Tag: crime

Manson family killer Leslie Van Houten, 73, is released from prison after serving 53 years of a life sentence

Leslie Van Houten walked out of a California prison Tuesday after serving 53 years of a life sentence for her participation in two of the infamous Manson murders.

Van Houten, the youngest member of the cult, ‘was released to parole supervision‘ and driven to transitional housing, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The convicted killer, 73, is expected to spend about a year in transitional housing, learning basic skills such as how to go to the grocery store and get a debit card, according to her attorney Nancy Tetreault. 

Van Houten was serving a life sentence for helping Charles Manson´s followers carry out the 1969 killings of Leno LaBianca, a grocer in Los Angeles, and his wife, Rosemary.

Her release comes just four days after Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom announced he would not fight a state appeals court ruling that Van Houten should be granted parole. He said it was unlikely the state Supreme Court would consider an appeal.

Keep reading

HOW MISSOURI’S ‘FELONY MURDER’ LAW TRAPS PEOPLE FOR DEFENDING THEMSELVES

Technically speaking, Antonio Meanus wasn’t supposed to own the gun he had stashed in his pants on Oct. 7, 2021. But he didn’t believe he had much of a choice.

Earlier that day in Springfield, Missouri, Meanus, a tall, 30-year-old man with a goatee and shoulder-length dreadlocks, had gotten a call from a man named Raquan White, the son of his former boss. White said he was in a financial bind. He was going to come up short on his next rent payment and wanted to sell an iPhone to a 17-year-old named I’Shon Dunham. But White had dealt with Dunham in the past and said that he “didn’t feel trustworthy.” So Meanus says White asked him to come along to make sure Dunham didn’t rob him.

Meanus, who had grown up in some of the roughest areas of St. Louis, told White that the whole thing was a bad idea and offered to just give him some money. But White insisted on going. Not one to abandon a friend, Meanus got in the car.

It had been an unusually warm fall day for the city’s 170,000 residents. About halfway through the ride to the meetup point, Meanus again tried to convince White to go home instead.

“I said, ‘This don’t sound right,’” Meanus told The Appeal in a phone interview from the state’s Crossroads Correctional Center. “Let’s just turn around and go back.” White assured him it would be fine and kept driving.

They eventually reached a two-story apartment building on 422 East Norton Road. Newly planted trees dotted the lawn around the parking lot. Dunham and a stranger emerged from the red brick apartment building. The stranger’s hand was tucked under his shirt. Dunham, a slender teenager with big eyes, a wide smile, and a peach-fuzz beard, hopped into the front seat and asked for the iPhone. But White first demanded to know what the uninvited guest was doing there.

“He cool,” Dunham said.

Dunham then lunged forward, tried to grab the iPhone, and began grappling with White in the front seat. After a brief struggle, Dunham wordlessly pulled out a gun and pointed it at White’s head.

Meanus panicked. He believed that both he and White would be killed. So he pulled out his gun and shot Dunham, killing him.

Distressed, Meanus called the police to report what had happened. He knew he couldn’t have done anything else in the circumstances. He didn’t know, however, that a single state law had already taken away his right to save himself.

Keep reading

Dem bill in California would mandate judges to consider race when doling out prison sentences

A Democrat-backed bill making its way through the California Legislature would require judges in the state to consider a convicted criminal’s race when determining how long to sentence them to prison.

Assembly Member Reggie Jones-Sawyer, the Democratic chair of the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, quietly introduced Bill 852 in February. The Assembly went on to pass the little-known legislation in May, and the measure is currently being considered in the state Senate. 

The bill would add a section to the Penal Code of California requiring courts, whenever they have the authority to determine a prison sentence, to “rectify” alleged racial bias in the criminal justice system by taking into account how historically persecuted minorities are affected differently than others.

“It is the intent of the Legislature to rectify the racial bias that has historically permeated our criminal justice system as documented by the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” the proposed new section to the Penal Code reads. “Whenever the court has discretion to determine the appropriate sentence according to relevant statutes and the sentencing rules of the Judicial Council, the court presiding over a criminal matter shall consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations.”

Keep reading

FBI to exhume body of woman featured on Netflix series ‘The Keepers’

The FBI will exhume the body of a woman whose mysterious death was detailed in Netflix’s true-crime series “The Keepers,” as law enforcement officials explore a potential link with the cold case murder of a Baltimore nun. 

“The Keepers” investigated the unsolved murder of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a nun and Baltimore high school teacher, and allegations of sexual abuse by an influential Baltimore priest named Father Joseph Maskell in the 1960s. 

In November 1969, before Cesnik seemingly vanished, Joyce Malecki was strangled, stabbed and found submerged in a body of water at Fort Meade.

Malecki’s body will be exhumed from Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore with her family’s permission as the FBI explores an unspecified lead possibly connecting the two cases, Kurt Wolfgang, executive director of Maryland Crime Victims’ Resource Center, confirmed to news outlets. 

“The FBI gave us no indication other than to say the purpose of the exhumation is to collect evidence,” Wolfgang told WBAL-TV. “Our best speculation is that they may be looking for DNA evidence to match it up with a potential suspect they may already have.”

Keep reading

‘Cannibal’ Mexican husband ‘killed his wife, ate her brains in tacos and used her skull as an ashtray’

A ‘devil worshipper’ dubbed the ‘Cannibal of Puebla’ who allegedly killed his wife, ate her brain in tacos, and used her skull as an ashtray has been arrested in Mexico.

The suspect, identified only as Alvaro, was seized at the couple’s home in Puebla on July 2 and taken into custody.

The police accuse the 32-year-old of murdering his wife – a mother of five – on June 29 while under the influence of a prohibited substance.

