Speaking of Kip Kinkel because you know we were, he has been denied a new trial.
Kinkel claimed he was too mentally ill to agree to a plea bargain that sent him to prison for more than 111 years. But the judge disagreed.
Kinkel argued his original defense attorneys and the trial judge should have ordered a mental competency evaluation before going ahead with the plea bargain.
But a lawyer for the attorney general’s office argued during a two-day hearing in June that Kinkel understood what was happening and was intelligent enough to calculate that his best chance for a reduced sentence was the plea deal.
Thank God for a responsible judge for once.
(Trench’s Note: I had this written up early yesterday but took the night off. Still, thanks to D.P. for thinking of me. 🙂 )
Even after being crushed in the North Carolina House, Attorney General Roy Cooper is still touting his master plan for MySpace.
Attorney General Roy Cooper vowed Monday to keep pressuring lawmakers to approve legislation that will require minors to get parental permission before using MySpace.com and other social networking Web sites.
North Carolina legislators failed to pass a bill this year targeting such sites, as some House members and Internet commerce groups said a broad restriction would be unworkable and unconstitutional.
“One thing we pride ourselves in doing is being ahead of the curve with ideas,” Cooper said during a news conference. “Sometimes it just takes the slow-moving Legislature a period of time to see the light.”
Or how about a slow Attorney General who doesn’t realize the technology doesn’t exist yet?
Cooper said age verification technology is already being used on adult oriented sites that advertise tobacco and alcohol. He said social networking sites just don’t want to lose the revenue generated from advertising to young people, an accusation MySpace denies.
What? You mean, that stupid drop-down menu that asks you your age? Yeah, nobody lies about that. The other form of verification is called a credit card. While a parent’s credit card may be helpful with parental consent, it doesn’t prevent kids from just lifting the numbers and using it themselves. Plus, it opens a whole other issue of identity theft.
And my favorite part…
Officials in two states have said MySpace recently identified more than 29,000 registered sex offenders with profiles. The company will not confirm the reports but said it is working to locate and remove profiles posted by sexual offenders.
Cooper threatened Monday to take action against MySpace if it fails to require parental consent voluntarily, but he declined to discuss specifics.
That’s Roy Cooper for you. He hasn’t been specific since he started this whole ordeal. From now on, I’m going to refer to him as Mr. Vague.
The trial of Richard Henderson Jr. opened yesterday. Henderson is accused of killing his entire family on Thanksgiving 2005.
The defense, of course, is pursuing an insanity defense…
But Franklin Roberts, one of Henderson’s court-appointed attorneys, told the jury a different story as he outlined his client’s defense. He contended the slayings in the family’s Myakka City mobile home were a tragedy brought on by Henderson Jr.’s severe mental illness.
“The horrible act of someone who was insane at the time it was committed,” Roberts said of Henderson, charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of his father, Richard Sr.; mother, Jeaneane; grandmother, June; and younger brother, Jacob.
As Henderson occasionally jotted notes, Roberts described him as a man with a troubled youth full of drug abuse, suicide attempts and self-mutilation.
“Early in life, something was wrong,” Roberts said. “He had trouble keeping up in school . . . was disruptive in class. He is not someone who simply at one moment in time – suddenly exploded.”
Doctors will take the stand, Roberts said, and testify Henderson was insane when he killed his family.
But just as the prosecution asked, how can Henderson be insane when he did this?
Henderson, while playing video games with his 11-year-old brother, took a metal pipe, struck him on the head and pushed the boy out a window. Then, in separate rooms, Henderson attacked his 82-year-old grandmother, his father, 48, and his mother, 42, killing each with “lethal amount of force” to their heads.
Sandy Stringer, Henderson’s other grandmother, called the home for her daughter, Jeaneane, on the night of the killings.
But Henderson Jr. answered instead.
Lying, he said that his mom was in the shower and would soon go to bed.
The day after the killings, Iten said, Henderson took his parents’ van, picked up his girlfriend and her friend and the three spent the next two nights in an Ellenton hotel. There, he told his girlfriend that he had killed people. But he lied about who, Iten said. He said he had killed his ex-wife, Brittany Wilde, and then killed his grandmother after she walked in on the attack.
He also later told friends he planned to head for Mexico, Iten said.
If he were insane, he would have told his girlfriend that he killed Snap, Crackle, and Pop and was running away to Crunchland. (If he did kill Snap, Crackle, and Pop, wouldn’t that make him a cereal killer?)
Henderson isn’t insane, he’s just a cold-blooded killer.
The last we heard anything about the shooting at Foss High in Washington State, gunman Douglas S. Chanthabouly was ordered to undergo a psych exam.
A psychiatrist there reported last month that the teen suffers from psychosis, and prescribed a battery of drugs to treat it, according to court documents.
So a judge has ruled that Chanthabouly is fit to stand trial.
Of course, his defense team will still more than likely be pursuing an insanity defense.
A psychiatrist hired by the defense has diagnosed Chanthabouly with a “major mental disorder,” John McNeish, one of the two public defenders assigned to represent the teenager, told Superior Court Judge Ronald Culpepper during a hearing.
