.Under the 1996 law, the one-year statute of limitations to file a federal habeas petition is supposed to begin after the conclusion of an inmate's direct appeal, which is filed in the state courts.
Three Steps to an Appeal
1 Direct Appeal In this appeal, filed in the state courts, an attorney makes arguments based upon the trial record - arguing, for example, that an objection should have been sustained or that the prosecutor made an improper argument. If the state courts deny relief, the attorney may seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court. Once this appeal is denied, an inmate has one year to file his federal habeas-corpus petition. 2 State Post-Conviction Appeal This appeal also starts in the state courts and can be taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court. A state post-conviction petition goes beyond the trial record, allowing an attorney to investigate and raise such claims as juror misconduct or the failure of prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence before trial. Motions pending during this stage will stop the one-year clock from running - but once denied, the one-year clock resumes ticking. 3 Federal Habeas Appeal This appeal starts in the federal courts - and, like state post-conviction, encompasses claims that go beyond the trial record. This petition is filed in the U.S. District Court, then goes up to a federal court of appeals and then the U.S. Supreme Court. If denied relief in the federal courts, a condemned inmate's last hope is to seek clemency.
The direct appeal - the first of three levels of possible appeals - must focus on the trial record. It can argue, for example, that an important objection by the defense counsel should have been sustained rather than overruled.Post-conviction petitions, which include federal habeas corpus appeals, can go beyond the trial to deal with anything from new evidence to the discovery of juror misconduct.Lawyers who do post-conviction work in capital cases face a daunting array of challenges: They must typically reinvestigate the evidence for both guilt and punishment; canvass witnesses called and uncalled; plumb a defendant's criminal, social and family history; and round up and study thousands of pages of records. They must also navigate an ever-shifting landscape of appellate deadlines and procedures, identify promising issues and craft a detailed petition - all while under the pressure of defending a client whose life may depend on their success.Yet while the law guarantees that indigent death row inmates have a court-appointed attorney in federal habeas corpus proceedings, it does not stipulate that the attorney must be competent. The Constitution guarantees the effective assistance of counsel at trial, but gives no similar assurance for lawyers doing habeas work.Some of the same federal judges who are responsible for appointing habeas counsel have later traced the failure of such attorneys to meet the filing deadline to their inexperience, indifference, ineptitude or illness - and to myriad combinations thereof.Motions or petitions filed properly in the state courts can suspend the federal deadline. But sometimes the motions are filed improperly, with lawyers neglecting to secure authorization to practice in a given court or failing to pay a required filing fee.In at least three cases since 1996, attorneys filed papers in the wrong court. One appellate attorney discovered that his predecessor missed the habeas deadline after failing to even order the client's case file. Another attorney, who insisted that he had read the relevant case file, was later found to have never picked up the voluminous records from a state repository.In some of the 80 cases, mistakes by judges compounded those of defense attorneys. The lawyer for Richard Hamilton, who was convicted in 1995 of raping and murdering a 23-year-old nursing student after kidnapping her from a supermarket parking lot in Lake City, Fla., thought Hamilton had more time to file than he really did. So did a local judge, who told Hamilton not to worry. "It has been resolved," the judge said, to which Hamilton replied: "If you say so, that's good enough for me." In two cases out of Texas, U.S. district court judges granted requests for a filing extension - setting, in effect, what appeared to be a new deadline - then enforced the old deadline after the petition was filed. "Parenthetically, this court may have erred in assuming that it had the authority to extend the statutory deadline," one judge later acknowledged.
Habeas deadline. Sometimes, courts waited too long to appoint habeas counsel. In California, where the courts have struggled mightily to find attorneys for capital appeals, at least six inmates received an attorney only after their deadline had passed - by more than five years in two cases. Then there are lawyers who have failed even more basic scrutiny. Some of the attorneys appointed to the 80 cases include an Alabama lawyer who was addicted to methamphetamine and was on probation for public intoxication, and a Louisiana lawyer who suffered from a neurological and physiological disorder so debilitating that he was asked to leave his firm. One attorney in Texas had twice before been reprimanded for misconduct, while another Texas lawyer had twice been put on probation by the state bar. Two weeks after being appointed in the capital case, he was put on probation again. In Mississippi, Willie Jerome Manning's first appointed attorney withdrew, citing his "most limited knowledged [sic] and familiarity with post-conviction proceedings at all." A second attorney also withdrew, citing his lack of qualifications. A third attorney was appointed - by a court order that was misfiled, adding to the delays - seven months after Manning's habeas deadline. Two other men facing death sentences complained that their lawyer had a drinking problem - and they had the same lawyer. "Damn near fell out of his chair," one of the inmates wrote of the man in a letter to the lawyer's co-counsel. As deadlines approached, some inmates pressed their attorneys for information. "I'm getting a little worried," one wrote. Another pleaded, "I want to know what's going on!" Chadwick Banks, the inmate executed in Florida on Thursday, wrote his attorney three weeks before his filing deadline, asking about “some date” that he understood could make a “big difference.” (Ultimately his appeals deadline was missed by 2,079 days.) In several cases, courts have shown that prisoners who schooled themselves in habeas law have sometimes demonstrated a better understanding of legal intricacies than their lawyers. "[P]lease file my 2254 Habeas Petition immediately," one defendant wrote in a typical plea to his lawyer. "Please do not wait any longer . . . again, please file my 2254 Petition at once." The Supreme Court took note of the phenomenon in the case of Albert Holland, who was sentenced to death for the 1990 murder of a Florida police officer who tried to arrest him. "Holland was right about the law," the justices wrote. His lawyer, they added, "was wrong about the law."
SentencedNew trial ordered after U.S. Supreme Court criticized Holland's attorney for not grasping the law. He missed the deadline by 37 days.Case is pending in federal appeals court. He remains on Death Row.
In the tracing of blame, the case of Mississippi death-row inmate Alan Dale Walker offered a triple bank shot. Attorneys for the state put a wrong date in a court filing. The Mississippi Supreme Court incorporated that error into an opinion. An attorney for Walker then used the opinion to calculate the filing deadline. Walker had a second attorney who had separately calculated the deadline, without relying on the court's opinion. He came up with a different date - but his date was wrong, too. Pitfalls and procedural issues The struggle to find capable lawyers for capital cases has been particularly visible in a handful of states with large numbers of death-row inmates. Since its death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Florida, for example, has bounced from one troubled arrangement to another for the provision of post-conviction counsel. Of the 80 capital cases with a missed deadline, Florida has 37 - the most of any state by far.
