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Saturday, January 16, 2010

AMBER ALERT - KIDNAPPING, ROANOKE, VA


The State of Virginia issued the Amber Alert Friday morning (1-15) after the boy was reportedly abducted by the suspects from his home in Roanoke late Thursday. The boy's stepfather was knocked unconscious by the suspects and a note demanding money was left at the scene.

Aveion Malik Lewis, a black male, 2 years old, 2' 6", 26 pounds with black hair and brown eyes. He was last seen wearing yellow Sponge Bob Squarepants Footie Pajamas.

There are three suspects. The first is know as Tony, a black male in his late 20's, 6' 2", stocky build with a full beard. He was last seen wearing a black hoodie shirt, black Puffy fur collar jacket and a black du rag. The two additional suspects are described as black males, both about 5'11" and in their early to mid 20's, One was wearing a brown hat with white writing. He has a light complexion and no facial hair. The second has Dreadlocks hair a light complexion and was wearing Red baseball cap.

The suspect vehicle is a white 1990's Chevy Blazer.

Anyone with information is asked to call the Virginia State Police at 1-800-822-4453 or dial 911.

EXCLUSIVE: USNS Comfort Passes Through Annapolis


The USNS Comfort passed underneath the Bay Bridge today on its way to Haiti. Fortunately for us, one of our viewers was in the right place at the right time and got a rare glimpse of this mission.
GO HERE to follow their Race to Haiti.

Death Penalty - How They Voted


Voting AGAINST SB 279 is a vote against Mike Miller's sponsored bill for O'Malley.

SB 279: An Act concerning Criminal Law - Death Penalty - Evidence for the purpose of restricting the death penalty to a case in which the State presents certain evidence to the court or the jury; prohibiting the death penalty in a case in which the State relies solely on evidence provided by eyewitnesses; providing, with certain exceptions, that in certain cases in which the State has filed a notice to seek a sentence of death, the notice shall be considered withdrawn and it shall be considered a notice to seek a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole under certain circumstances; providing that it is the intent of the General Assembly that certain services shall be funded by savings resulting from the restriction of the death penalty to certain cases; requiring the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention to submit a certain report to certain committees; requiring that certain funds be administered by the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention; making conforming and clarifying changes; and generally relating to the restriction of the death penalty to certain cases.
O'Malley signed this bill into law May 7, 2009

Highlights:
-Prohibits the State from sentencing a defendant to death if the State relies solely on evidence provided by eyewitnesses (Sec. 1).

-This bill is sponsored by Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller by request of the Governor.
Read the legislation in its entirety Death Penalty.pdf

Synopsis:

Vote to pass a bill that limits cases in which a defendant who is found guilty of first degree murder may be sentenced to death to cases in which the State presents to the jury biological or DNA evidence that links the defendant to the murder, a videotape of the dependent confessing to the murder, or a video recording that conclusively links the defendant to the murder.

It should also be noted that Senator Andy Harris, M.D., a candidate for Congress in the First Congressional District also voted against SB 279 and voted for HB 2 Mandatory Sentencing for Sex Offenders.

Before you cast your vote for an incumbent, research their voting record. See where they really stand on issues. Don't allow them to offer a bunch of lipservice with only one goal in mind, obtaining your support and vote.
Project Vote Smart

Update On Brian Wagner

The Charter Boat Captain, Brian Wagner, who went missing from his stricken vessel on Jan.4th. 2010 (Monday evening 5:30 pm) has been recovered from the icy waters of the Tangier Sound. His body was discovered by four duck hunters from Rock Hall Md. just off Wenona, about four miles from the accident scene. Danny was on Brian's boat to help transport it to Scott's Cove Marina at Deal Island from Wenona to be put into storage for the winter. On this seven mile trip up the out shore just off Deal Island the boat encountered a mechanical malfunction which resulted into Brian's fall from his boat, "The Sandra Lee"

In spite of Danny's best efforts to save his friend, Brian, because of high winds and ice forming on the boat, the attempt to save the boater failed. This resulted in to a Search and Rescue and then Search and Recovery for the missing boater by the NRP, The USCG, The DI Chance Fire and Rescue Co. 4, and many of Brian's fishing buddies, along with my children, Stev, Andrew, Debbie, and of course Danny.

