Black Defendant Elton Walters’ Defense Team Uses O.J. Defense in Closing Arguments in Pembroke Pines Condo Rape-Murder of White Evelyn Norell, 93
Thanks to my partner in crime, David in TN, for this article. David writes,
I love this:
"Defense lawyers Betsy Benson and Caroline McCrae portrayed the murder investigation as a rush to judgment that ignored other possible suspects once the victim's belongings were discovered in Walters' Dodge pickup."
Yeah, must have been one of those Colombian drug gangs that are always running around butchering white women.
•
Elton Walters during closing arguements [sic] in his murder trial. Walters is… (Mike Stocker, Sun Sentinel )
Police caught the killer red-handed, a Broward prosecutor told a jury Wednesday.
And it wasn't just a figure of speech. As Elton Walters was being interrogated at the Pembroke Pines Police Department hours after the body of Evelyn Norell, 93, was discovered, a detective noticed red stains on Walters' fingers.
And when a detective told Walters he was going to be arrested and fingerprinted, Walters began chewing his fingernails. A nervous habit, defense lawyers said. An attempt to get rid of the evidence, said Assistant State Attorney Stephen Zaccor.
Jurors listened to closing arguments in Walters' murder trial Wednesday. Zaccor said police were on to Norell's killer soon after her body was found Oct. 6, 2009 in the bedroom of her condo at the Images community in Pembroke Pines.
Defense lawyers Betsy Benson and Caroline McCrae portrayed the murder investigation as a rush to judgment that ignored other possible suspects once the victim's belongings were discovered in Walters' Dodge pickup.
Among those belongings were a tablecloth from Norell's dining room, bloodstained linen and pillowcase, a lockbox and Norell's purse. Police also found the knife they believe Walters used to slash Norell's throat after sexually assaulting and strangling her.
Zaccor told the jury that the evidence leads to one reasonable conclusion — Walters, a maintenance man at the condo complex where Norell lived alone, was her killer.
"Why would her blood be on his shorts?" Zaccor said. "Why would her blood be on his hands?"
And why, he asked, would Norell's DNA — from a source that was not blood — be on the crotch of the underwear Walters was wearing when he was arrested? The only explanation, he said, was that Walters' boxers came in direct contact with the victim, who was naked from the breast area down to her socks when her body was found.
Walters faces the death penalty if convicted of first-degree murder, armed sexual battery, armed robbery and armed burglary.
But Benson and McCrae said police had the wrong guy from the start. Walters, who did not testify during the trial, told Pembroke Pines Police detective Carl Heim that he had no idea how the victim's belongings got in his pickup, but police never considered the notion that someone else had stashed them in the vehicle, Benson said.
Benson focused largely on the absence of evidence of rape. Even Zaccor conceded that there was no evidence of penetration, Benson noted. There were no bruises on the elderly woman's body that would be expected if she had been raped. And there was no semen.
"There is no evidence whatsoever of any sexual battery," she said.
McCrae told jurors they should doubt the conclusions about DNA presented during the trial because the evidence was handled in a way that, she said, could easily have led to contamination. Samples collected from various sources were stored close together during testing, McCrae said, leaving open the possibility that some of the items may have been mixed up.
"You have to take every single reasonable step to ensure that contamination does not occur," she said. "You need to eliminate the conditions that allow for contamination."
Zaccor defended the Broward Sheriff's DNA analyst who handled the evidence, Christopher Sase Comar, saying he followed accepted protocols and that there's no indication any of it was mixed up or contaminated.
Jurors deliberated for about five hours Wednesday before retiring for the night. Because it's a death penalty case, the jury is being sequestered during deliberations, shielded from exposure to media accounts of the case and prevented from contacting their families except during brief, monitored conversations.
Deliberations will resume Thursday morning.
raolmeda@tribune.com, 954-356-4457 or Twitter @SSCourts
[Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that the jury deliberated for one hour Wednesday. Deliberations began shortly after 4 p.m. and ended for the night shortly before 9:30 p.m.]
At 7:38 a.m., my son and I bust it down our long block to the city bus stop.
We can’t risk missing the early bus, because the driver is a nice white guy who charges all school kids the same price (nothing), regardless of the color of their skin. The next driver is a black guy, who charges white and Asian kids (mine is both) half-fare, while letting black and Hispanic kids ride for free….