The state originally asked private lawyers to do the work free; it got few takers. It then established a special government office to do the work, but later shifted much of the load to a registry of private attorneys after lawmakers complained about the delays and the cost. In 1998, the state also set a cap on the number of hours per case those lawyers could bill (840) and the rate they could charge ($100 per hour). The complexities of habeas law often have challenged even the most conscientious defense attorneys. Michelle Kraus is an experienced defense attorney in Fort Wayne, Ind., who concentrates almost entirely on trial work. At the request of a lawyer friend, she signed on to assist with a state-level appeal for Gregory Scott Johnson, who had been convicted in 1986 of beating an 82-year-old woman to death. But after her friend left the case, Kraus wound up taking it to federal court, where she confronted a steep learning curve. "It was overwhelming, getting grounded in it," Kraus says. She got the standard text on habeas practice and procedure - at that point, the two volumes ran to some 2,000 pages - and read it front to back. She also traveled to Atlanta to attend a one-week seminar on capital litigation, taught by some of the country's leading experts. Kraus devoted long hours to Johnson's petition, which included a claim that prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that might have reduced Johnson's culpability and perhaps spared him the death penalty. She dropped the petition in the mail three days before deadline, but it arrived one day late. "Counsel bungled the job," the federal appeals court wrote in 2004. Instead of using first-class mail, Kraus should have opted for FedEx or a courthouse messenger, the court said. The person held accountable would be Johnson. "[L]awyers are agents," the court wrote. "Their acts (good and bad alike) are attributed to the clients they represent." Telling Johnson about her mistake - and how he would be punished for it - "was probably the hardest thing I've ever done," Kraus says. She stayed on the case - "he forgave me," she says - and was with Johnson for his last meal before he was executed in
But Kraus has declined to do any more habeas work since then. "The pitfalls are there, and I fell into one," she recalled. "And it was horrible." Sometimes, even legal organizations that are usually lauded for the quality of their capital work have faced criticism. In a Georgia case, a federal judge chastised lawyers with the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that opposes the death penalty and provides free legal support to prisoners in capital cases. The Southern Center lawyers had left the case well before an inmate's habeas petition was due, but the judge argued that they should have done more to find replacement counsel and to help the inmate determine the filing deadline. One of the authors of the two-volume legal guidebook on habeas practice, James S. Liebman, a law professor at Columbia University, says the complexity and vagueness of the 1996 law has given lawyers all kinds of procedural nuances over which to fight. An important result has been that prosecutors have more ways to get a petition thrown out on procedural grounds - an advantage that they have seized "energetically and assiduously," Liebman says. The guidebook, now in its sixth edition, has grown over the years to 2,700 pages. "There are more and more pages,” he said, but “less and less justice." Confronted with late filings, courts have embraced a remedy called "equitable tolling," which allows judges to waive a missed deadline in some circumstances. But courts limit its application to extraordinary situations, and the standard has been applied unevenly around the country. Plain negligence - or a "simple gaffe," as the court labeled the mistake Kraus made - generally will not merit a judge's forbearance. But abandoning clients or lying to them often will constitute grounds for setting the deadline aside.
In the 80 capital cases, courts have granted equitable tolling in about a third. At least three of the inmates whose habeas petitions were reviewed went on to receive new trials. The courts usually won't forgive a missed deadline if an attorney misinterpreted the law, a mistake that gets categorized as negligence. But a federal court in Ohio did so in the case of Michael Keenan, a landscaper who was convicted of murdering a young man found in a Cleveland park. "He would have been executed," Keenan's lead defense lawyer, Vicki Werneke, said in an interview. "He came dangerously close to getting his whole case dismissed." When Werneke came onto the case in 2008, after Keenan had been granted equitable tolling, the state's case was already showing signs of unraveling. In 2012, a U.S. district court judge considered Keenan's habeas petition and ordered a new trial. Citing the state's "egregious prosecutorial misconduct" in withholding evidence, an Ohio county judge later ruled that prosecutors can't retry Keenan, allowing him to go free. The state's appeal of that ruling is now pending before the Ohio Supreme Court.
Race against time When a deadline is missed, an inmate's federal appeal can be lost - no matter the strength of the argument for a new trial, and even if the late filing can be attributed more to hard luck than ineptitude. The law requires that prosecutors turn over evidence favorable to the defense before trial. But it wasn't until 22 years after William Kuenzel was condemned in Alabama that his appellate attorney received police notes and grand jury testimony undermining the prosecution's case. Kuenzel was convicted in 1988 of murdering a convenience-store clerk. But in 2010, the state disclosed that an alleged accomplice originally told police he was with someone else, and that the only eyewitness who identified Kuenzel at trial had told grand jurors she "couldn't really see a face." With such revelations, Kuenzel's claim of innocence has attracted an array of prominent supporters and generated a polished publicity campaign. Three former district attorneys - Robert M. Morgenthau of Manhattan, Gil Garcetti of Los Angeles and E. Michael McCann of Milwaukee - filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying the newly surfaced evidence "completely eviscerated" a prosecution case that they characterized as “weak, to say the least." Although Kuenzel now has potentially strong grounds for an appeal, he still lacks a court to hear them - his lawyer missed the federal filing deadline by nearly three years. When the 1996 law took effect, Kuenzel had one year to file his habeas petition. But the law included a provision that would suspend the normal one-year statute of limitations if an inmate had a "properly filed" petition pending in state court, effectively stopping the clock on the appeals process. A petition that Kuenzel had filed in an Alabama circuit court had been dismissed as untimely in 1994, but then restored to the docket in May 1996. This led Kuenzel and his attorney to believe he had a "properly filed" state petition pending, and that the countdown toward the appeals deadline had paused. But three years later, the circuit court reversed itself again at the request of state prosecutors, which was interpreted by a federal court to mean that the clock had been ticking all along. "It is just the most grievous injustice," says David Kochman, an attorney who has been working on Kuenzel's appeal since 2004. "If any case was crying out for review, it was this case." The state has written in court files that the newly disclosed evidence "fails to even come close" to exonerating Kuenzel. "It is time for this case to finally come to an end," wrote the state, which two months ago asked for an execution date to be set. Sentenced to death at 26, Kuenzel is now 52. In a letter to this reporter last month, he wrote that he felt like he was listening to an old grandfather clock as it wound down, knowing he would be killed when it stops. He can't rewind the clock, he said, because "the courts have shut the hole."
Habeas petition deadline fell more than 8 years after sentencing.Lawyers missed his habeas deadline by nearly three years after state courts decided an earlier motion was improperly filed.He remains on Death Row. In September, prosecutors asked for his execution date to be set.
Guarding against racial prejudice On April 17, 1996, as then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued against any weakening of habeas corpus protections in the pending antiterrorism bill, the New York Democrat reminded his colleagues that the matters at hand were more profound than mere legal procedures. "We are dealing here, sir, with a fundamental provision of law, one of those essential civil liberties which precede and are the basis of political liberties," Moynihan said. Quoting from a letter that several former attorneys general had written to President Clinton, he cast the federal courts' ability to review state-court decisions under habeas corpus as an essential guarantee: "It has a proud history of guarding against injustices born of racial prejudice and intolerance, of saving the innocent from imprisonment or execution, and in the process, ensuring the rights of all law-abiding citizens." Two days before Moynihan's speech on the Senate floor, one of the jurors who voted to send Kenneth Rouse to his death, Joseph Baynard, signed an affidavit acknowledging that he had deliberately withheld the fact of his mother's murder so that he could get on the jury. Baynard, who died last year, acknowledged in the affidavit that his decision in the Rouse case might have been colored by "bigotry." A Duke University law student who interviewed the former juror for Rouse's appeal also filed a separate affidavit detailing Baynard's racial invective. At that point, Rouse's case was still in the state courts, which ultimately denied him a new trial. His one-year habeas deadline came on Feb. 7, 2000, and his lawyers, who miscalculated the date, filed their petition on his behalf one day too late. While the American public often complains about criminal defendants winning their legal cases on technicalities, the opposite is often true, says Gretchen Engel, a habeas expert who had advised Rouse's defense team and provided the correct filing date: "What they don't realize is how often people lose on technicalities, or in ways that would offend most people's sense of justice." Despite the federal courts' refusal to hear his case, Rouse got one more chance in 2009, when the North Carolina legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, allowing condemned prisoners to challenge their sentences if they could demonstrate that racial bias had played a role. Rouse filed a motion to have his case reviewed under the act. But in 2013 - after four other death-row inmates had succeeded in getting their sentences reduced to life without parole under the new provision - the state legislature repealed the law altogether. Rouse's motion is still pending. It is unclear if it will ever be heard.
ORIGINALLY FILED Saturday, November 15, 2014 at 4:30 p.m. ET
In 1992, Kenneth Rouse, an African-American man with an IQ between 70 and 80 - "borderline intellectual functioning," in the clinical parlance - prepared to stand trial in North Carolina on charges that he had robbed, murdered and attempted to rape a white, 63-year-old store clerk.Rouse's lawyers questioned the prospective jurors to try to expose any racial or other bias they might have against the defendant. But several years after the all-white jury convicted Rouse and recommended a death sentence, his defense team made a stunning discovery.