Lt. Commander Scott Richardson, a long time friend, and Director of the search effort allowed me and Danny to accompany he and Srg.. Kevin Osborn on the search. We left the harbor at DI, yesterday morning on one of several DNR boats engaged in the search. When the body was discovered and we were in route, the Commander was sensitive to my son's hurting heart and requested he return to the harbor at DI before taking Brian's body on board his rescue boat to be transported to Wenona Harbor. Danny's words to his me as the Lt, Richardson was about the head back into port, "Dad, I was with Brian when we left the harbor, and I want to be with him when the bring him home!" The DNR Captain instinctively knew that this must be a part of some small measure of closure, not just for The Wagner Family, but also for my son. After he asked Danny if he was sure he would be up to the task of this mission he continued to the area where the body was located. With much compassion, and great care given by the Commander and his team, knowing that this was not just another body, but a beloved husband, father, son, brother, son in-law, nephew and wonderful friend to many who knew and loved Brian. He was gently and finally brought to the Home Port, of Wenona, of the "Sandra Lee" his beloved Charter Boat!

While much appreciation and credit is due the DRN Search Team, and duck hunters from Rock Hall for the quick success of what appeared to be a long wait for Brian's recovery, both me and my Danny knew the secret to the Miraculous Recovery., along with many others who prayed that this day would happen! Having picked up Danny at his home in Wenona, before pulling out of the drive I took my hat off, placed my hand on my son's shoulder and said this to him , "Danny, if your dad can pray with everyone else who needs help I can surely pray for and with my own son." We then prayed for A Miracle of Recover that would allow some closure for The Wagner's and also to Danny
this day!

After returning to the harbor with Brian's body I shared this prayer time experience that I had with Danny, and all agreed. especially The DNR Commander and his Staff, that this quick recover was not an accident, and that there had to be Divine Intervention. While everyone involved in the search gave a Collective Sigh of Relief when we reach port with the success of recovery, we also took the time to give thanks for The One Who Made It Happen, (The Lord Jesus) not just as a result of the Prayer Time in the truck before leaving Danny's house, but for the many many prayers that reached heaven by so many people who knew of the tragic accident.

For all who stayed in touch with me, by e-mail and phone, the encouraging words to Danny, the comfort we found in those who truly cared. and especially for your prayers for The Wagner Family, I will forever be indebted to for your support. "Prayer Changes Things" One last note of interest that I wish to pass along. I watched as my four children, Danny, Stev, Andrew and Debbie as they stood shoulder to shoulder with their dad, assuring and reassuring each other with prayer, hugs, and many "I Love You's" softly whispered to each other over the past two weeks. Because I am a firm believer in Rom. 8:28, I can take comfort in knowing, " Something Good" will result from this sad tragedy of Jan.4th. 2010. My prayers will continue for Mr. Jack and Mr. Harry, (father and father in-law respectively) and the Entire Wagner Family, especially Brian's loving wife and two children. May the wonderful memories of this good man fill each heart with warmth, comfort and love in this and every day of life's journey.

With My Love and Appreciation

Sonny Benton

MSP Press Release


DATE & TIME: January, 15 2010 @ 0859 hrs. LOCATION: 28831 Adkins Road, Delmar, Maryland
CASE NUMBER: 10-54-000447
CRIME: Burglary
VICTIM: Kirsten Nicole Johnson

BRIEF RESUME:

On 1/15/10 at approximately 0859 hours, Tfc Pardoe responded to 28831 Adkins Road, Delmar, Wicomico County, Maryland in reference to a burglary. A black male was knocking on the victim’s front door and then went behind the house. While behind the residence the suspect attempted to open a window. The victim gave a description of the suspect as a black male approximately 50 years old, 6’0” feet, 180 lbs., no facial hair. The suspect left the residence in a Pontiac Grand Prix red in color bearing unknown Maryland registration heading towards Jersey Road. The victim was unable to provide any further information.

