Blog - What's New - The Law Office of Stephen W. Wolf, LLC

Cellphone Tracking

A useful technology, at least to the police, is cellular telephone tracking. If you are accused of a crime, a good investigation will examine your cellphone provider's records to determine if you made any calls in the area of a crime. That, the investigator will feel, is evidence you were in the area of the crime.

The problem is that law enforcement is using this without warrants. Law enforcement can "fish". There might not be any evidence against you but they just know you did the crime. The request the records and your cellular company gladly provides them. Why? Because they charge law enforcement fees. This is very profitable for the cellphone companies. Some actually have a catalog of surveilance fees.

Does that bother you? It should. They may also be wiretapping you. We really don't know, and won't, until someone leaks it.

There is potential for abuse. That potential will be abused.

Canada after my OVI

(No, but ...)

An OVI makes you "criminally inadmissible"

An OVI makes you criminally inadmissible. You can't visit Canada without paying a fee and obtaining a document showing you are rehabilitated.

But ... as of March 1, 2012 ...

Persons arrested for OVI for the first time
Who have served no jail time
Who have committed no other acts that would prohibit them from visiting Canada

May visit ONCE.

And also ...

A person who has been convicted of OVI may return more than once or may gain entry if convicted more than once if they:

Satisfy an officer from Citizenship and Immigration Canada or the Canada Border Services Agency that you meet the legal requirements to be deemed rehabilitated;
Apply for rehabilitation and get approved; or
get a pardon.

Good luck with that! You will have to get entry documents and pay a fee of about $200 Canadian dollars.

This information was valid as of early 2012. See their entry web page for more information.

Crashing the Justice System

When a young person pleads to a felony, they are most often shut out from society. A felony makes it exceedingly difficult to obtain employment. Drug and alcohol addiction follows. The county takes the kids. Homelessness. Then death or perpetual incarceration.

An author wrote an article in the New York Times wondering what would happen if, knowing the above, everyone demanded a trial. Would the criminal justice system collapse or would lawmakers work to restore basic rights to those who make mistakes?

The article can be found here. A PDF is here.

Private Prison Operators Demand Prisons Remain Nearly Full

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is a private, for-profit corporation that runs prisons. Its stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Some in government believe that prisons should not be run by the government. Instead, prisons should be privatized to companies the government will pay to provide the service.

CCA wants some guarantees. They will run the prisons. In exchange, the government must guarantee a ninety percent occupancy rate for twenty years.

Government provides services. Many of the services must be done by government. There is no one else to perform the service. If government contract the service out, it does so to some organization with no competition. The cost of having a service done when there is no competition is astronomical. For example, when you go to the toilet you pull the handle and the results of your work disappears down a hole. No one wants to take care of your sewage. Wal-Mart and Home Depot are not in the sewage industries. Because of that, the government must provide water pollution control services.

Prisons are the same way. Except, there is a private contractor willing to undertake the job. Competition is minimal or non-existent. The private contractor, without real competition, can reap a large profits. That same contractor can demand that government send enough people to its jail so that it will always be nearly full.

Never mind the idea that we have to send more people to jail to insure a major corporation stays profitable. That is bad enough. The idea that we have government employees that would even entertain, let alone agree and then collude to set profits for a virtually competition-free industry is so very wrong.

Newsweek has an article on this here. A PDF of that article is available here.

Sheriff Closes Jail to Those Who Are Mentally Disabled

February 13, 2012

Summit County Sheriff Drew Alexander is planning to close the Summit County Jail to those whose mental illness. People with mental disabilities often cannot judge right from wrong and find themselves charged in criminal cases. The conditions in many county jails are horrific. In Summit County, the wait for a prisoner to see a psychiatrist is three to five weeks.

In Cuyahoga County the rule is that a prisoner is transported with no property. Period. No meds for the mentally ill. Talk about being set up to fail!

Ohio.com has an article with many more details here. A PDF of that article is available here. Thank you to the Akron Beacon Journal for bringing this to our attention.

Minority Neighborhoods

January 31, 2012

For some time a police officer has been able to justify a search based on the person being searched being in a "bad" neighborhood. The officer testifies that he or she has experience with drug dealers in a particular neighborhood.

In an interesting twist, this quote was dropped in a recent 10th District Court of Appeals decision:

The Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has not proceeded to the point that a police officer can pull a citizen out of a parked vehicle merely because the citizen is parked in a minority neighborhood and acts surprised when he or she suddenly sees a police officer standing right outside his or her vehicle.

SOPA wasn't the only bill that went into the trash: TCPA

January 29, 2012

Recently the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, was put forward by groups who wished to severely limit on-line speech. Once those supporting this bill realized what a storm of protest they were facing they quickly backed away and the bill died. Another bill was dying at the same time: the TCPA.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act, or TCPA, has a fine sounding name. Except, it did all but what it suggested. The real push was to open cellular phones, pagers, hospital phones and other emergency telephones to robo-callers. As it is now, a robo caller cannot include those numbers. A number of law makers joined with the US Chamber of Commerce and the robo-calling lobby to try to pass a bill to open those phones. Thanks to the National Consumer Law Center and other consumer advocates, the real reason for the bill was brought forward and those sponsoring this nonsense decided not to advance the bill.

High court to decide student free speech rights

January 16, 2012

The Los Angeles Times reported that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up the issue as to if a school can punish a student for speech outside the control of the school. Typically, the student makes a horrible and patently false claim against a teacher the student doesn't like.

The teacher has every right to then go after the student in court for libel. When a defamation is written, it is libel. When spoken it is slander. There is much law on how each version should be handled.

But, in these cases, it is the school that reached out beyond it's walls to punish the student for things done at the student's home.

The Los Angeles Times article can be found here. A PDF of the article was saved here.

Thanks the Los Angeles Times for this information.