One of the jurors, Joseph S. Baynard, admitted that his mother had been robbed, murdered and possibly raped years before. Baynard had not disclosed this history, he said, so that he could sit in judgment of Rouse, whom he called "one step above a moron." Baynard added that he thought black men (“niggers” was the term he was quoted as using) raped white women for bragging rights.As claims of juror bias go, the evidence could hardly have been stronger. But Rouse's final appeal was never heard. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Rouse's lawyers had just one year after his initial state appeal to petition for a last-resort hearing in federal court.They missed the deadline by a single day.
A federal appeals judge wrote that it was "unconscionable" for her court to reject Rouse's case because of such a mistake by his court-appointed lawyers. But dozens of lawyers have made the same mistake, and most of their clients, like Rouse, have not been forgiven by the courts for missing the deadline.An investigation by The Marshall Project shows that since President Bill Clinton signed the one-year statute of limitations into law - enacting a tough-on-crime provision that emerged in the Republicans' Contract with America - the deadline has been missed at least 80 times in capital cases. Sixteen of those inmates have since been executed -- the most recent on Thursday, when Chadwick Banks was put to death in Florida.By missing the filing deadline, those inmates have usually lost access to habeas corpus, arguably the most critical safeguard in the United States' system of capital punishment. "The Great Writ," as it is often called (in Latin it means "you have the body"), habeas corpus allows prisoners to argue in federal court that the conviction or sentence they received in a state court violates federal law.For example, of the 12 condemned prisoners who have left death row in Texas after being exonerated since 1987, five of them were spared in federal habeas corpus proceedings. In California, 49 of the 81 inmates who had completed their federal habeas appeals by earlier this year have had their death sentences vacated.The prisoners who missed their habeas deadlines have sometimes forfeited powerful claims. Some of them challenged the evidence of their guilt, and others the fairness of their sentences. One Mississippi inmate was found guilty partly on the basis of a forensic hair analysis that the FBI now admits was flawed. A prisoner in Florida was convicted with a type of ballistics evidence that has long since been discredited.Just last month, Mark Christeson, a Missouri inmate whose lawyers missed the habeas deadline in 2005, received a stay of execution from the Supreme Court just hours before he was set to die by lethal injection.In a court brief filed on Christeson's behalf, 15 former state and federal judges emphasized that he had not even met the appellate attorneys handling his federal case until after the filing deadline had passed. "Cases, including this one, are falling through the cracks of the system," they wrote. "And when the stakes are this high, such failures unacceptably threaten the very legitimacy of the judicial process."
The 80 death-penalty cases reviewed here were largely culled from databases of federal court opinions, but they also include other, unpublished rulings that were known to capital defense attorneys and advocates interviewed around the country. They represent just a fraction of the habeas appeals foreclosed by the 1996 law, which also applies to non-capital cases.Like Rouse, who is still awaiting execution in North Carolina, two other inmates missed the habeas deadline by a single day, and for the most banal reasons. One attorney made the mistake of using regular mail instead of an overnight courier; another relied on a court's after-hours filing system, which turned out to be broken.But many of the other habeas petitions from condemned inmates were late by hundreds of days, or even thousands. (On average, those lawyers missed the deadline by 853 days, or more than two years and four months.) In one case, the attorney was more than 11 years late.Some of the lawyers' mistakes can be traced to their misunderstandings of federal habeas law and the notoriously complex procedures that have grown up around it. Just as often, though, the errors have exposed the lack of care and resources that have long plagued the patchwork system by which indigent death-row prisoners are provided with legal help.The right of condemned inmates to habeas review "should not depend upon whether their court-appointed counsel is competent enough to comply with [the] statute of limitations," one federal appeals judge, Beverly B. Martin, wrote in an opinion earlier this year. Allowing some inmates into the court system while turning others away because of how their lawyers missed filing deadlines was making the federal appeals process "simply arbitrary," she added.Meanwhile, the problem that the habeas deadline was intended to solve - the ever-lengthening delays in the carrying out of death sentences - has grown steadily. In 1996, the average time from sentencing to execution was 10 years and five months, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2012, the latest year for which the same figure is available, the delay had stretched to 15 years and 10 months. Average Years from Sentence to Execution, 1984—2012
Passing habeas reformThe 1996 law that set the one-year statute of limitations on habeas appeals was one of the signal compromises that Clinton forged on domestic policy in the aftermath of the sweeping Republican victory in the 1994 midterm elections. Some Republicans had advocated for habeas corpus reform for years, mainly as a way to streamline and limit death-row appeals. The idea struggled to gain traction, but it became a small element of the Contract with America championed by then-Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who was on his way to becoming House speaker. After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the proposal found new life as part of antiterrorism legislation embraced by both parties.That pairing created political tension, both between the major parties and within them. Some Democrats supported the antiterrorism measures but viewed the habeas restrictions as the unnecessary circumscribing of a fundamental right. Some Republicans backed the habeas restrictions but feared the possible government excesses that might come from expanding surveillance authorities and other law enforcement powers also included in the measure."Why is it necessary to link the death penalty and the constitutional guarantees of habeas corpus to a terrorism bill?" Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.) asked during the debate in the House. "This is just a political deal. It is a political deal to get votes on the right." By the mid-1990s, American support for the death penalty had climbed to 80 percent, its highest point since Gallup began polling on the issue in the 1930s. Public patience with the appeals process also was waning as the typical time between sentencing and execution stretched to more than a decade."Somehow, somewhere, we are going to end the charade of endless habeas proceedings," the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), declared in the debate over the antiterrorism law. "And this bill is going to do it."But important changes in the legal landscape already were raising concerns among some civil libertarians. One opponent of the habeas proposal, Rep. Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat, cited the advent of DNA evidence and the fact that some prisoners were being exonerated up to 15 years after their trials. Congress, he said, was proposing "to compromise the most basic thing - innocence - for political expediency."Four former U.S. attorneys general who were opposed to the legislation - two Democrats and two Republicans - wrote to Clinton to urge that any filing deadlines on habeas petitions take effect "only upon the appointment of competent counsel."As supporters of the bill lined up four competing attorneys general behind their position, Hyde announced that he had a "celebrity to trump all of those attorneys general" on the matter. "His name," Hyde said, "is President Clinton."Clinton, who had initially opposed linking habeas reform to the antiterrorism measures, changed his mind - as he had on key facets of welfare reform, criminal sentencing and other domestic policies. As he began campaigning for reelection, he described the delays in death-penalty litigation as "ridiculous." The streamlining of appeals should begin with the Oklahoma City bombing cases, he announced.The ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden of Delaware, introduced amendments to soften several of the habeas restrictions in the bill. At one point, he proposed to limit the one-year deadline to only federal prisoners, but he eventually supported the bill that came to the floor without that change.The legislation passed the Senate by a vote of 91 to 8, and it cleared the House by a margin of more than two to one.Myriad mistakesThe hurried and often convoluted draftsmanship of the law's habeas provisions began to come under criticism almost as soon as it took effect. The ambiguities of the measure left a host of questions for the courts to answer, and with each passing year, the relevant case law has grown more complex.Under the 1996 law, the one-year statute of limitations to file a federal habeas petition is supposed to begin after the conclusion of an inmate's direct appeal, which is filed in the state courts.