Meet John Doe

Masked by the Web’s anonymity, Internet users feel free to flame celebrities, blast politicians, or blow the whistle on employers for corporate misdeeds.

Burned by the postings, many plaintiffs resort to defamation suits. But in addition to the usual litigation issues, plaintiffs often find another one: plenty of defendants with the same name, John Doe.

“If we don’t know who they are, we don’t know where they are and we don’t necessarily know what court to file in,” says Gary Nissenbaum of Union, N.J., managing principal of Nissenbaum Law Group, which practices Internet law in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. “Part of the reason this defamatory speech is so ubiquitous is because people assume they can never be found.”

But many Internet users forget one important thing: That cloak of anonymity has holes in it. The question now before the courts is exactly how big those holes should be.

Courts across the country are establishing balancing tests to decide when subpoenas should be enforced to unmask anonymous defendants for allegedly defamatory comments on the Web. The tests balance the defendant’s constitutional free speech rights against the plaintiff’s right to protect his reputation.

Many courts are moving away from a lesser standard requiring “good faith” by the plaintiff toward more restrictive standards that require plaintiffs to present evidence similar to that needed to survive a summary judgment motion.

“I think the law is becoming more settled,” says David Ardia, co-founder and director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “The courts have taken a pretty high standard that anonymous speech is protected under the First Amendment.”

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals established its own balancing test in August in a case of first impression in Solers Inc. v. John Doe. Solers, a software-development defense contractor, was accused of copyright infringement by the Software & Information Industry Association, a D.C.-based trade group that seeks to prevent software piracy. The SIIA had received a tip through a confidential reporting form on its website alleging that Solers was using unlicensed software.

The SIIA threatened legal action against Solers based on the tip, but it didn’t pursue a claim after Solers completed an audit of its software. Solers then sued the unnamed informant for defamation and tortious interference with “prospective advantageous business opportunities” and subpoenaed the association to identify the tipster. The SIIA, which is not a defendant, didn’t identify the informant because it promises anonymity to tipsters to help protect whistle-blowers from retaliation.

FIVE STEPS TO SUBPOENA
A lower court dismissed the suit for failure to state a claim. But the suit was reinstated by the D.C. Court of Appeals, which established a five-point balancing test that must be met before a subpoena can be enforced to identify an anonymous defendant. The plaintiff must adequately plead the elements of the defamation claim and make reasonable efforts to notify the defendant, with the court providing reasonable time for the defendant to respond. The court also must require the plaintiff to “proffer evidence creating a genuine issue of material fact on each element of the claim that is within its control” and “determine that the information sought is important to enable the plaintiff to proceed with his lawsuit.”

The appeals court noted that its test closely resembles the “summary judgment standard” articulated in Doe v. Cahill. In 2005, the Delaware Supreme Court dismissed a suit filed by a local politician over comments about him on a blog sponsored by the Delaware State News. The court found that a plaintiff must present evidence sufficient to survive a summary judgment motion before an anonymous defendant could be identified through a subpoena.

The Delaware Supreme Court ruled that a lower standard could chill free speech and allow for discovery abuses by plaintiffs who wanted to unmask anonymous defendants for “extrajudicial self-help remedies; more bluntly, the plaintiff can simply seek revenge or retribution.”

That lower standard had been articulated in 2000 by a Virginia circuit court in In re subpoena duces tecum to America Online Inc. The court held that subpoenas to identify anonymous defendants on the Web are valid if evidence from the plaintiff shows there is “a legitimate, good-faith basis” to contend that it may be the victim of actionable conduct and the “subpoenaed identity information is centrally needed to advance that claim.”

