Saturday, June 23, 2012

Irvine pair not the usual suspects

Irvine pair charged in framing case aren't the usual suspects

Lawyer couple face charges of framing a volunteer at their son's school, Irvine's Plaza Vista, over a two-year dispute.

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By Kate Mather, Nicole Santa Cruz and Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times
June 20, 2012, 7:55 p.m.
The tip was an unusual one, especially in a city often ranked as the safest in the nation.

The caller, who identified himself as a concerned parent, told an Irvine police dispatcher that he had seen a woman driving erratically, parking at Plaza Vista School, and hiding drugs in her car's back seat.

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He had more help to offer: He knew the culprit's name. And he had a license plate.

Based on that call on the afternoon of Feb. 16, 2011, Irvine police pulled school volunteer Kelli Peters from the elementary school classroom where she was working and searched her car. They found a bag with marijuana, Percocetand Vicodin. She insisted the drugs were not hers, and had no idea how they got there.

When detectives tried to trace the call, authorities say, they found that it had come from the business center of a Newport Beach hotel. Police say surveillance video revealed the tipster to be Kent Easter, 38, a parent at Plaza Vista and alawyer.

This week, Easter and his wife, Jill, also a 38-year-old attorney, were accused of trying to frame Peters, currently the school's PTA president, in retaliation for what they alleged was her ill treatment of their young son at the school.

The Easters face felony charges of conspiracy to procure false arrest, false imprisonment, and conspiracy to falsely report a crime, charges that could bring three years in prison if they are convicted.

The case is the talk of the town in affluent, master-planned Irvine.

"I've seen some bizarre stuff," Irvine Police Lt. Julia Engen said. "I'm not going to say it's the weirdest thing I've ever seen, but it's definitely a unique situation I've never seen before."

The roots of the conflict appear to date back two years.

In March 2010, Kent Easter filed a civil complaint in Orange County Superior Court alleging that his son, then a first-grader, had been in an after-school tennis class the month before when Peters locked the child out of the school for about 19 minutes. A tennis instructor said he had found the child "crying and alone" and trying to open the door to the building, according to Easter's complaint.

When Jill Easter asked Peters why she had left the child outside, the complaint alleged, Peters said the child "takes too long to line up with the other children after class and it is too hard to wait for him."

Jill Easter then contacted a director of the after-school program and was asked not to call the police, the complaint said. The civil case was dismissed.

Around the same time, Jill Easter filed a request for a restraining order against Peters, alleging that the school volunteer was "harassing and stalking" her and her son, and that she had "threatened to kill me."

"She will stop at nothing in her attempts to silence myself and my son," Easter alleged. She also complained that Peters had been telling parents at her son's school that she was "psychotic" and "unstable."

"She is stalking me and attempting to intimidate me at my son's school and while I run errands in Irvine," Jill Easter alleged.

The request for the restraining order was dismissed.

Calls to Kent Easter's law office were not returned. The couple has not entered a plea in court.

Farrah Emami, a spokeswoman for the Orange County district attorney's office, said investigators had no indication that other parents were upset with the volunteer, whom she described as "completely professional."

"This was obviously something [the Easters] had sought out and planned with the intent of having her arrested," Emami said.

Prosecutors said that about 12:30 a.m. on Feb. 16, 2011, Kent Easter drove to Peters' home and planted the drugs, along with a used marijuana pipe, in her unlocked car. Prosecutors said Kent Easter later drove to the public phone to report Peters.

Prosecutors said Kent Easter was in cellphone and text message contact with his wife around the times he planted the drugs and called in the tip.

After the call led police to Peters' car, authorities said, police detained her for about two hours. She let police search her home, but they found no evidence that she was a drug user.

Engen of the Irvine Police Department said the officer who responded to the tip interviewed witnesses at the school who confirmed that Peters had been in the classroom at the time the caller said he saw her driving.

Also suspicious, Engen said, were the facts that the call had come from a public phone and that the caller had left a fake name and phone number.

She said the investigation was "complicated and detailed," and the fact that the defendants were attorneys added a "delicate" component to the case.

"These are very savvy people. They work in the system, and we don't want to make an arrest and have to release people," Engen said. "We wanted to make sure everything had been pursued and investigated to its fullest."

Peters declined requests from The Times for an interview. But in an interview with KTLA-TV Channel 5, she said she was shocked when police confronted her at the school. "I lost my breath; I thought I was on a joke show, like somebody was playing a joke on me," Peters told the station.

"They tried to make me look like the worst person you could be when you're involved with a school. I wouldn't have seen my daughter again, I think.... Those are the nightmares I had, like why would someone do that to another human being? I don't even really know the reason. I just don't understand it."

The Easters, who are free on $20,000 bail each, are scheduled to be arraigned next month in Orange County Superior Court.