Three Steps to an Appeal
1 Direct Appeal In this appeal, filed in the state courts, an attorney makes arguments based upon the trial record - arguing, for example, that an objection should have been sustained or that the prosecutor made an improper argument. If the state courts deny relief, the attorney may seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court. Once this appeal is denied, an inmate has one year to file his federal habeas-corpus petition. 2 State Post-Conviction Appeal This appeal also starts in the state courts and can be taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court. A state post-conviction petition goes beyond the trial record, allowing an attorney to investigate and raise such claims as juror misconduct or the failure of prosecutors to disclose exculpatory evidence before trial. Motions pending during this stage will stop the one-year clock from running - but once denied, the one-year clock resumes ticking. 3 Federal Habeas Appeal This appeal starts in the federal courts - and, like state post-conviction, encompasses claims that go beyond the trial record. This petition is filed in the U.S. District Court, then goes up to a federal court of appeals and then the U.S. Supreme Court. If denied relief in the federal courts, a condemned inmate's last hope is to seek clemency.
The direct appeal - the first of three levels of possible appeals - must focus on the trial record. It can argue, for example, that an important objection by the defense counsel should have been sustained rather than overruled.Post-conviction petitions, which include federal habeas corpus appeals, can go beyond the trial to deal with anything from new evidence to the discovery of juror misconduct.Lawyers who do post-conviction work in capital cases face a daunting array of challenges: They must typically reinvestigate the evidence for both guilt and punishment; canvass witnesses called and uncalled; plumb a defendant's criminal, social and family history; and round up and study thousands of pages of records. They must also navigate an ever-shifting landscape of appellate deadlines and procedures, identify promising issues and craft a detailed petition - all while under the pressure of defending a client whose life may depend on their success.Yet while the law guarantees that indigent death row inmates have a court-appointed attorney in federal habeas corpus proceedings, it does not stipulate that the attorney must be competent. The Constitution guarantees the effective assistance of counsel at trial, but gives no similar assurance for lawyers doing habeas work.Some of the same federal judges who are responsible for appointing habeas counsel have later traced the failure of such attorneys to meet the filing deadline to their inexperience, indifference, ineptitude or illness - and to myriad combinations thereof.Motions or petitions filed properly in the state courts can suspend the federal deadline. But sometimes the motions are filed improperly, with lawyers neglecting to secure authorization to practice in a given court or failing to pay a required filing fee.In at least three cases since 1996, attorneys filed papers in the wrong court. One appellate attorney discovered that his predecessor missed the habeas deadline after failing to even order the client's case file. Another attorney, who insisted that he had read the relevant case file, was later found to have never picked up the voluminous records from a state repository.In some of the 80 cases, mistakes by judges compounded those of defense attorneys. The lawyer for Richard Hamilton, who was convicted in 1995 of raping and murdering a 23-year-old nursing student after kidnapping her from a supermarket parking lot in Lake City, Fla., thought Hamilton had more time to file than he really did. So did a local judge, who told Hamilton not to worry. "It has been resolved," the judge said, to which Hamilton replied: "If you say so, that's good enough for me." In two cases out of Texas, U.S. district court judges granted requests for a filing extension - setting, in effect, what appeared to be a new deadline - then enforced the old deadline after the petition was filed. "Parenthetically, this court may have erred in assuming that it had the authority to extend the statutory deadline," one judge later acknowledged.
Habeas deadline. Sometimes, courts waited too long to appoint habeas counsel. In California, where the courts have struggled mightily to find attorneys for capital appeals, at least six inmates received an attorney only after their deadline had passed - by more than five years in two cases. Then there are lawyers who have failed even more basic scrutiny. Some of the attorneys appointed to the 80 cases include an Alabama lawyer who was addicted to methamphetamine and was on probation for public intoxication, and a Louisiana lawyer who suffered from a neurological and physiological disorder so debilitating that he was asked to leave his firm. One attorney in Texas had twice before been reprimanded for misconduct, while another Texas lawyer had twice been put on probation by the state bar. Two weeks after being appointed in the capital case, he was put on probation again. In Mississippi, Willie Jerome Manning's first appointed attorney withdrew, citing his "most limited knowledged [sic] and familiarity with post-conviction proceedings at all." A second attorney also withdrew, citing his lack of qualifications. A third attorney was appointed - by a court order that was misfiled, adding to the delays - seven months after Manning's habeas deadline. Two other men facing death sentences complained that their lawyer had a drinking problem - and they had the same lawyer. "Damn near fell out of his chair," one of the inmates wrote of the man in a letter to the lawyer's co-counsel. As deadlines approached, some inmates pressed their attorneys for information. "I'm getting a little worried," one wrote. Another pleaded, "I want to know what's going on!" Chadwick Banks, the inmate executed in Florida on Thursday, wrote his attorney three weeks before his filing deadline, asking about “some date” that he understood could make a “big difference.” (Ultimately his appeals deadline was missed by 2,079 days.) In several cases, courts have shown that prisoners who schooled themselves in habeas law have sometimes demonstrated a better understanding of legal intricacies than their lawyers. "[P]lease file my 2254 Habeas Petition immediately," one defendant wrote in a typical plea to his lawyer. "Please do not wait any longer . . . again, please file my 2254 Petition at once." The Supreme Court took note of the phenomenon in the case of Albert Holland, who was sentenced to death for the 1990 murder of a Florida police officer who tried to arrest him. "Holland was right about the law," the justices wrote. His lawyer, they added, "was wrong about the law."
SentencedNew trial ordered after U.S. Supreme Court criticized Holland's attorney for not grasping the law. He missed the deadline by 37 days.Case is pending in federal appeals court. He remains on Death Row.
In the tracing of blame, the case of Mississippi death-row inmate Alan Dale Walker offered a triple bank shot. Attorneys for the state put a wrong date in a court filing. The Mississippi Supreme Court incorporated that error into an opinion. An attorney for Walker then used the opinion to calculate the filing deadline. Walker had a second attorney who had separately calculated the deadline, without relying on the court's opinion. He came up with a different date - but his date was wrong, too. Pitfalls and procedural issues The struggle to find capable lawyers for capital cases has been particularly visible in a handful of states with large numbers of death-row inmates. Since its death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Florida, for example, has bounced from one troubled arrangement to another for the provision of post-conviction counsel. Of the 80 capital cases with a missed deadline, Florida has 37 - the most of any state by far.
The state originally asked private lawyers to do the work free; it got few takers. It then established a special government office to do the work, but later shifted much of the load to a registry of private attorneys after lawmakers complained about the delays and the cost. In 1998, the state also set a cap on the number of hours per case those lawyers could bill (840) and the rate they could charge ($100 per hour). The complexities of habeas law often have challenged even the most conscientious defense attorneys. Michelle Kraus is an experienced defense attorney in Fort Wayne, Ind., who concentrates almost entirely on trial work. At the request of a lawyer friend, she signed on to assist with a state-level appeal for Gregory Scott Johnson, who had been convicted in 1986 of beating an 82-year-old woman to death. But after her friend left the case, Kraus wound up taking it to federal court, where she confronted a steep learning curve. "It was overwhelming, getting grounded in it," Kraus says. She got the standard text on habeas practice and procedure - at that point, the two volumes ran to some 2,000 pages - and read it front to back. She also traveled to Atlanta to attend a one-week seminar on capital litigation, taught by some of the country's leading experts. Kraus devoted long hours to Johnson's petition, which included a claim that prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that might have reduced Johnson's culpability and perhaps spared him the death penalty. She dropped the petition in the mail three days before deadline, but it arrived one day late. "Counsel bungled the job," the federal appeals court wrote in 2004. Instead of using first-class mail, Kraus should have opted for FedEx or a courthouse messenger, the court said. The person held accountable would be Johnson. "[L]awyers are agents," the court wrote. "Their acts (good and bad alike) are attributed to the clients they represent." Telling Johnson about her mistake - and how he would be punished for it - "was probably the hardest thing I've ever done," Kraus says. She stayed on the case - "he forgave me," she says - and was with Johnson for his last meal before he was executed in
But Kraus has declined to do any more habeas work since then. "The pitfalls are there, and I fell into one," she recalled. "And it was horrible." Sometimes, even legal organizations that are usually lauded for the quality of their capital work have faced criticism. In a Georgia case, a federal judge chastised lawyers with the Southern Center for Human Rights, a nonprofit that opposes the death penalty and provides free legal support to prisoners in capital cases. The Southern Center lawyers had left the case well before an inmate's habeas petition was due, but the judge argued that they should have done more to find replacement counsel and to help the inmate determine the filing deadline. One of the authors of the two-volume legal guidebook on habeas practice, James S. Liebman, a law professor at Columbia University, says the complexity and vagueness of the 1996 law has given lawyers all kinds of procedural nuances over which to fight. An important result has been that prosecutors have more ways to get a petition thrown out on procedural grounds - an advantage that they have seized "energetically and assiduously," Liebman says. The guidebook, now in its sixth edition, has grown over the years to 2,700 pages. "There are more and more pages,” he said, but “less and less justice." Confronted with late filings, courts have embraced a remedy called "equitable tolling," which allows judges to waive a missed deadline in some circumstances. But courts limit its application to extraordinary situations, and the standard has been applied unevenly around the country. Plain negligence - or a "simple gaffe," as the court labeled the mistake Kraus made - generally will not merit a judge's forbearance. But abandoning clients or lying to them often will constitute grounds for setting the deadline aside.