The “good-faith test” has been criticized by many courts, including a California appellate court in Krinsky v. Doe 6 in 2008.

The court found that the test “offers no practical, reliable way to determine the plaintiff’s good faith and leaves the speaker with little protection.” And it concluded that a plaintiff must make “a prima facie showing of the elements of libel in order to overcome a defendant’s motion to quash a subpoena seeking his or her identity.”

The Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court came to a similar conclusion in 2001 in Dendrite International Inc. v. Doe, but the decision went one step further. A plaintiff “must produce sufficient evidence supporting each element of its cause of action, on a prima facie basis.”

But the trial court then must “balance the defendant’s First Amendment right of anonymous free speech against the strength of the prima facie case presented and the necessity for the disclosure of the anonymous defendant’s identity to allow the plaintiff to properly proceed.”

Several courts have found the second balancing test to be needlessly complicated, redundant or too restrictive for plaintiffs.

DOLLARS TO DONUTS
In February of last year, the Maryland Court of Appeals adopted the Dendrite test in a case of first impression in Independent Newspapers Inc. v. Brodie.

Businessman Zebulon Brodie had sued anonymous posters to an Internet news site who called his Dunkin’ Donuts franchise “dirty and unsanitary-looking” and commented on the burning of a pre-Civil War home that Brodie sold in a real estate deal.

Emotions often cloud the facts when plaintiffs react to abusive comments with litigation without determining whether the comments are false or protected as opinion, says Paul Alan Levy, founder and director of Public Citizen’s Internet Free Speech Project in Washington, D.C. Levy represented Independent Newspapers in the Maryland case and argued for amicus groups in Cahill and Dendrite.

Usually, Levy says, the companies that sue over abusive comments are not big names like Ford or General Motors. “It’s someone who is personally invested in the business,” he says. “They don’t want to be personally attacked and so they want to send back a message: Don’t criticize me.”

Anonymity is a well-established facet of free speech. In the 1995 political-pamphlet case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, the U.S. Supreme Court found that an author’s decision to remain anonymous “is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment,” and anonymity is “a shield from the tyranny of the majority.”

Justice Antonin Scalia was joined by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist in a dissent that took a dimmer view of anonymity because it “facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of the anonymity.”

PLAINTIFF, HEAL THYSELF
Developments in the law haven’t solved one central paradox of defamation claims. Plaintiffs seeking to protect their reputations inevitably spread the comments they are unhappy about to a much wider audience through the litigation.

In August, model Liskula Cohen won a ruling from a Manhattan judge that compelled Google to identify an anonymous blogger who called her a “skank” and a “ho.” The insults, which had been limited to an obscure blog, received widespread media attention because of the suit.

And the anonymous tipster who accused Solers of software piracy complained directly to the Software & Information Industry Association through its confidential, online tip line—not via a Web chat room or blog.

“This was not a public communication,” says Scott Bain, the SIIA’s in-house litigation counsel. “Nobody would have ever heard anything about this if it wasn’t for their lawsuit.”

Daniel Tobin, a partner with Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll in Bethesda, Md., represents Solers. He says the company “wanted to make clear that it wasn’t a [software] pirate” because the accusation carries extra weight since Solers is a software development company.

“We actually viewed it as a win,” Tobin says about the decision reinstating the suit. “The case is where we want it to be.”

Source

Woo Hoo! Beam Me Up, Scotty!!

A new poll in the Massachusetts Senate race shows a shift in favor of the Republican Party and a potential disaster for President Barack Obama and his Democratic political agenda in Tuesday's special election.

The Suffolk University survey released late Thursday showed Scott Brown, a Republican state senator, with 50 percent of the vote in the race to succeed the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in this overwhelmingly Democratic state.

Democrat Martha Coakley had 46 percent. That was a statistical tie since it was within the poll's 4.4 percentage point margin of error, but far different from a 15-point lead the Massachusetts attorney general enjoyed in a Boston Globe survey released over the weekend.