In Tim Cavanaugh’s article, “Defining conservatism down,” he did an excellent job of showing that Paul Ryan is no conservative but just another big government, establishment Republican. Yes, it is hard to find any time he failed to vote for any Republican expansions of government.
But the piece fails to mention that Ryan has also been a relentless supporter of the phony "free trade" agreements that never fail to increase the trade deficit. The corporate elites love these agreements which allow them to move their production overseas and then import the products back to the U.S. This has resulted in the loss of millions of good-paying middle class manufacturing jobs and massive increases in the trade deficit. They have also allowed China to accumulate enormous trade surpluses which they can spend on militarization.
But Ryan and the corporatists he serves aren't satisfied with displacing Americans with cheap labor abroad—now Ryan is leading the fight in the House for a massive amnesty/immigration surge which will displace not just lower-income workers, but also replace educated professionals with cheaper labor from China and India.
It just isn't true that there is a labor shortage. If that were true, basic economics would have resulted in surging wages as companies competed for the available workers. Instead wages have been flat and nearly everyone knows educated engineers and programmers who cannot find jobs. Ryan whines that Wisconsin dairy farmers can't find cheap laborers. He says they can't raise wages to draw American workers because their products would be too expensive. However, studies have shown that farm wages can be increased enormously with very little increase in supermarket prices.
He also claims that higher prices would cause cheese production to move offshore. Well, that seems unlikely, but if it were true, tariffs would take care of the problem. Tariffs enabled the US to become the leading industrial power in the world. Now that we have shed protectionism, we are rapidly losing industry to Asian countries which have accomplished this through the use of literally hundreds of forms of protectionism. Tariffs are not an assault on freedom--they are simply taxes and internal taxes could be reduced to make the overall level of government revenue neutral--or preferably lower.
Ryan is not only a traitor to Americans, but also to his own party. Numerous studies have shown that when the majority of immigrants vote, they vote Democrat. Republican Treason Lobbyists have tried to tell us that is because immigrants see Republicans as anti-immigrant. This is a lie—the reality is that most immigrants want the kind of big government socialism which the Democrats provide best. All Ryan's immigration increase will do is further suppress American wages and increase the percentage of leftist voters.
If the average American is to have any kind of quality of life in the future, fake conservatives like Ryan must be given the boot. We need politicians who will look after the interests of average Americans—not corporate elites or protected minorities. The Republican Party must change or we need a new party.
[N.S.: Mr. Mossman sent in the above ms. as a letter to the editor, but it was so professionally written that I merely changed the opening, to turn it into an op-ed column.]
Black Suspect, Dereak Turner, 24, Finally Arrested for Racist, 2009, Hayward, California Murder of White Thomas Cunningham, 38, in Front of His Daughter, 13; San Francisco Chronicle Seeks to Justify Murder
Thanks to reader-researcher AL for the heads-up.
Under Jim Snow, whites can’t even safely go out to buy ice cream. And check out the new stupid journalist trick: Refusing to countenance racial hatred as a black murder suspect’s motive, but having no problem blaming it on a friendly dog.
A sketch of the suspect wanted in connection with the fatal shooting of Thomas Cunningham, 38, in front of his 13-year-old daughter. Photo: Courtesy of Hayward Police Dept
A Vallejo man has been arrested and charged with murdering a man in Hayward in 2009 after taking exception to one of the victim's dogs sniffing at his leg, authorities said Wednesday. [“Taking exception”? Is this a character in a Noel Coward play?]
Dereak Turner, 24, shot and killed Thomas Cunningham, 38, outside a liquor store near Vermont and B streets about 10 p.m. on Nov. 24, 2009, police said.
Cunningham had been walking home with his 13-year-old daughter after buying some ice cream.
Turner is being held without bail at Hayward City Jail. Alameda County prosecutors have charged him with murder and a gun enhancement.
Cunningham and his daughter had gone to the store to get ice cream and were walking home when they encountered Turner, who asked Cunningham to hold back his dogs - a 1-year-old German shepherd and a smaller dog - as he passed, authorities said.
[Turner didn’t “ask[ed] Cunningham to hold back his dogs.” He said something like, ‘You better keep them m’f’n dogs away from me, bitch!’]
Both dogs were off leash but were not behaving aggressively, investigators said.