In the 80 capital cases, courts have granted equitable tolling in about a third. At least three of the inmates whose habeas petitions were reviewed went on to receive new trials. The courts usually won't forgive a missed deadline if an attorney misinterpreted the law, a mistake that gets categorized as negligence. But a federal court in Ohio did so in the case of Michael Keenan, a landscaper who was convicted of murdering a young man found in a Cleveland park. "He would have been executed," Keenan's lead defense lawyer, Vicki Werneke, said in an interview. "He came dangerously close to getting his whole case dismissed." When Werneke came onto the case in 2008, after Keenan had been granted equitable tolling, the state's case was already showing signs of unraveling. In 2012, a U.S. district court judge considered Keenan's habeas petition and ordered a new trial. Citing the state's "egregious prosecutorial misconduct" in withholding evidence, an Ohio county judge later ruled that prosecutors can't retry Keenan, allowing him to go free. The state's appeal of that ruling is now pending before the Ohio Supreme Court.
Race against time When a deadline is missed, an inmate's federal appeal can be lost - no matter the strength of the argument for a new trial, and even if the late filing can be attributed more to hard luck than ineptitude. The law requires that prosecutors turn over evidence favorable to the defense before trial. But it wasn't until 22 years after William Kuenzel was condemned in Alabama that his appellate attorney received police notes and grand jury testimony undermining the prosecution's case. Kuenzel was convicted in 1988 of murdering a convenience-store clerk. But in 2010, the state disclosed that an alleged accomplice originally told police he was with someone else, and that the only eyewitness who identified Kuenzel at trial had told grand jurors she "couldn't really see a face." With such revelations, Kuenzel's claim of innocence has attracted an array of prominent supporters and generated a polished publicity campaign. Three former district attorneys - Robert M. Morgenthau of Manhattan, Gil Garcetti of Los Angeles and E. Michael McCann of Milwaukee - filed a brief with the Supreme Court saying the newly surfaced evidence "completely eviscerated" a prosecution case that they characterized as “weak, to say the least." Although Kuenzel now has potentially strong grounds for an appeal, he still lacks a court to hear them - his lawyer missed the federal filing deadline by nearly three years. When the 1996 law took effect, Kuenzel had one year to file his habeas petition. But the law included a provision that would suspend the normal one-year statute of limitations if an inmate had a "properly filed" petition pending in state court, effectively stopping the clock on the appeals process. A petition that Kuenzel had filed in an Alabama circuit court had been dismissed as untimely in 1994, but then restored to the docket in May 1996. This led Kuenzel and his attorney to believe he had a "properly filed" state petition pending, and that the countdown toward the appeals deadline had paused. But three years later, the circuit court reversed itself again at the request of state prosecutors, which was interpreted by a federal court to mean that the clock had been ticking all along. "It is just the most grievous injustice," says David Kochman, an attorney who has been working on Kuenzel's appeal since 2004. "If any case was crying out for review, it was this case." The state has written in court files that the newly disclosed evidence "fails to even come close" to exonerating Kuenzel. "It is time for this case to finally come to an end," wrote the state, which two months ago asked for an execution date to be set. Sentenced to death at 26, Kuenzel is now 52. In a letter to this reporter last month, he wrote that he felt like he was listening to an old grandfather clock as it wound down, knowing he would be killed when it stops. He can't rewind the clock, he said, because "the courts have shut the hole."
Habeas petition deadline fell more than 8 years after sentencing.Lawyers missed his habeas deadline by nearly three years after state courts decided an earlier motion was improperly filed.He remains on Death Row. In September, prosecutors asked for his execution date to be set.
Guarding against racial prejudice On April 17, 1996, as then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued against any weakening of habeas corpus protections in the pending antiterrorism bill, the New York Democrat reminded his colleagues that the matters at hand were more profound than mere legal procedures. "We are dealing here, sir, with a fundamental provision of law, one of those essential civil liberties which precede and are the basis of political liberties," Moynihan said. Quoting from a letter that several former attorneys general had written to President Clinton, he cast the federal courts' ability to review state-court decisions under habeas corpus as an essential guarantee: "It has a proud history of guarding against injustices born of racial prejudice and intolerance, of saving the innocent from imprisonment or execution, and in the process, ensuring the rights of all law-abiding citizens." Two days before Moynihan's speech on the Senate floor, one of the jurors who voted to send Kenneth Rouse to his death, Joseph Baynard, signed an affidavit acknowledging that he had deliberately withheld the fact of his mother's murder so that he could get on the jury. Baynard, who died last year, acknowledged in the affidavit that his decision in the Rouse case might have been colored by "bigotry." A Duke University law student who interviewed the former juror for Rouse's appeal also filed a separate affidavit detailing Baynard's racial invective. At that point, Rouse's case was still in the state courts, which ultimately denied him a new trial. His one-year habeas deadline came on Feb. 7, 2000, and his lawyers, who miscalculated the date, filed their petition on his behalf one day too late. While the American public often complains about criminal defendants winning their legal cases on technicalities, the opposite is often true, says Gretchen Engel, a habeas expert who had advised Rouse's defense team and provided the correct filing date: "What they don't realize is how often people lose on technicalities, or in ways that would offend most people's sense of justice." Despite the federal courts' refusal to hear his case, Rouse got one more chance in 2009, when the North Carolina legislature passed the Racial Justice Act, allowing condemned prisoners to challenge their sentences if they could demonstrate that racial bias had played a role. Rouse filed a motion to have his case reviewed under the act. But in 2013 - after four other death-row inmates had succeeded in getting their sentences reduced to life without parole under the new provision - the state legislature repealed the law altogether. Rouse's motion is still pending. It is unclear if it will ever be heard.
ORIGINALLY FILED Saturday, November 15, 2014 at 4:30 p.m. ET
So many things are wrong with the death penalty. And when mistakes are made, and that happens too often, it is impossible to undo the punishment.
who dont understand, this is made by ukrainian forces, supported by money from our EU.
'Progressive' America does not care about Isis, but Israel, oh boy, what an evil nation! Hypocrisy rules the world.
one sentence is this video can reveal a big point of current conflict on Ukraine...
85 old woman said that "even germans didnt sink to a level of brutality as poroshenko and his Verkhovna Rada did!".
