An attorney was disbarred last week by the Florida Supreme Court for letting female clients “take it out in trade.”

Panama City attorney James Harvey Tipler was disbarred for multiple violations and unethical conduct.

According to the North Country Gazette, Tipler traded sex for fee credits and offered discounts for sex referrals:

In one case, the referee had found that Tipler represented a client, an 18-year-old mother, in Bay County, Florida, on a charge of aggravated assault. Tipler charged his client a fee of $2,300 and entered into a fee agreement with her that allowed a “credit of $200 for each time she engaged in sex with Respondent” and a “$400 credit if she arranged for other females to have sex with him.”

Talk about service with a smile!

In addition to the sex barter issue, there were other problems.

Acording to the Supreme Court’s findings:

In addition, Tipler secured fees based on intentional misrepresentation and fraud. In most of the cases, Tipler charged an excessive fee, failed to comply with the Bar rules governing trust accounts, and failed to protect the clients’ interests by refunding unearned fees. Further, Tipler committed conversion and criminal theft in many of the instances. In one instance, Tipler labored under a conflict of interest. In some instances, Tipler failed to respond to inquiry letters sent by the Bar to his record address.

The former attorney was charged in Florida with racketeering and prostitution in 1999, and he pled guilty to a count of solicitation in 2001.

Tipler also has issues with the state bar associations in Alabama and California.

One of these days someone’s going to line out the potential for a conflict between the right to free speech and the illegality of prostitution on Craigslist.

Really, which is it?  There seems to be quite a grey area, where euphemisms and codes make it hard to determine whether a post is a  solicitation of prostitution or an offer of legal companionship or services.

Eventually that grey will be resolved into black and white in court. In the meantime, murder is coming to be a known outcome of responding to some of the juicer posts.

Now Patrick Lynch, the Attorney General of Rhode Island, has excoriated Craigslist in the press for serving as an arena for crimes involving sex and murder. It’s no surprise that Lynch is perturbed–alleged Craigslist murderer Philip Markoff did his thing–whatever it was–in Rhode Island’s Warwick, as well as nearby Massachusetts.

Is Craigslist founder Craig Newmark the innocent victim of crooks who abuse Craigslist, or is Newmark profiting from paid pandering?

According to The Globe, Newmark has donated profits:

The Globe reported last month that Craigslist has taken steps to curb illegal activity on the Internet, although many law enforcement officials are urging the company to do more. After pressure from attorneys general in 40 states last November, Craigslist agreed to cooperate with authorities and donate the money it makes from erotic advertising - including blatant prostitution promotions — to charity.

This makes it sound like Newmark can distinguish between legal and illegal solicitations.  Can he?  Only the court system knows for sure.

Ireland is putting some serious funding behind programs designed to encourage sex offenders to get help and reintegrate into communities after release from prison.

Dermot Ahern, Ireland’s Minister of Justice, has announced a new sex offender center at Arbour Hill Prison and two satellite centers.

The facilities are part of a larger policy to prevent recidivism and guide released offenders in the direction of seeking assistance in modifying their previous behaviours.

Ahern explained the development:

“This policy reinforces commitments to meeting the concerns of victims and the general public as regards sex offenders. It will enhance public safety by ensuring that, while in prison, sex offenders will participate in therapeutic interventions relevant to their needs and risks. It is designed to ensure, as far as possible, that higher risk sex offenders will not simply serve out their sentences without engaging with relevant services.”

The facilities and services are part of an elaborate plan to take over where the previous program, founded in 1984, left off:

• New initiatives to increase the range and availability of therapeutic interventions in prison and increase participation rates and effectiveness;

• Greater emphasis on individual assessments and integrated sentence planning and on offenders with higher need and risk profiles;

• Establishment of a National Centre at Arbour Hill Prison with a full range of interventions and an increase in the number of sex offenders accommodated in the prison;

• Accommodation of sex offenders also in two Satellite Centres (the Midlands and Wheatfield Prisons) where a narrower range of interventions will be available;

• Transfer of offenders into and out of the National Centre in accordance with sentence planning, demand for interventions and security imperatives;

• Establishment of a Sex Offender Unit in the Prison Service Headquarters to monitor sentence planning and liaise with other criminal justice agencies;

• Greater emphasis on the transition from prison to community.