Upset that the German shepherd had sniffed his leg, Turner exchanged words with Cunningham before shooting him twice with a handgun, police said. The daughter ran inside the liquor store for help, and Cunningham later died at a hospital.
[Lee is acting as though the dog “caused” the killing. Turner wasn’t “upset that the German shepherd had sniffed his leg”; he had to already have been looking for a pretext to murder a white.
Let’s take Lee’s insinuation seriously: If a dog sniffing the cuff of his pants were sufficient to send Turner into a homicidal rage, he would have murdered thousands of people by now. Every day, he would be encountering such outrages: White women who failed to disrobe and lie down in his path; Korean and Mexican store clerks who made him pay for his purchases, etc.]
Henry K. Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: hlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @henryklee
A Towson University student was stabbed multiple times Sunday night near the school’s campus, Baltimore County Police said Monday.
Police spokeswoman Elise Armacost said police and EMS units were called to the corner of Burke Avenue and Centre Avenue in Towson about 10:50 p.m. Sunday night when a woman passing by the location found the man in the middle of the street.
“We found that he had been stabbed multiple times and he was really seriously hurt,” Armacost said.
Related
Female college student in Towson awakened by unknown man in her bedroom
Man stole woman's purse in Towson grocery store lot
Homeless man, woman robbed at gunpoint in downtown Towson
Armacost said that the man was too seriously injured to provide any information to the police other than that the attackers were three thin, black males. The man, who is 24, was transported to a local hospital, which Armacost did not identify for safety reasons.
Police said the man’s cell phone was taken, and the incident is being investigated as a possible robbery.
“We don’t know for certain if that was the motive for this assault until we talk to the victim,” Armacost said.
The Sunday-evening robbery marked the end of busy weekend in downtown Towson.
According to a police report, a man was sitting on a bench at the Towson Town Center mall at 6:58 p.m. Sunday when his phone was taken from his hand. Police described the suspect as a black male in his 20s, 5 feet 9, with a medium build, brown eyes, and medium complexion.
Just after 12:30 a.m. Friday, Nov. 1, a female college student was walking down Aigburth Road toward Cedar Lane near Towson High when her iPhone 4S was stolen from her hands.
Police said two men walked up on either side of her and stole the phone from the woman, who struggled with the thieves but was unsuccessful.
Later that morning, police said two men, one with a handgun and another armed with a shotgun, pulled their weapons on a man walking in the 1100 block of Charlesview Way at 3 a.m. Friday.
Illiterate Public School Teachers: You Got a Problem with That?!
New York City Techurs Spel Trubble
By Nicholas Stix
July 18, 2001 A Different Drummer/Toogood Reports
New York Post reporters Carl Campanile and Stefan Friedman just got this year's New-York-City-illiterate-teacher "scoop." Such stories are a staple of New York journalism, one that a smart education reporter not working for the New York Times—where they are unofficially banned—will return to annually.
This year's exhibit comes from an angry Brooklyn high school teacher, Sunny Liang, who wrote to the Post to complain of its portrayal of city public school teachers. Liang, who immigrated to the U.S. from China in 1985, is presently teaching kids who failed last year's academic work, in summer school.
"Sunny Liang, a 10-year veteran of Fort Hamilton HS, has sent three letters to The Post, complaining about low teacher salaries, poor student attendance and lack of parental involvement.
"But there's one major problem with his arguments: They were all written incoherently.
"Some lowlights from the letters:
"'Only if our society realize that there are so many factors contributing to a student's test score, then teachers will be willing to take the blam game. Who is to blam when students don't do homeworks? who is to blam when pareants don't care to come to the teacher pareant conference?"
"In one letter, Liang even misspelled the course he teaches: 'socail studies.'
"The remarkable thing about Liang is that he passed the state licensing exams that thousands of other teachers fail. Schools Chancellor Harold Levy has said the tests are not difficult.
The certification tests, in fact, are deliberately written on a simpler level than the SAT I that high school kids take as part of their college application process. Excepting, that is, high school kids applying to the City University of New York (CUNY) system, which requires only a New York City high school diploma for admission. And every year, the already dumbed-down New York State certification test is dumbed down further by a "cultural bias" committee, which removes questions that black and Hispanic testees too often answer incorrectly.
A few years ago, the city Board of Education announced that it was going to fire thousands of teachers who had flunked the certification exam three times or more. One "educator" had flunked 24 times. However, the failures were virtually all black and Hispanic. Race activists, screaming racism, demanded that the incompetents all be retained. And so they were.