------------
I had to agree and I shame that EU support people, who are worse than hilter was :-(
Be welcome to express your opinion on Ukrainian army' style of leading a war.... war against civilians... I want know your opinions, I suppose a lot of you like that so you can accept EU supporting them.
source:
85 old woman said that "even germans didnt sink to a level of brutality as poroshenko and his Verkhovna Rada did!".
------------
I had to agree and I shame that EU support people, who are worse than hilter was :-(
Be welcome to express your opinion on Ukrainian army' style of leading a war.... war against civilians... I want know your opinions, I suppose a lot of you like that so you can accept EU supporting them.
source:
Mexico missing students: Capital braced for mass protests
Protesters blocked access to a road leading to the international airport in Mexico City on Thursday
Relatives of 43 missing Mexican students, who the authorities say were murdered by a drugs gang, have arrived in the capital ahead of mass protests.
Convoys carrying the families arrived in Mexico City on Thursday after touring the country to rally support.
The Mexican authorities say local police handed the students to a drug gang who then murdered them.
But some families of the missing are unconvinced by this explanation and still hope they will be found alive.
Francisco Lagro, father of 19-year-old Magdaleno, one of those missing, has been travelling on one of the caravans.
"It's been almost two months without knowing where they are. We don't know anything and we're desperate," he said.
"What are they doing? In what conditions? Do they get any water or food? Are they tied up? We have so many questions."
President's test
Thousands of people are expected to take part in the march in the capital, which starts at 17:00 local time (23:00 GMT). Protests are also under way in other parts of Mexico and abroad.
In one of the first rallies of the day, hooded protesters clashed with police close to Mexico City's international airport.
Witnesses say some of the protesters threw Molotov cocktails at police officers who had been trying to disperse them.
Many shops and businesses were reportedly closed on Thursday ahead of the demonstrations.
Rocks and Molotov cocktails were hurled at police near the airport
There was a heavy police presence ahead of the march
Bolivian students marched in solidarity with their Mexican counterparts in La Paz
Demonstrators have also called for a nationwide strike.
The abduction has galvanised opposition to rampant political corruption and violence, says the BBC's Wyre Davies in Mexico City.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has accused some of the protestors of trying to "destabilise" the state.
The protests for the missing students reflect wider anger at political corruption
Analysts say it is the biggest challenge he has faced in his two years of office.
The students, all trainee teachers, went missing after attending a protest in Iguala, Guerrero State.
Forensic tests are being carried out on bodies found in mass graves in the state.
More than 100,000 people have been killed and 27,000 have disappeared in Mexico in the last decade.
bbc.com
100.000 killed and probably another 27.000 also .... :O
Protesters blocked access to a road leading to the international airport in Mexico City on Thursday
Relatives of 43 missing Mexican students, who the authorities say were murdered by a drugs gang, have arrived in the capital ahead of mass protests.
Convoys carrying the families arrived in Mexico City on Thursday after touring the country to rally support.
The Mexican authorities say local police handed the students to a drug gang who then murdered them.
But some families of the missing are unconvinced by this explanation and still hope they will be found alive.
Francisco Lagro, father of 19-year-old Magdaleno, one of those missing, has been travelling on one of the caravans.
"It's been almost two months without knowing where they are. We don't know anything and we're desperate," he said.
"What are they doing? In what conditions? Do they get any water or food? Are they tied up? We have so many questions."
President's test
Thousands of people are expected to take part in the march in the capital, which starts at 17:00 local time (23:00 GMT). Protests are also under way in other parts of Mexico and abroad.
In one of the first rallies of the day, hooded protesters clashed with police close to Mexico City's international airport.
Witnesses say some of the protesters threw Molotov cocktails at police officers who had been trying to disperse them.
Many shops and businesses were reportedly closed on Thursday ahead of the demonstrations.
Rocks and Molotov cocktails were hurled at police near the airport
There was a heavy police presence ahead of the march
Bolivian students marched in solidarity with their Mexican counterparts in La Paz
Demonstrators have also called for a nationwide strike.
The abduction has galvanised opposition to rampant political corruption and violence, says the BBC's Wyre Davies in Mexico City.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has accused some of the protestors of trying to "destabilise" the state.
The protests for the missing students reflect wider anger at political corruption
Analysts say it is the biggest challenge he has faced in his two years of office.
The students, all trainee teachers, went missing after attending a protest in Iguala, Guerrero State.
Forensic tests are being carried out on bodies found in mass graves in the state.
More than 100,000 people have been killed and 27,000 have disappeared in Mexico in the last decade.
bbc.com
100.000 killed and probably another 27.000 also .... :O
Fifa 'corruption' report: Compliance chief to analyse full report
Fifa ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert and lawyer Michael Garcia have agreed to release full copies of reports into alleged World Cup bidding corruption to the organisation's compliance chief.
Domenico Scala will put selected evidence to Fifa's Executive Committee.
The body will then "evaluate which steps are required", leaving the door open to a possible re-vote.
Fifa is facing calls to publish all of Garcia's report after the release of a 42-page summary document last week.
The report cleared Russia and Qatar of corruption over their respective 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids, paving the way for them to remain hosts.
At a meeting on Thursday, Eckert and Garcia "agreed that it is of major importance" the Fifa Executive Committee has the "information necessary" to evaluate the work done by its Ethics Committee.
The role of Swiss-born Scala, the independent chairman of the organisation's Audit and Compliance Committee, will be crucial to the outcome as it will fall to him to determine "how much" of the information at his disposal he puts to the Executive Committee.
Eckert and Garcia have made themselves available to answer any questions from either Scala or the Executive Committee.
The statement also said a number of individuals have had ethics cases opened against them by Garcia.
It is not known how many people have had cases opened against them, or for what specific reasons. Fifa has also lodged a separate criminal complaint with the Swiss attorney general.
The statement added: "Neither the recent referral of the reports to the Swiss Federal Public Prosecutor's Office nor the request to the chairman of the Fifa Audit and Compliance Committee will interfere with those ongoing proceedings."
German judge Eckert, who published his summary document on 13 November, based his findings on the work of American lawyer Garcia.
Just hours after the document was made public, Garcia issued a statement questioning the report, in which he said Eckert's findings contained "numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations".
And despite today's meeting, Garcia is still appealing Eckert's report.
bbc.com
I wonder how long Blatter can keep this show up :/
Fifa ethics judge Hans-Joachim Eckert and lawyer Michael Garcia have agreed to release full copies of reports into alleged World Cup bidding corruption to the organisation's compliance chief.
Domenico Scala will put selected evidence to Fifa's Executive Committee.
The body will then "evaluate which steps are required", leaving the door open to a possible re-vote.
Fifa is facing calls to publish all of Garcia's report after the release of a 42-page summary document last week.
The report cleared Russia and Qatar of corruption over their respective 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids, paving the way for them to remain hosts.
At a meeting on Thursday, Eckert and Garcia "agreed that it is of major importance" the Fifa Executive Committee has the "information necessary" to evaluate the work done by its Ethics Committee.
The role of Swiss-born Scala, the independent chairman of the organisation's Audit and Compliance Committee, will be crucial to the outcome as it will fall to him to determine "how much" of the information at his disposal he puts to the Executive Committee.
Eckert and Garcia have made themselves available to answer any questions from either Scala or the Executive Committee.
The statement also said a number of individuals have had ethics cases opened against them by Garcia.
It is not known how many people have had cases opened against them, or for what specific reasons. Fifa has also lodged a separate criminal complaint with the Swiss attorney general.
The statement added: "Neither the recent referral of the reports to the Swiss Federal Public Prosecutor's Office nor the request to the chairman of the Fifa Audit and Compliance Committee will interfere with those ongoing proceedings."
German judge Eckert, who published his summary document on 13 November, based his findings on the work of American lawyer Garcia.
