The first school district in California to implement RFID (radio frequency identification devices) to track student movements is in Yuba City. Apparently, the motive for the various school districts around the country is money, since the dollars distributed to schools is based on attendance.

Find out about the attributes of the various medicinal treatments your criminal defense clients were subject to as children, at the UCLA Online Archive of American Folk Medicine.

This is not the Los Angeles Police Department Ramparts scandal but heads are rolling in San Bernardino County, California where the Public Defender’s Office has shown itself to be a bit lax in its hiring practices. It seems that Public Defender John Roth hired an attorney who had a criminal conviction for soliciting work from jail inmates. These are desperate times. News report here and here. [posting suggestion from R.A. Nosek Investigations]

Read what law enforcement executives say about the Ramparts area Los Angeles Police Department corruption investigation. Read and listen to the 2002 National Public Radio report.

The Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants (SCLAID) of
the American Bar Association (ABA), produced a report, Gideon’s Broken Promise: America’s Continuing Quest for Equal Justice, based on testimony at public hearings held in 2003.

Recommendations for improving the systems for indigent defense are detailed in the report. The conclusions arrived at by the Committee:

• Forty years after Gideon v. Wainwright, indigent defense in the United States remains in a state of crisis, resulting in a system that lacks fundamental fairness and places poor persons at constant risk of wrongful conviction.

• Funding for indigent defense services is shamefully inadequate.

• Lawyers who provide representation in indigent defense systems sometimes violate their professional duties by failing to furnish competent representation.

• Lawyers are not provided in numerous proceedings in which a right to counsel exists in accordance with the Constitution and/or state law. Too often, prosecutors seek to obtain waivers of counsel and guilty pleas from unrepresented accused persons, while judges accept and sometimes even encourage waivers of counsel that are not knowing, voluntary, intelligent, and on the record.

• Judges and elected officials often exercise undue influence over indigent defense attorneys, threatening the professional independence of the defense function.

• Indigent defense systems frequently lack basic oversight and accountability, impairing the provision of uniform, quality services.

• Efforts to reform indigent defense systems have been most successful when they involve multi-faceted approaches and representatives from a broad spectrum of interests.

• The organized bar too often has failed to provide the requisite leadership in the indigent defense area.

• Model approaches to providing quality indigent defense services exist in this country, but these models often are not adequately funded and cannot be replicated elsewhere absent sufficient financial support.

Here’s an opportunity to hear free marketing advise offered by a marketing guru who is also an attorney, from the comfort of your office. This is a teleseminar. You must register to participate and get the details on the telephone link.

Title: “Top 8 Ways To Build Your P.I. Business”
Date: Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Time: 10:00 a.m. PST, 11:00 a.m. MST, 12:00 p.m. CST, 1:00 p.m. EST
Duration: 60 minutes
Who can call? Private Investigators only
Free registration: http://www.privateeyemarketing.com/

A good collection of resources on the legality of audio recording of telephone conversations is at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press site. They include a state-by-state summary and a list of case citations. The enforcement of the law is conditional. Remember Linda Tripp, whose indictment was dropped by Maryland prosecutors.

The FCC has its own words of wisdom on the legality of tape recorded telephone calls. Their statement on interstate phone communication cuts to the chase. The complete list of the current FCC telephone fact sheets is here.

The FCC protects the privacy of telephone conversations by requiring notification before a recording device is used to record interstate (between different states) or international wireline calls. Interstate or international wireline conversations may not be recorded unless the use of the recording device is:
• preceded by verbal or written consent of all parties to the telephone conversation; or
• preceded by verbal notification which is recorded at the beginning, and as part of the call, by the recording party; or
• accompanied by an automatic tone warning device, sometimes called a “beep tone,” which automatically produces a distinct signal that is repeated at regular intervals during the course of the telephone conversation when the recording device is in use.
Also, a recording device can only be used if it can be physically connected to and disconnected from the telephone line or if it can be switched on and off.

SafetyEd International addresses issues of child exploitation on the Internet. The site includes an extensive list of links on legal issues and California statutes related to stalking and harassment.