McNeish did not say from what mental disease his client suffers or what the possible mental defense would be.
They haven’t picked out their mental disease yet.
To successfully argue insanity, his lawyers would have to convince a judge that Chanthabouly didn’t know the difference between right or wrong or couldn’t perceive the nature and quality of what he was doing when Kok was shot.
Eric Hainstock has been sentenced to life behind bars with the possibility of parole in 30 years for the shooting death of Weston Schools principal John Klang.
Judge Patrick Taggart said that he considered Hainstock’s age and background before sentencing. He said that he believes the teen can be rehabilitated, WISC-TV reported.
Defense attorneys had requested parole eligibility after 20 years while the state had requested 49 years with the date of eligibility being Sept.29, 2056 — or 50 years after the shooting at Weston Schools, WISC-TV reported.
The jurors who convicted Hainstock said that they focused on the guns and ammunition that he brought to school and the number of shots fired in determining his intent to murder.
Juror Brian Ludolph, of Prairie du Sac, said on Friday the fact numerous shots were fired by Hainstock convinced them the student intended to kill Klang. Ludolph said that Hainstock bringing the guns and ammunition to school also played into their finding of intent.
Juror Diana Mielke, of North Freedom, said that the jury was initially split on whether Hainstock intended to kill Klang.
Mielke said that she was initially among the six who thought Hainstock didn’t have intent to kill, but changed her mind after recalling Hainstock’s lack of emotion during the trial.
Thankfully, there was a jury with common sense who recognized Hainstock’s intent and weren’t fooled by his lies.
Justice has been served.
While you’re at WISC’s website, take the poll and let them know how you feel about the verdict and sentence. You can probably guess how I voted.
Not only was Eric Hainstock found guilty in the shooting death of principal John Klang, he was also convicted on the first-degree intentional homicide charge. He’s looking at life in prison.
Here we go. Now we get to see how rough poor widdle Eric Hainstock had it.
On the morning of the shooting, Hainstock testified, he awoke feeling tired of being picked on at school and said to himself, “I have to get all of this to stop.”
At school, he was stuffed into lockers, had his head dunked into toilets and was called a “fag” by his classmates, he said. As a result of the bullying, he attempted suicide three times.
His classmates’ comments “cut a little deeper,” he said, because at the age of 6, he was sexually molested by his 12-year-old stepbrother. He kept the alleged assaults a secret, he said.
Hainstock’s father, Shawn Hainstock, cried as his son testified.
Wait a minute. I thought his father was an abusive ogre who didn’t care about his son.
When he came home from school, Hainstock said, his parents forced him to do most of the housework. When he failed to do so, he was disciplined.
Hainstock testified that his father often kicked him and also used a wooden board called “the board of education” to spank him.
He said his father also refused to provide him with medication to help curb his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Yeah, like that. If they were as poor as everyone is making them out to be, they more than likely would have been eligible for government assistance, where the medication would have cost them next to nothing. Not to mention the fact that ADD and ADHD are probably the most misdiagnosed and over-diagnosed conditions of the modern medical age, in my opinion. And which one is it that makes the kids go crazy? Is it being on meds or not being on meds? I forget, since I’ve seen both used as criminal defenses.
After loading his father’s 20-gauge shotgun and .22-caliber revolver, he drove to school, hoping he could force Klang to listen to his problems, he said.
Again, no reason to load the guns if his intent was to scare, which it wasn’t. Not only that, but what made him think that taking two guns to school to threaten people with wasn’t going to land him in jail. Did he think that miraculously all his problems would disappear and there would be no repercussions to his actions? What a dumbass.
When he entered the school, he screamed, “Everyone get in the office. I’m not f—ing kidding!”
He said he didn’t get flustered when the school’s maintenance man, David Thompson, was able to grab the shotgun out of his hand. Hainstock said he reacted by pulling the handgun out of his pants.
That sounds strangely like the characteristics of a cold-blooded killer to me. He’s lucky that Mr. Thompson didn’t blow him away right then and there.
When Klang turned the corner, Hainstock testified, he pointed the gun at him and said, “I ain’t going to do nothing … let’s go to the office, I want to talk.”
Hainstock said Klang agreed to talk to him in his office, but as they walked there, Klang grabbed him and the gun went off accidentally.
“The gun was caught in the clothing of my arm and when he pulled my arm it went off,” Hainstock testified.
He said he then aimed the gun at Klang’s arm and fired “so he would let go of him.”
After an accidental third shot fired, Hainstock said he was in shock.
“I didn’t think Mr. Klang was going to die … I hoped not,” Hainstock said. “I didn’t plan to hurt nobody.”
“The gun was caught in the clothing of my arm and when he pulled my arm it went off,” How in the hell would he have to be holding the gun for that to possibly happen?
The last witness to testify was Hainstock’s grandmother, Irene Hainstock, who said Eric called her from jail after his arrest.
“What have you done,” she recalled asking her grandson. “I don’t know, grandma. Something snapped in my head,” was the response.