A new programme of group interventions, entitled “Building Better Lives”, is being introduced in Arbour Hill Prison. The programme comprises three modules:

• exploratory open groups (”Exploring Better Lives”),
• practice open groups (”Practising Better Lives”), and
• maintenance groups (”Maintaining Better Lives”).

This all sounds very enlightened, but expect some controversy. One aspect of the new programs is the possibility of early release from prison for offenders who participate.

This probably won’t sit too well with everyone on the outside, especially victims and their families.

This is a follow up to yesterday’s post on the role of close acquaintances in violent crimes.

Many of us have a sort of profile of the likely sex offender–a shadowy stranger, usually a man, who is  a loner with no attachments to the institutions we hold dear.

When a violent killer proves to be one of us, it’s terrifying. Just ask anyone who belonged to the BTK murderer’s church.

It’s just harder to deal with when the perpetrator turns out to be someone who was able to fit into a community unnoticed.

Some other surprising perpetrators that emerged in the last week:

An 82-year-old North Carolina man pled guilty to abusing children last summer. His attempts to play the age card to elicit sympathy reached at least one unsympathetic listener:  ”He was in that same condition when he was molesting children last summer and it didn’t stop him,” said Rowan County District Attorney Bill Kenerly.

A Louisiana state trooper was accused of felony indecent behavior with a juvenile.

A North Carolina youth soccer ref faces ten years in prison for coercing a 14-year-old into having sex.

A grade school gym teacher in Pennsylvania is accused of threatening a fifth grader with a knife to coerce him into sexual conduct.

A Colorado Springs middle school music teacher is on the verge of losing his job over alleged posting of inappropriate images of children.

States spend a lot of time registering sex offenders. They also spend a lot of time screening school employees for offenses related to crimes against children.

Neither approach seems to be achieving stellar success at this point, leaving us all to wonder if the person next door is really a “stranger in our midst.”

The murder of Stockton, Calif., youngster Sandra Cantu is a tragedy no matter how you look at it.

The girl’s body was found on April in a suitcase left in a pond, and more recently the child’s Sunday School teacher, Melissa Huckaby, was charged with kidnapping, rape, and murder.

Details of the allegations against Huckaby are unavailable.

Young female murder victims are more often than not killed by male aggressors, but the close and ironic connection between Sandra and Huckaby illustrates an ugly fact about homicides committed against young people.

The ultimate nightmare scenario for parents and society at large tends to involve abduction and murder by a total stranger, the Bogey Man of the “stranger danger scenario.” And it can happen that way, as painfully shown by the Polly Klaas murder.

But statistics suggest an more insidious scenario, where crimes committed against girls and women are more likely to be carried out by people well known to the victims.

Numbers from 1976 through 2000 indicate that women and girls killed in their homes are more likely than males to be killed by a family member or intimate acquaintance.

When it comes to abductions, here is some data from Crimes Against Children Research Center:

In police reports of abductions, juveniles are kidnapped as often by non-family acquaintances as by strangers.

Two-thirds of juveniles kidnapped by acquaintances are female, and most are teenagers.*

Crimes like the murder of Sandra Cantu are rare, but they do happen. And that reality fuels a lot of the motivation for stringent sex offender registration requirements.

After all, who wants to have a sex offender living next door?

But the truly frightening reality is that the potential perpetrator may have already walked through the front door without arousing any concern whatsoever.

* Quote from: Finkelhor, D., & Ormrod, R. (2000). Kidnapping of Juveniles: Patterns from NIBRS. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

In a perhaps unprecedented situation, a California college student is auctioning off her virginity online.

In a culture salted with the vulgarity of scripted “reality” television and celebrity idolatry, the sale is emblematic of the urge to monetize, regardess of the cost to human decency and moral fiber.

Here’s how it’s shaping up, according to a news outlet in New Zealand:

Earlier this year - in January, in the US (where else!?!) - a university student in California by the name of Natalie Dylan decided to sell her virginity to make a bit of money. She’s 22 and doing a master’s in family and marriage therapy, and she hit on the idea after being “inspired” by her sister, who paid her own uni fees by working as a hooker.