Ian Hanigan, a spokesman for the Irvine Unified School District, said: "This is obviously a sad and unfortunate incident involving members of our community." He did not want to say much more, but added: "The allegation is a new one for me."

kate.mather@latimes.com

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com

christopher.goffard@latimes.com
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times
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Legalizing Watergate


Posted: 06/23/2012 8:04 am
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Who would have thought, forty years after the greatest political scandal and presidential abuse of power in U.S. history, that the Supreme Court of the United States would rule that the practices that fueled and financed that scandal were now legal?
Yet that is essentially the effect of the Citizens Uniteddecision. Go ahead and take bets on how much time will pass before the tsunami of cash unleashed byCitizens United ends up in the pockets of a Watergate-like cast of break-in burglars, wiretap experts, surveillance magicians, and cyberpunks. Given the power and money at stake in the nation's presidential and congressional elections, it is inevitable that candidates or their operatives will tap into the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through their campaigns and try to game the system -- in perfectly legal or highly illegal ways.
And, of course, the ultimate victims of the corruption of the democratic process are not defeated candidates and parties but America's citizens. Perhaps Supreme Court justices should have to experience a corrupted election process firsthand to understand what it means to live with a hollowed-out democracy. As one who experienced Watergate in its multi-tentacled form, it isn't pleasant to discover that you've been placed under surveillance, had your taxes audited, and been subjected to other dirty tricks. All this happened to me, among a number of others, simply because we worked for an honest presidential candidate who dared to challenge the authority and power of a president who had long-since forgotten the integrity the democratic process requires.
Coupled with the concentration of lobbying power now consolidating in the offices of a small hand-full of mega-firms (see the blog: "Convergence in the Garden of Government Influence"), the advent of legalized corruption launched by the Supreme Court through Citizens United empowers the super-rich to fund their own presidential and congressional campaigns as pet projects and to foster pet policies. The calculus here is simple: Because you have several hundred million dollars, or even a billion, you can lease or purchase a candidate from an endless reserve of minor politicians and then make him or her a star. In short order, all of that money and marketing power makes your candidate a mouthpiece for any cause or purpose you and your money handlers value, no matter how questionable. Your candidate-for-hire also will mouth your script in endless political debates and through as many television spots as you are willing to pay for -- all of which Citizens Unitedmakes quite legal now.
The five prevailing Supreme Court justices might at least have required the bought-and-paid-for candidates to wear sponsor labels on their suits like stock car drivers. For the time being, though, Exxon-Mobil or the Stardust Casino can't openly sponsor candidates, and instead rely on phony "Committee for Good Government" smokescreen entities.
So, America: Welcome to the Age of Vanity Politics and Campaigns-For-Hire. If this Court had been sitting in 1974, when the Watergate scandal was in full blossom, it would not have voted 9-0 to require the president to turn over legally incriminating tapes but instead would have voted to support the use of illegal campaign contributions to finance criminal cover-ups as an exercise in "free speech."
For many decades our citizens has had to survive free-wheeling antics by politicians and parties. Now American have to survive their own Supreme Court.
This post appears in the June 24, 2012 issue of Huffington.
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State concedes battered victim issue in Kruzan case

RIVERSIDE: State concedes battered victim issue in Kruzan case

The attorney general is conceding the Riverside girl who killed her ex-pimp was an abused partner