Some more students…
Other defense witnesses included five students at Weston who saw Eric enter the school with a shotgun and saw it taken away from him. None remembered hearing him say, “I’m here to (expletive) kill somebody,” as one witness recalled.
On cross-examination, however, most said they weren’t sure they could hear everything that was being said that day.
Now let’s hear from Hainstock himself…
In his own testimony, Hainstock said he brought the shotgun and pistol to the school to make people listen to him and did not intend to kill Klang.
Hainstock said he needed the weapons — a 20-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber revolver — “because they would be scared,” he said, referring to people at the school. “If they were scared they’d listen, hopefully.”
Hainstock, 16, testified unemotionally as the first witness in the defense case after prosecutors rested their case Wednesday morning.
Mounting frustration with his home life and with persistent taunting at school led him to the desperate action, he said, which he said was not intended to hurt anyone.
But after Klang grabbed him from behind at the school, Hainstock testified, the gun went off.
“It was accidental,” he said. He heard a grunt from Klang, he said, who continued to hold him. Hainstock said a second shot, which struck Klang on the side of the head but did not penetrate his skull, was intended for Klang’s arm, to get Klang to let go of him.
Hainstock said he underestimated the lethal power of the .22.
“I didn’t think it would hurt nobody that bad because it was so little,” he said.
I don’t buy any of it. According to this article, when asked by his attorney why Hainstock loaded the weapons he said it was “just a reaction.” Loading two separate weapons is not a reaction. That’s intent. And what did he think the .22 would do? Just bounce off people? And what if the shotgun was not taken from him. Did he think that a shotgun “wouldn’t hurt nobody?”
Anything less than a conviction of first-degree murder is a travesty of justice.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is up to his usual misguided ways. This time, he’s focusing his wrath on Facebook.
Connecticut’s attorney general is scrutinizing Facebook, the popular social-networking site, for allowing convicted sex offenders to register, calling into question whether the company is doing enough to protect users.
The inquiry by Richard Blumenthal is designed to force Palo Alto’s Facebook to take a more aggressive stand against sexual predators after his office uncovered at least three cases of such offenders becoming members, a spokesman confirmed. In addition, Blumenthal’s team found that some of Facebook’s users had posted sexually explicit material that was not swiftly removed.
A whole three, compared to MySpace’s 29,000. Ooooooooh, Facebook really is a criminal haven.
Connecticut officials have contacted Facebook and asked it to remove the sex offenders’ profiles. Blumenthal plans to continue his inquiry.
A Facebook spokeswoman did not return telephone calls seeking comment. Chris Kelly, the company’s chief privacy officer, told the New York Times that he is not familiar with the Connecticut investigation but that the company receives many reports about sex offenders registering on the Web site. The profiles are usually removed within 72 hours, he said.
“We want to be a good partner to the states in attempting to address this societal problem,” Kelly told the Times. “We’ve worked with them for quite some time now, and we look forward to continuing our fruitful partnership.”
Facebook maintains more-stringent security rules than some of its competitors because of its early days as an online destination for students. Full user profiles aren’t visible to the general public, for instance, and can be seen only by people who have been confirmed as friends.
It’s bad enough that AG Blumenthal places the blame on MySpace instead of inattentive parents. Now he’s going after a site that has very little criminal activity. In the year and a half that I’ve been doing this site, the stories about Facebook pale in comparison to the stories about MySpace.
As I’ve said before, AG Blumenthal needs to concentrate on keeping sex offenders off the streets than off of MySpace or Facebook.
The videotaped statement that Eric Hainstock gave to investigators was shown to the jury yesterday.
The video, filmed just hours after the Sept. 29 shooting, shows Hainstock slouched in a Sauk County Sheriff’s Department interview room with Klang’s blood on his clothes. He tells detectives that he complained to Klang for three years about kids teasing him and calling him a “fag,” but that Klang did nothing to stop them.
That morning after his parents left their home, he says in the video, he “was still ticked off” at various students and the principal.
According to the criminal complaint, Hainstock, then a 15-year-old freshman, went to school outside Cazenovia, about 65 miles northwest of Madison, with a shotgun and a revolver.
A janitor tore the shotgun away, and Hainstock pulled out the revolver, cocked it and got ready to fire, he tells detectives in the video.
Hainstock was well-trained in firearms. You don’t cock the hammer on a gun unless you have full intentions of using it.
He says Klang came toward him and asked him, ‘What’s going on?’”
“I’m like, ‘I’m sick of you guys,’” he says in the interview.
He ordered Klang into an office, and as they turned to walk there, Klang jumped him, Hainstock says. He stuck his pistol under Klang’s left armpit and fired three times, he says. Klang later died.
“I just freaked out,” Hainstock says.
Yet multiple witnesses have testified that they heard Hainstock say he was there to kill someone. To me, cocking the gun definitely shows intent. If he wanted to scare someone, he could have just pointed an empty gun at them. But no, Hainstock went in there with two different loaded weapons with multiple rounds available for reloading.
He was planning on a massacre. He didn’t freak out. He probably realized that when John Klang went for his gun that it was probably the only chance he was going to get for revenge. John Klang probably saved a lot of lives that fateful day.