If there is one iron law of education, it is that you cannot teach material that you have not yourself mastered.
For over thirty years, the New York City schools have been gripped in a vicious cycle of escalating racism and cognitive decline. Black and Hispanic activists demand that the schools be cleansed of white teachers; the additional illiterate, black and Hispanic "teachers" cause academic declines, leading to renewed calls for more incompetent blacks and Hispanics. The new hires portray themselves as "role models" for "students of color," and terrorize white teachers. The new system was known as "community control."
Beginning in the 1970s, white parents who removed their children from public schools, or fled the city altogether in the face of a belligerent, black racism that school authorities either yielded to or actively supported, were damned as racists, through the new term, "white flight."
The City University of New York (CUNY), was also destroyed. Once the nation's most rigorous system of higher education, CUNY's Harlem City College campus, had been from circa 1915-1964, tougher to gain admittance to and to graduate from than Harvard. CUNY provided the city with the nation's most brilliant corps of public school teachers.
(Many city public school teachers were intellectually superior to most college professors. The teachers had pursued academic careers, but as Howard M. Sachar writes in A History of the Jews in America, most were until circa 1950 barred from professorships, by the then reigning anti-Semitism.)
In the spring of 1969, the first group of affirmative action admits to City College, demanded that all academic standards be jettisoned. And so they were.
In 1970, CUNY began routinely admitting functional illiterates, who were provided with "remedial" education and increasingly dumbed-down, "college-level" courses. CUNY's new system was known as "open admissions."
Many of the illiterates saw life as a package of entitlements: graduation from high school, admission to, and graduation from CUNY, and then lifetime positions as city teachers. They saw themselves as the owners of the city's black and Hispanic children.
According to the United Federation of Teachers, over eighty percent of the city's public school teachers are CUNY graduates. And yet, the State of New York has threatened, since the late-1990s, to shut down all of CUNY's teacher education programs. At the time, many of the programs' graduates had passing rates on the New York State teacher certification examination, of under 40 percent. (The programs have since somehow boosted their graduation rates to a whopping 50 percent.) By contrast, graduates of teacher ed programs at State University of New York (SUNY) campuses, have long had 95 percent passing rates on state teacher certification exams.
Instead of being embarrassed by CUNY's failure, CUNY apartheidists, like "civil rights attorney," Ronald McGuire, whose screeds are distributed in CUNY department offices, have damned SUNY for its success, because its students are predominantly white.
For the past thirty-odd years, New York City schools have also continually dumbed down their curricula. Part of this has been the result of hiring people who cannot teach grade-level curricula. Adding insult to injury, educators have inflicted on students "self-esteem" pedagogy, dumbed-down instructional materials, and in the case of Hispanic students, "bilingual education" taught often by teachers who know no English. The terms "ebonics" and "Spanglish" refer to the fruits of this anti-pedagogy.
Once bright, even brilliant graduates of the city's public college campuses filled poor and working-class children of all races with wonder, as they taught them physics, history, poetry, chemistry ... Some of the best of those students followed in their teachers' footsteps.
For the past thirty-odd years, the incompetents who have taken over the city's public schools have filled their charges' heads with the notion that "caucasians" are responsible for all of their problems.
A couple of years ago, The Wave, the local paper for the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, published a "poem" -- really just a list of rhetorical questions, written by a black second or third-grader. The poem was submitted by the boy's teacher in predominantly-black Far Rockaway, one of the nation's most violent, racist, slums. One question asked, "Why do Americans hate Black Americans?"
In 1990, while working as a foster-care worker with abused and neglected children, I was taking one of my kids, Latoya, "home" to her East New York, Brooklyn, foster home. Spying her third-grade teacher in our subway car, Latoya sought to introduce us. Silently glaring at me, the woman ignored the introduction.
A few weeks later, at her foster home, I found a spelling bee in Latoya's book bag. The teacher -- the woman from the train -- had given her an "A," for spelling 19 out of 20 words correctly. Except that Latoya had only spelled 13 words correctly, and thus deserved only a "D." How was she ever going to improve, if her teacher lied to her about her progress, or was too incompetent to measure it?