During questioning, he allegedly told officers that Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death) and the devil had ordered him to commit the crime.

Following the killing, Alvaro allegedly dismembered victim Maria Montserrat Animas Montiel’s body and placed her remains in plastic bags.

He allegedly threw some of them into a ravine behind the home and kept the rest inside the property.

According to sources close to the case, he confessed to eating part of his wife’s brain in tacos and using part of her shattered skull as an ashtray.

Two days after the killing, he allegedly called one of his stepdaughters to confess his crime.

The victim’s mother, Maria Alicia Montiel Serran, told local media: ‘He told one of her daughters to come and collect her mum because “I already killed her and put her in bags”.’

Grieving Maria Alicia added that Alvaro chopped up the 38-year-old victim’s body ‘with a machete, a chisel, and a hammer’. She went on: ‘I called him crying, asking why he did that to her if she wasn’t a bad person.’

According to Maria Alicia, the suspect confessed: ‘I killed her, I cut her into pieces, and I threw her into the ravine in bags.’

She added that he claimed: ‘She didn’t suffer.’

Keep reading

QAnon ‘momfluencer’ sentenced to jail for accusing Latino couple of abducting her children

A social media influencer with ties to the QAnon movement has been sentenced to jail for falsely accusing a Latino couple of trying to kidnap her children, Law & Crimereported on Friday.

“Kathleen ‘Katie’ Sorensen, a white mother of two, made an Instagram video in which she made up a story about Sadie Vega-Martinez and Eddie Martinez — a Hispanic couple she did not know — trying to kidnap her then 4-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter,” reported Jason Kandel.

She was sent to prison for 90 days Thursday on a count of knowingly making a false report of a crime, the website reported.

Sorensen, who lives in California, originally went viral in 2020 as she claimed in a video from her car that a couple, later revealed to be Eddie and Sadie Vega-Martinez, tried to abduct her children at a Michael’s craft store.

But her story fell apart almost immediately as police found “inconsistencies,” and it turned out the whole thing was fabricated. She was arrested in May 2021.

Prosecutors believe she fabricated the story to boost and monetize her following, prosecutors noted — but there may have been a political and conspiracy theory basis for it, too.

Keep reading

Rhode Island senator arrested, accused of keying car with anti-Biden bumper sticker

State Senator Josh Miller was arrested on Thursday, accused of keying a car in the Garden City shopping center parking lot that was sporting a bumper sticker reading “Biden sucks.”

Body-worn camera videos released by the Cranston Police Department showed Miller initially denied keying the man’s car when stopped by police at Garden City, but at his home later Thursday night acknowledged he did so because he felt he was being threatened by the man.

The arrest report says the alleged victim returned to his car parked near Ben & Jerry’s Thursday afternoon and heard a scratching sound coming from the passenger side.

“Upon checking, he observed a large scratch on his passenger side rear door and a male, later identified as Joshua Miller, quickly walking away, holding keys in his right hand and gripping a single key which he says was pointing towards his vehicle,” Officer Alberto Diaz wrote in the report.

Keep reading

No prison time for pedophile Portland Antifa member who pleaded guilty to stabbing black conservative at 2020 riot

A Portland Antifa member who spent years in prison for a child sex crime conviction pleaded guilty this morning to stabbing a black conservative livestreamer during the 2020 BLM-Antifa riots.

Blake David Hampe, 46, pleaded guilty in a sweetheart deal to felony second-degree attempted assault. He will serve no prison time, instead getting three years of probation. The charge is downgraded from the original felony second-degree assault charge. A felony charge of unlawful use of a weapon was dropped in the plea deal.

On July 25, 2020—during the height of the nightly far-left rioting in downtown Portland—Hampe was recorded on video stabbing Andrew Duncomb. Duncomb was hospitalized and narrowly survived being paralyzed as the blade pierced inches from his spinal cord.

Hampe had his face covered with a helmet and goggles during the attack and nearly escaped. This reporter witnessed him being captured by a protest crowd who mistook him for being a right-winger following the stabbing. After he was booked into jail, Hampe’s $250,000 bond was covered by a far-left bail support group.

Keep reading

Maryland Supreme Court Limits Testimony on Bullet-Matching Evidence

The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that firearms experts will no longer be able to testify that a bullet was fired from a particular gun. The decision is likely the first by a state supreme court to undercut the widespread forensic discipline of firearms identification, which is used in criminal cases across the country.

In a 4–3 decision first reported by The Baltimore Sun, the Maryland Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of Kobina Ebo Abruquah after finding that a firearm expert’s trial testimony linking Abruquah’s gun to bullets found at a crime scene wasn’t backed up by reliable science. In the majority opinion, Maryland Supreme Court Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader wrote that “firearms identification has not been shown to reach reliable results linking a particular unknown bullet to a particular known firearm.”

The ruling is a major victory for defense groups like the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions and limit what it calls faulty forensic science in courtrooms. It’s also not the only one: Radley Balko recently reported at The Watch on a similar ruling from a Cook County circuit judge in Illinois.

But Tuesday’s ruling is the first by a state supreme court limiting such testimony that Tania Brief, a senior staff attorney at the Innocence Project, which filed an amicus brief in the case, is aware of.

“One of the tensions in our work is that the law is always playing catch-up with the current scientific understanding,” Brief says. “And this is a real step forward in the law catching up with what the current scientific understanding is.”

Forensic firearms identification includes well-established uses such as determining caliber and other general characteristics, but examiners are also frequently called on to testify whether a particular bullet was fired from a particular gun. A gun’s firing pin and the grooves on the inside of a gun barrel leave marks on cartridge casings when a bullet is fired, so a firearm examiner compares crime scene bullets to samples fired from the suspect gun and looks for matching patterns under a microscope.

Keep reading