Penny Dean and Your Rights

The <a href="http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/politicsnow/la-pn-holder-guns-201.... Times reports</a> that the
<blockquote>inability to enact new gun safety laws after the Sandy Hook school shooting ranks as "the single failure" of his tenure, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a televised interview.</blockquote>

In an interview with MSNBC, this Obama appointee states that "The gun lobby simply won, you know?"

Imagine you are a juror in the federal trial of five people charged with growing and distributing marijuana in northeastern Washington. The prosecution cannot present any direct evidence that the defendants sold marijuana to anyone, and the defendants say they were growing all 74 plants for their own personal use. A bit of arithmetic reveals that the total number of plants comes to just under 15 per defendant, which happens to be the presumptive limit for patients under Washington's medical marijuana law. Yet no one says anything about medical marijuana during the trial.

When a Houston man arrived home earlier this month to find a package he’d been expecting smashed open, and its contents strewn all about his front yard, he checked his home security camera footage.

What homeowner Ben Lucas discovered shocked him beyond belief.
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San Francisco, Calif. – In a blatant attempt at intimidation, police handcuffed and arrested a San Francisco deputy public defender, Jami Tillotson, at the Hall of Justice for attempting to protect her client’s constitutional rights on Tuesday.

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A former California Highway Patrol officer has been sentenced to three years' probation for sharing explicit photos from the cellphones of two women while they were under arrest.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports (http://bit.ly/1z7brao ) the judge also gave Sean Harrington six months in jail Tuesday, but she suspended the sentence as long as Harrington attends a violence prevention training program and obeys the law while on probation.

WASHINGTON — At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office announced it is looking into whether or not six NYPD officers planted guns on innocent people in order to arrest them for illegal possession of firearms.

Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson announced the investigation after prosecutors were forced to drop a weapons case involving a man accused of having a gun outside his Brooklyn apartment. The probe will center on allegations that police officers have been planting guns on innocent people.

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[It is worth noting that the homeowner's wife had already called 911. The police did eventually arrive. - ed. ]

An internal audit by the FBI, completed last month, found that every one of the nation’s field offices had problems tracking gun and drug evidence and that in some cases, drugs disappeared for months without notice. The Washington field office was among those with the highest error rates; 90 percent of drug evidence examined had been mishandled or had record-keeping problems.

<img src="http://police-praetorian.netdna-ssl.com/article-images/londonart.jpg" align="right">BRULE COUNTY, S.D. — A nearly two-day standoff in a South Dakota town resulted in one highway patrol officer shot and a father-son pair arrested.