Black racism is so pervasive in today's New York, that most black civilians feel the same as black "educators." Fairly typical, I believe, are the sentiments expressed by Brooklynite Yahli Eady, a successful, Manhattan advertising sales manager.
Eady, a CUNY graduate in her late 40s says, "You have to have open admissions" for the "opportunities" it provides, even though she is clearly bright enough to have attended CUNY without open admissions. Eady, who has sent her children to Afrocentric and Catholic private schools, also insists, "You have to have community control." At the same time, citing the lack of certified teachers in predominantly black schools, she refuses to send her children to public schools. But she will not acknowledge the connection between community control and failing schools. Indeed, during our last conversation, she acted as though I were somehow personally at fault for the lack of quality public schools: "You tell me, why I pay taxes, but I can't send my kids to the public schools!"
Maybe Yahli Eady is right; maybe I'm the problem. I caused New York City's public schools to fail.
Meanwhile, Sunny Liang insists, "It's just my personality. Sometimes, I just get overexcited, don't read over my work, and my shortcomings come out. But as far as my own flaws go, my own writing doesn't reflect how I teach in the classroom." And progressive pedagogues have long complained that facility in spelling is the result of unimaginative, "rote memorization." They have even gone so far as to suggest that an inability to spell correctly, or do well on tests, is a sign of wisdom and creativity.
If you think this story is unique to New York, think again.
PENNSVILLE, N.J. (AP) -- The young man believed to have carried out a shooting at Los Angeles International Airport had sent a sibling a text message mentioning suicide, leading their father to seek authorities' help in finding him, a New Jersey police chief said Friday.
Paul Ciancia's father called Pennsville Police Chief Allen Cummings early Friday afternoon, saying another of his children had received a text message from the 23-year-old "in reference to him taking his own life," the chief told The Associated Press.
The elder Ciancia, the owner of an auto-body shop in southern New Jersey, asked for help in locating Paul, Cummings said. The chief called Los Angeles police, which sent a patrol car to Ciancia's apartment. It wasn't clear whether the police visited before or after the airport shooting.
"Basically, there were two roommates there," Cummings said. "They said, `We saw him yesterday and he was fine.'"
He told Ciancia's father that because of his son's age, he couldn't take a missing persons report.
A law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity identified Paul Ciancia as the man who pulled a semi-automatic rifle from a bag and shot his way past a security checkpoint at the airport, killing a security officer and wounding two other people.
The gunman was wounded in a shootout with police and was taken into custody, Los Angeles police said.
The official who identified Ciancia was briefed at the airport on the investigation and requested anonymity because was he was not authorized to speak publicly.
The shooter was wearing fatigues and carrying a bag containing a handwritten note that said he "wanted to kill TSA and pigs," the official said. A second law enforcement official confirmed the identity, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly.
The Pennsville Police Department has had no dealings with the younger Ciancia, Cummings said. He and neighbors described the Ciancias as a good, nice family.
Ciancia graduated in 2008 from Salesianum School, an all-boys Roman Catholic school in Wilmington, Del., across the Delaware River from Pennsville, the school said.
The suspect's father has been involved with Pennsville's Fraternal Order of Police, said neighbor Orlando Pagan, a lieutenant in nearby Penns Grove. He didn't provide details on his involvement.
Outside the father's home Friday in Pennsville, a police cruiser blocked the long driveway. Phone calls weren't answered, and efforts to reach siblings were also unsuccessful.
Orlando Pagan's 17-year-old son Josh said that he would sometimes encounter Ciancia at orthodontist appointments, but that it had been at least two years since the last one.
"He was never weird toward me. He never gave me any weird vibes," he said, adding that in the 10 years he has lived across the street from the Ciancia family, "they've been nothing but nice to us."
---
Rubinkam reported from Pennsylvania. Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Tami Abdollah in Los Angeles and Alicia Caldwell in Washington, Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, N.J., and AP news researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York.
FBI: LAX Shooter Who Shot 8, Murdering 1 TSA Officer This Morning was Paul Anthony Ciancia, 23, of Pennsville, NJ
The media have not yet reported on whether the shooter is alive. On the one hand, they have said that he was shot multiple times in the chest, and that one person is in critical condition, insinuating that Ciancia is the latter. However, the only way someone could survive so many chest wounds is if he was wearing body armor. So, Ciancia was wearing a bulletproof vest, or he’s dead, or the stories were incorrect.