The Suffolk poll also confirmed a fundamental shift in voter attitudes telegraphed in recent automated polls that Democrats had dismissed as unscientific and the product of GOP-leaning organizations.

And it signaled a possible death knell for the 60-vote Democratic supermajority the president has been relying upon to stop Republican filibusters in the Senate and pass not only his health care overhaul, but the rest of his legislative agenda heading into this fall's mid-term elections.

More here..

"The Joe Albero Show" With Delegate Jim Mathias

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HISTORICAL COMMENTS BY GEORGE CHEVALLIER


Tales from the Hall – Part I

The game of pool has been around for a long time. Actually, pool is a later derivation of billiards. In billiards, there are no pockets and the rules are different, and it is played with only three balls, two white and one red.

In researching the game, the earliest reference I can find lists two “pool rooms” in Salisbury in 1899. One was owned by Percy Brewington on Division St. and the other one was owned by Charles M. Mitchell and was located on Dock St.(which is now Market St.). By 1907, Mitchell’s was the only one still in operation.

Salisbury must have tried to enhance their image by 1940. The two establishments are listed under “Billiard Parlors”. One was the Arcade Billiard Parlor in the Arcade Theater Building. This was where WMDT is now located. It was operated by L. F. Stevens. The other was Moody’s Billiards Rooms on W. Main St. run by Moody Williams.

The 1950 phone book has only one listing under Billiard Parlors. It was the Billiard Center on E. Main St.

The first “pool hall” I can remember was Salisbury Pocket Billiards on Baptist St. Many a young man of my generation fondly recalls his memories of that place. The building is comprised of law offices now, and I’m not even sure the people who work there know what went on in there some 40-odd years ago.

It was truly a mecca for the local young men. There were legal laws such as no one was admitted under 16, a law that was fairly relaxed by the mid-sixties. And then there was the unwritten law that barred women, so much so that if a wife wanted to contact her husband or boyfriend, she waited in the car outside until the next customer arrived. She would then ask him if he would tell her husband or boyfriend that she wanted to see him. The message was always delivered and, with much grumbling, the husband or boyfriend would go see what she wanted.

Since this was the era before drugs, I never saw any illicit activity in the pool hall. There was never any drinking in the pool hall with the exception of Friday afternoon. A few of the older men would knock off early Friday and bring a bottle to the pool room. They never offered any to the younger patrons.

My mother always told someone if they called at home for me that I was down at the “smoky ol’ pool parlor”. Compared to today, it was relatively tame.

There were never any fights. Smoking was permitted and you just put the butt out on the floor. At the end of the day it was cleaned up by Squirrel or Harlan, the two mainstays in those days. They also had 5 gallon cans placed strategically for the “chewers”. These were nasty and the ultimate occurrence was if the cue ball managed to find its way in one of them – yuck! Even big, hardy men didn’t like retrieving that cue ball.

All of the tables were 4½ by 9 feet in size and all of the balls were 3 1/8 inches in diameter. When the popular “bar table” appeared on the scene, the size was reduced to 4 x 8 and the cue ball was increased in size to 3¼ inches. This was to allow the cue ball to follow a different path under the table and be able to be returned to play.

NEXT WEEK – The Pool Hall – Part II

Pelosi Sees "Boom" In Wake Of Haiti Quake


House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that the earthquake in Haiti and the resulting aid may lead to a "real boom economy" there.
Lawmakers say they plan to encourage more charitable donations by making them tax-deductible.

"I think that this can be an opportunity for a real boom economy in Haiti," she told reporters in the Capitol, drawing from her experience in San Francisco. Haiti "can leap-frog over its past challenges, economically, politically, and demographically in terms of the rich and poor and the rest there, and have a new -- just a new, fresh start," the California Democrat added.
House leaders said they plan to introduce legislation -- possibly as soon as next week -- that would allow people to deduct charitable contributions directed to Haiti from their 2009 tax filings. --Washington Times