Just hours after the document was made public, Garcia issued a statement questioning the report, in which he said Eckert's findings contained "numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations".
And despite today's meeting, Garcia is still appealing Eckert's report.
bbc.com
I wonder how long Blatter can keep this show up :/
George Osborne backs down over EU cap on bankers’ bonuses
Chancellor concedes defeat in his efforts to challenge bonus cap after senior EU lawyer rejects UK claims it is illegal
Osborne banker bonus case Osborne: 'I’m not going to spend taxpayers’ money on a legal challenge now unlikely to succeed.' Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
George Osborne has conceded defeat in his attempt to overturn the EU cap on bonuses after a senior legal advisor at the European court of justice rejected his arguments.
Instead the chancellor raised the prospect of forcing changes to the way bankers are paid, by having their salaries – not just their bonuses – clawed back when errors are made.
He took his decision after one of the ECJ’s advocate generals, recommended upholding the EU law on bankers’ bonuses that restricts payouts to 100% of a bankers’ salary, or 200% if shareholders grant their approval.
The opinion – although not binding – was seen as a blow to the chancellor who gave his backing to ideas floated by Mark Carney and other central bankers to force change in the way bankers are paid.
Osborne wrote to Carney – in his capacity as head of the financial stability board – on Friday night to set out his views on the need for further reform. The FSB was set up after the banking crisis to create global standards for banks.
Osborne said: “I’m not going to spend taxpayers’ money on a legal challenge now unlikely to succeed. The fact remains these are badly designed rules that are pushing up bankers’ pay not reducing it. These rules may be legal but they are entirely self-defeating, so we need to find another way to end rewards for failure in our banks.”
Osborne and officials at the Bank of England have warned that bankers’ fixed pay will rise to compensate for the lower bonus potential. As it is, bankers were being handed “allowances” alongside their salaries and bonuses – a move which the European Banking Authority had concluded was circumventing the bonus cap.
The Treasury said the advocate general of the European Court of Justice confirmed that argument, highlighting that the legislation provides no restriction on fixed pay, which is already increasing because of the limit on bonuses. “But it has also made it very clear that the government’s legal challenge is unlikely to succeed.
A spokesman said: “We will therefore withdraw the challenge, and instead look at other ways of building a system of pay in global banking that encourages rather than undermines responsibility. For example, it may be necessary to develop standards that ensure non-bonus or fixed pay is put at risk, maximise claw back, or pay senior staff in performance-related bond.”
Such an idea was floated by Carney this week when he said fines were not enough to change behaviour. It is based on ideas put forward by US regulators.
The Treasury had argued that the EU overstepped its remit by legislating on bankers’ bonuses and imposed the law in a rushed way without any assessment of its impact. But the advocate general dismissed all the UK’s arguments in an opinion that said European regulators had the legal authority to introduce the cap and had not infringed UK sovereignty. He also argued that it was wrong to characterise the bonus restrictions as a cap on pay, because basic salaries were not fixed.
A final judgment from the court is expected by early February, just as thousands of bankers in the City are waiting to hear how much their bonus cheques will be worth.
Many legal experts think the court will follow this latest opinion, leaving the bonus cap in place.
“It seems unlikely now that the court will overturn the advocate general’s opinion, so banks should continue planning on the basis that the bonus cap will still be in force next year,” said Tom Gosling, head of PwC’s reward practice.
Jake Green, a senior associate at Ashurst, said although the advocate general’s conclusion was expected, the forcefulness of his arguments came as a surprise. “It seems so thoroughly reasoned and absolute in its conclusions and perhaps that is the surprise. There is no fence-sitting on any of the issues.”
theguardian.com
Damn bankers :/
Chancellor concedes defeat in his efforts to challenge bonus cap after senior EU lawyer rejects UK claims it is illegal
Osborne banker bonus case Osborne: 'I’m not going to spend taxpayers’ money on a legal challenge now unlikely to succeed.' Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
George Osborne has conceded defeat in his attempt to overturn the EU cap on bonuses after a senior legal advisor at the European court of justice rejected his arguments.
Instead the chancellor raised the prospect of forcing changes to the way bankers are paid, by having their salaries – not just their bonuses – clawed back when errors are made.
He took his decision after one of the ECJ’s advocate generals, recommended upholding the EU law on bankers’ bonuses that restricts payouts to 100% of a bankers’ salary, or 200% if shareholders grant their approval.
The opinion – although not binding – was seen as a blow to the chancellor who gave his backing to ideas floated by Mark Carney and other central bankers to force change in the way bankers are paid.
Osborne wrote to Carney – in his capacity as head of the financial stability board – on Friday night to set out his views on the need for further reform. The FSB was set up after the banking crisis to create global standards for banks.
Osborne said: “I’m not going to spend taxpayers’ money on a legal challenge now unlikely to succeed. The fact remains these are badly designed rules that are pushing up bankers’ pay not reducing it. These rules may be legal but they are entirely self-defeating, so we need to find another way to end rewards for failure in our banks.”
Osborne and officials at the Bank of England have warned that bankers’ fixed pay will rise to compensate for the lower bonus potential. As it is, bankers were being handed “allowances” alongside their salaries and bonuses – a move which the European Banking Authority had concluded was circumventing the bonus cap.
The Treasury said the advocate general of the European Court of Justice confirmed that argument, highlighting that the legislation provides no restriction on fixed pay, which is already increasing because of the limit on bonuses. “But it has also made it very clear that the government’s legal challenge is unlikely to succeed.
A spokesman said: “We will therefore withdraw the challenge, and instead look at other ways of building a system of pay in global banking that encourages rather than undermines responsibility. For example, it may be necessary to develop standards that ensure non-bonus or fixed pay is put at risk, maximise claw back, or pay senior staff in performance-related bond.”
Such an idea was floated by Carney this week when he said fines were not enough to change behaviour. It is based on ideas put forward by US regulators.
The Treasury had argued that the EU overstepped its remit by legislating on bankers’ bonuses and imposed the law in a rushed way without any assessment of its impact. But the advocate general dismissed all the UK’s arguments in an opinion that said European regulators had the legal authority to introduce the cap and had not infringed UK sovereignty. He also argued that it was wrong to characterise the bonus restrictions as a cap on pay, because basic salaries were not fixed.
A final judgment from the court is expected by early February, just as thousands of bankers in the City are waiting to hear how much their bonus cheques will be worth.
Many legal experts think the court will follow this latest opinion, leaving the bonus cap in place.
“It seems unlikely now that the court will overturn the advocate general’s opinion, so banks should continue planning on the basis that the bonus cap will still be in force next year,” said Tom Gosling, head of PwC’s reward practice.
Jake Green, a senior associate at Ashurst, said although the advocate general’s conclusion was expected, the forcefulness of his arguments came as a surprise. “It seems so thoroughly reasoned and absolute in its conclusions and perhaps that is the surprise. There is no fence-sitting on any of the issues.”
theguardian.com
Damn bankers :/
Briton claiming to be former Taliban bomb expert ‘joins Isis’
Car mechanic Hamayun Tariq, who ‘fought in Pakistan to evict infidels’ and tweeted weapons data, ‘is Islamic State jihadi’
Twitter feed giving notes on bomb making and the 'latest detonation methods'. Photograph: Guardian
A man from the West Midlands who claims to be an explosives expert has told the Guardian he has joined Isis after fighting for the Taliban for several years.
Hamayun Tariq, 37, a car mechanic who became a jihadi, says he volunteered to fight for the militant group, known for inflicting ruthless violence on unarmed captives and civilians, seven weeks ago after spending the summer hitchhiking from Pakistan’s tribal belt.
He said that he was now “really happy” and receiving a salary and housing allowance from Isis.
During the last few days the self-declared bomb maker has been using Twitter to distribute information from the Mujahideen Explosives Handbook.