The California Supreme Court, In re ANDERSON HAWTHORNE, JR., the Court was faced with the dilemma of reviewing a habeas petition of a mentally retarded man under sentence of death, as a new law (Penal Code 1376) was enacted, barring the execution of the mentally retarded. The Court notes, “By its terms, section 1376 applies only to preconviction proceedings. We issued an order to show cause to determine how to resolve postconviction claims of mental retardation. ” Read the decision

Penal Code 1376 exerpt: a) As used in this section, “mentally retarded” means the condition of significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior and manifested before the age of 18. (b) (1) In any case in which the prosecution seeks the death penalty, the defendant may, at a reasonable time prior to the commencement of trial, apply for an order directing that a mental retardation hearing be conducted.

The Court concludes: “The new legislation makes no provision for cases in which the death penalty has already been imposed. The task thus falls to this court to formulate appropriate procedures for resolving post conviction claims. ”

Search and read all Court opinions issued in the last 120 days.

Take a free preliminary tour of the search engine optimization tool Wordtracker. List various keywords that describe your service to discover how many times those terms have been searched.

I’m sniffing around for a trend. Will those who are found guilty of crimes be able to seal their records? Well, perhaps Illinois is leading the way. A new law goes into effect in June that will do just this. Don’t just hold your nose, organize.

When Public Act 93-1084 goes into effect on June 1, former criminals may file petitions to seal records of certain offenses, including municipal ordinance violations, misdemeanors and some Class 4 felonies, such as prostitution and possession of up to 500 grams of cannabis. Among the crimes excluded from the legislation are drunken driving, violating an order of protection and any crime requiring sex offender registration.
To have records sealed, individuals must have been acquitted of an offense or had a conviction reversed. Convicted criminals are eligible if they stay out of trouble for three years after misdemeanor supervision or four years after completing a sentence, probation, parole or felony supervision. [Emphasis is mine.]

I hope those private investigators who are planning on attending the State of California’s ID Theft Summit, Tuesday, March 1, will talk some sense with the attendees who have spoken negatively about private investigators. I’m thinking particularly of Mari Frank. I heard her studio audience presentation on PBS, working the scare tactic angle. She didn’t recognize private investigators as having a valuable place in uncovering identity theft and protecting people from fraud. Just the opposite. We’re lumped in with the quick-buck-meisters running wild on the Internet.

Now in the olden days, you really have to actually go to maybe get court records or do some other things to commit identity theft. That would take much longer. So, yes, there was identity theft. And there were people who were able to do that as a profession, people who were very smart about getting your information–people like private investigators, information brokers. Now they put that online. There are hundreds and hundreds of sites that you can go to. You don’t have to spend a great deal of money or a great deal of time. It’s transferred to you in just a second.

Read the whole transcript to get a sense for her approach.

The Office for Victims of Crime is having an online forum TODAY, Wednesday, February 9, on Identity Theft. The presenters are from the Identity Theft Resource Center.

All 50 states have business related public records online, to varying degrees. Kathy Biehl at LLRX provides an updated summary of the source and types of records the county and state governments make available. She includes links organized by state.

While this is informative and conveniently located in one place, there’s a gaping need in the field of free public records online searching: the public records search engine. Wouldn’t it be a giant leap for investigator kind if we could simultaneously search within multiple public records indexes? This would be akin to the search mechanism provided by commercial services, such as that of Merlindata. The public agencies, their online indices and any search engines can’t supplant the benefits of the online fee services.

But free is the future. As I wrote in an earlier post, there is one company that is in the infancy of developing just such a public records search engine. But the limitations of bandwidth keep the full possibilities just beyond our reach.

Health inspection reports are a public record but this Spring San Francisco County will post them online. Contra Costa County is also considering a similar move, primarily to pressure restaurants to improve their sanitary conditions. There’s demonstrable evidence to support the effectiveness of this approach, as evidenced in the Los Angeles experiment, where health inspection reports have been posted to the Internet since 1998.

Many counties and cities have searchable databases of food facility inspection reports, including Denver, Santa Clara, San Mateo. Texas lists the inspection reports by category. A substantial list can be generated at searchsystems.net by doing an advanced search in the following way. Match All Keywords: Inspection; Match any keyword: Food Health Restaurant; Without keywords: Licenses.