Natalie posted her ad on a site called the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, which is the online face of a legal brothel in Nevada, and she says she got bids from over 10,000 men.

And of course it wasn’t long before a copy cat emerged in the form of a Romanian teenager who has already faced questions about the quality of the goods.

The situation in California has law enforcement authorities stymied. While the virginity fire sale just “doesn’t seem right,” it’s not clear what laws Dylan has broken, if any.

The auction is being conducted through Nevada, where prostitution is legal in some counties.

Fox News quotes a frustrated law man:

“[Since] prostitution is legal in the area that she’s listing from, and she’s over 18 and it’s consensual, I would defer it to local police authorities,” said David Staretz, a spokesman for the FBI’s Las Vegas field office.

The whole deal is morally objectionable to many, yet it remains unclear whether Nevada’s prostitution stance is out of sync with the rest of the country–or vice versa.

Ultimately, much will be left for the lawyers, who could end up representing buyers and sellers in suits involving everything from family law to product liability.

At the very least, there could be serious disagreements over return policies.

Endoscopic equipment used for 1) eye, ear, throat exams and for 2) colonoscopies — without being properly sterilized between treatments — has so far led to one known case of HIV infection and 16 known cases of hepatitis.

“Good enough for government work” is not the standard we want here.

A 20 year-old employee caught visiting porn web sites on the job was just given a pass by his employer, the U.S. National Science Foundation, despite his admission of guilt.

The NSF is notorious for its permissive attitude toward porn on the job (acknowledging that nerds have a harder time getting dates than non-nerds) which has included 30 employees being involved over a ten year period and a senior member of the staff using an agency computer to engage in ‘chatting’ with ‘live performers.’

A recent letter from Senators Grassley and Mikulaski to the agency asked about senior staff using government money as travel expenses to pursue long distance sexual relationships developed online, according to an article in the April 7, 2009 edition of The New York Times in an article by Gardiner Harris.

The government is different than you and me–at least accountablity-wise, it seems.

Another celebrity DUI incident will undoubtedly continue to put drunk driving enforcement under the headlights of public scrutiny.

Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte Stallworth was driving his Bentley Continental GT when he struck and killed a construction worker in Miami Beach on March 14. The Browns star had a blood alcohol level of 0.126 percent, well above Florida’s legal limit of 0.08 percent.

Stallworth remained at the scene of the accident to provide an account to police officers.

The Miami Herald provided a glimpse of the scene last week when Stalworth responded to a criminal charge and posted bond:

Holding his mother’s hand, Cleveland Browns wide receiver Donte’ Stallworth walked out of a Miami-Dade County jail after noon Thursday after posting bond on a charge of DUI manslaughter.

”I just want to extend my condolences to the Reyes family. My prayers are with them,” Stallworth told reporters and a gaggle of cameras waiting outside the jail. “I have full confidence and faith in the legal process.”

Stallworth’s attorney said at a press conference that he will fight the felony drunk driving charge that carries a statutory maximum of 15 years in prison.

The bond was $200,000–anyone have any views on that figure?

The incident may not hold up bonus money heading Stallworth’s way.

Controversy over the issue of civil commitment under the Walsh Act was heightened by a recent U.S. Supreme Court action.

A lengthy review is available at SCOTUS Blog:

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., put on hold on Friday a federal appeals court ruling that the federal government contended would lead to the early release of “the great majority” of “sexually dangerous” inmates now held in federal prison.

In a brief order, the Chief Justice said there was “a presumption of constitutionality” of the 2006 federal law that the Fourth Circuit Court struck down. He thus blocked temporarily the Circuit Court ruling, until the Justices act on a new government appeal filed Friday (U.S. v. Comstock, et al., 08-1224).

In consequence of a Jan. 8 order, authorities seeking the commitment of an offender with mental health issues need to ask a federal judge to commit the individual.

This makes the situation more complex, but it does not remove the constitutional dimensions of imprisoning a person after their sentence is over.

As Greenville, North Carolina’s Channel 9 News puts it:

The question is, should the government have the power to put you in prison indefinitely just because you could pose a future threat?