Tariq, a divorced father of two who was born and brought up in Dudley, has also tweeted pictures of multiple pages of handwritten notes on electronic components which could be used to assemble bombs, along with basic information on the chemicals needed to make crude toxins and poisons.
His account has been suspended twice by Twitter over the last week two weeks.
Family members told the Guardian that they had not been in contact with him for three and a half years but confirmed he had left the UK some time ago.
Tariq served three and a half years in prison for conspiring to defraud banks and post offices. He said he then left the UK in July 2012 to fight for Islamic insurgents in Waziristan in the tribal belt of Pakistan’s north-west.
He said he had met 30 to 40 other Brits since joining the ranks of Isis, and that one fixer he met was weekly smuggling in a 1,000 fighters of multiple nationalities.
The latest figures from police and security services suggest that 500 Brits are fighting for several factions in the bloody Syrian civil war, which was sparked following the brutal suppression of a popular uprising in 2011.
On Sunday a Kurdish leader told a British newspaper that Isis might have an army of 200,000.
While abroad last year Tariq said he had had his passport cancelled by the home secretary. Such cancellations are a highly usual step usually reserved only for those believed to be a serious threat to national security. The Home Office said it would not discuss individual cases.
On Tuesday, Tariq tweeted a picture of a Saudi building destroyed by a massive truck bomb in 1996 by Islamist militants adding: “I try to visualise this pic as SIS, the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, at Vauxhall Cross.”
The Twitter account, which was removed late Wednesday, had, over a five-day period, distributed graphics on the construction of military communication equipment, illustrations on explosively formed penetrators employed to destroy armour on vehicles, a glossary of scientific and explosives terms, and meticulous notes on aiming Russian-made mortars.
Tariq also tweeted information on chemicals which could be used as precursors for making toxins and poisons.
After the death of Tariq’s father in January this year his family said they had been little motivated to make contact with him but added that his father had been devastated by the path he had taken. They confirmed his imprisonment for fraud and that he held radical views, but did not want to make any public comment.
An intermediary for the family described Tariq as a “simple guy” and was surprised at the possibility of his now working and fighting for Isis as an explosives expert. They added that he had studied science to at least GCSE level.
Speaking via direct messaging on Twitter, Tariq said that his transition towards a more fundamentalist mindset began in 2000. “It was after ... I started reflecting on the creation of God that I came to understands there was a creator who gives life and takes life,” he said.
He skipped bail and fled to Pakistan to avoid being tried for fraud in Wolverhamton crown court in April 2005 but said that he was deported back to the UK in October 2007 and subsequently served his sentence for three and a half years.
Following his release, he said, he went to the tribal regions of Pakistan “to evict the infidels from our occupied lands and to implement the laws of the almighty God”. While there he said his co-jihadi members were killed in US drone strikes.
Asked about his role in Isis he said that he was working in explosives and also trained as a sniper. He said that daily life under Islamic State was much more comfortable than in Waziristan and he got a regular salary and a housing allowance from Isis.
“Life was tough in Waziristan but here I can’t believe I get a salary, I get rent. They even paid for my transport. I’m really happy here and all the guys I’ve met from the UK are also happy and settled.”
Asked about his views on the conflict he said the UK should pull out the US-led coalition to bomb Isis positions. “All I see for the UK in the horizon are dark black clouds. Leave the affairs of the Muslims to the Muslims. The UK should be more concerned about their own welfare and their people,” he said.
The Home Office did not comment further.
theguardian.com
What :O ... that Isis might have an army of 200,000 !!
Car mechanic Hamayun Tariq, who ‘fought in Pakistan to evict infidels’ and tweeted weapons data, ‘is Islamic State jihadi’
Twitter feed giving notes on bomb making and the 'latest detonation methods'. Photograph: Guardian
A man from the West Midlands who claims to be an explosives expert has told the Guardian he has joined Isis after fighting for the Taliban for several years.
Hamayun Tariq, 37, a car mechanic who became a jihadi, says he volunteered to fight for the militant group, known for inflicting ruthless violence on unarmed captives and civilians, seven weeks ago after spending the summer hitchhiking from Pakistan’s tribal belt.
He said that he was now “really happy” and receiving a salary and housing allowance from Isis.
During the last few days the self-declared bomb maker has been using Twitter to distribute information from the Mujahideen Explosives Handbook.
Tariq, a divorced father of two who was born and brought up in Dudley, has also tweeted pictures of multiple pages of handwritten notes on electronic components which could be used to assemble bombs, along with basic information on the chemicals needed to make crude toxins and poisons.
His account has been suspended twice by Twitter over the last week two weeks.
Family members told the Guardian that they had not been in contact with him for three and a half years but confirmed he had left the UK some time ago.
Tariq served three and a half years in prison for conspiring to defraud banks and post offices. He said he then left the UK in July 2012 to fight for Islamic insurgents in Waziristan in the tribal belt of Pakistan’s north-west.
He said he had met 30 to 40 other Brits since joining the ranks of Isis, and that one fixer he met was weekly smuggling in a 1,000 fighters of multiple nationalities.
The latest figures from police and security services suggest that 500 Brits are fighting for several factions in the bloody Syrian civil war, which was sparked following the brutal suppression of a popular uprising in 2011.
On Sunday a Kurdish leader told a British newspaper that Isis might have an army of 200,000.
While abroad last year Tariq said he had had his passport cancelled by the home secretary. Such cancellations are a highly usual step usually reserved only for those believed to be a serious threat to national security. The Home Office said it would not discuss individual cases.
On Tuesday, Tariq tweeted a picture of a Saudi building destroyed by a massive truck bomb in 1996 by Islamist militants adding: “I try to visualise this pic as SIS, the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, at Vauxhall Cross.”
The Twitter account, which was removed late Wednesday, had, over a five-day period, distributed graphics on the construction of military communication equipment, illustrations on explosively formed penetrators employed to destroy armour on vehicles, a glossary of scientific and explosives terms, and meticulous notes on aiming Russian-made mortars.
Tariq also tweeted information on chemicals which could be used as precursors for making toxins and poisons.
After the death of Tariq’s father in January this year his family said they had been little motivated to make contact with him but added that his father had been devastated by the path he had taken. They confirmed his imprisonment for fraud and that he held radical views, but did not want to make any public comment.
An intermediary for the family described Tariq as a “simple guy” and was surprised at the possibility of his now working and fighting for Isis as an explosives expert. They added that he had studied science to at least GCSE level.
Speaking via direct messaging on Twitter, Tariq said that his transition towards a more fundamentalist mindset began in 2000. “It was after ... I started reflecting on the creation of God that I came to understands there was a creator who gives life and takes life,” he said.
He skipped bail and fled to Pakistan to avoid being tried for fraud in Wolverhamton crown court in April 2005 but said that he was deported back to the UK in October 2007 and subsequently served his sentence for three and a half years.
Following his release, he said, he went to the tribal regions of Pakistan “to evict the infidels from our occupied lands and to implement the laws of the almighty God”. While there he said his co-jihadi members were killed in US drone strikes.
Asked about his role in Isis he said that he was working in explosives and also trained as a sniper. He said that daily life under Islamic State was much more comfortable than in Waziristan and he got a regular salary and a housing allowance from Isis.
“Life was tough in Waziristan but here I can’t believe I get a salary, I get rent. They even paid for my transport. I’m really happy here and all the guys I’ve met from the UK are also happy and settled.”
Asked about his views on the conflict he said the UK should pull out the US-led coalition to bomb Isis positions. “All I see for the UK in the horizon are dark black clouds. Leave the affairs of the Muslims to the Muslims. The UK should be more concerned about their own welfare and their people,” he said.
The Home Office did not comment further.
theguardian.com
What :O ... that Isis might have an army of 200,000 !!