 Special to The Press-Enterprise/The Press-Enterprise
Sara Jessimy Cruzan, who killed a pimp in Riverside when she was 16. Kruzan, now 34, is asking for courts to review her case. 
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RICHARD K. De ATLEY
RICHARD K. De ATLEYSTAFF WRITER
rdeatley@pe.com
Published: 22 June 2012 08:05 PM
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The California Supreme Court has ordered a new hearing in the case of Sara Jessimy Kruzan, who was initially sentenced to life in prison without parole for the shooting death of her former pimp in a Riverside motel room in 1994, when she was 16.
Kruzan, now 34, has been waging a high-profile fight from prison to get a new trial in which she would be able to present a defense as a victim of intimate partner battering by the pimp, George Gilbert “G.G.” Howard.
Kruzan said Howard had raped, molested and subjugated her starting when she was 11, then shopped her as a teen prostitute.
Ordering a hearing is a long way from anything conclusive.
But it came after the California attorney general’s office, which had fought Kruzan’s request for two years, appears to have given some ground.
The state earlier said there was only a prostitute-pimp relationship between Kruzan, who was in her early teens, and Howard, who was 36 when he died.
The attorney general’s office now says that Kruzan’s argument for a new trial with a battered partner defense appears to have some standing, and should be reviewed again.
Kruzan’s attorneys said the state itself termed its “prior, contrary position” as “perversity.”
The California Supreme Court termed it a “partial concession by the attorney general.”
In her 1995 murder trial, prosecutors had argued that Kruzan was no longer employed by Howard in March 1994, when she lured him to the Dynasty Suites on Iowa Avenue, shot him in the neck with a pistol and stole $1,500 from his pocket, and his Jaguar.
She confessed upon her arrest four days later, eventually testifying that Howard’s rival had threatened her life if she didn’t carry out the crime.
Special circumstances attached to Kruzan’s first-degree murder conviction allowed a mandatory life prison term, despite her age. At her 1995 sentencing, the judge said the teen had “no moral scruple” to shoot one pimp at another’s behest.
Kruzan’s supporters for a new trial include the Human Rights Watch organization and actress Demi Moore. In 2009, a 3-year-old video featuring Kruzan and her case went viral. A YouTube version posted on Feb, 28, 2009, has more than 409,400 hits.
Moore had linked to the video through her popular Twitter site.
“She was a child. Unprotected,” Moore wrote in September 2009. “I think she deserves a 2nd chance. Do you?”
In January 2011, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, on his last full day in office, commuted her life sentence to 25 years to life, with the possibility of parole. But the issue of whether she should get a new trial to offer a battered victim defense remained.
This week, there was a major turn in Kruzan’s legal battle.
Her petition for a new trial had been denied in Riverside Superior Court in February 2010. That denial was upheld by the Fourth District Court of Appeal. The California Supreme Court was petitioned, and in May 2011 the court asked for informal letter responses from Kruzan and the state attorney general.
CHANCE TO USE DEFENSE
On Wednesday, June 20, the high court ordered a new hearing to show cause in Riverside Superior Court on why Kruzan was not entitled to the relief she is seeking — to get a new trial with the chance to use the battered partner defense .
No hearing date has been set. The attorney general’s office has until July 20 to file papers, and Kruzan has 30 days after that to respond.
Ronald A. McIntire, one of the attorneys representing Kruzan, declined comment Thursday. Calls to the California attorney general’s office made Wednesday and Thursday were not returned.
But the paper trail in Kruzan’s case this year shows a marked shift in the attorney general’s stance, from characterizing her early teen years relationship to Howard as a prostitute to his pimp, to one that pointedly called her “a sexually exploited minor.”
On March 19, a letter brief filed with the state high court by the attorney general’s office contended that Kruzan “cannot be considered a ‘victim of domestic violence’ because she and Howard were not involved in the type of ‘dating relationship’ that is necessary to have existed to support (Kruzan’s) claim that she suffered from intimate partner battering syndrome.
“To the contrary, the facts demonstrate that while Howard may have indeed perpetrated crimes against (Kruzan), their ‘relationship’ was a professional one, as pimp and prostitute.”
McIntire wrote to the court on March 29: “The attorney general’s interpretation of the meaning of ‘domestic violence’ and ‘dating relationship’ is simply wrong.”
The letter noted that the attorney general’s office acknowledged “the severe abuse that Sara suffered at G.G.’s hands,” even as it claimed she was not entitled to relief as a battered partner.
“Under the attorney general’s definition, the severe sexual and emotional abuse that G.G., a man 20 years Sara’s senior, inflicted on Sara for a third of her young life does not ‘count’ as intimate partner battering because their ‘sexual involvement’ — G.G.’s molestation and two rapes of Sara — was criminal, not consensual.”
And McIntire also attacked the attorney general’s position that the relationship between G.G. and Sara did not “count” because after two years of grooming her “during which he acted as everything from her father figure to her boyfriend, G.G. trafficked Sara for the next three years as a teen prostitute — a relationship that the attorney general characterizes as merely ‘professional’ and ‘casual.’ ”
Then on April 17, a letter from the attorney general’s office opened by briefly reviewing its previous stance that Kruzan had failed to demonstrate she was entitled to an intimate partner battering defense.
Then there was this: “However, on further review, this office respectfully requests that the court accept this further briefing and issue an Order to Show Cause … to develop the facts necessary to decide whether Ms. Kruzan is entitled to an intimate partner battering defense.”
While it carries no legal weight, the April 17 letter refers to her as “Ms. Kruzan,” while the March 19 letter referred to her once by her full name, and thereafter as “petitioner.”
The attorney general noted that Kruzan’s relationship with Howard could not fit into the exact definitions of family law code as a co-habitant or former co-habitant, or the category of a dating or engagement relationship.
“Indeed, Ms. Kruzan’s tragic circumstances and the fact that she was a sexually exploited minor is the antithesis of what is traditionally thought of as ‘dating,’” the letter stated.
“But we recognize that it may be applicable here or in other cases. We also recognize that it is perverse to suggest that a minor who has been sexually abused and exploited from the age of 11 should be entitled to lesser defenses than an adult who has been in an abusive dating relationship,” the letter stated.
“While Ms. Kruzan’s situation may not fit neatly into the statutory definition of domestic violence, her involvement in a relationship marred by commercial sexual exploitation should not necessarily foreclose the application of the intimate partner battering defense.”
The letter then asked to withdraw the attorney general’s earlier responses, and for a hearing in Riverside County Superior Court, “with our apologies for the inconvenience that this belated request has caused.”
Kruzan’s attorneys had argued in a subsequent letter that while Kruzan agreed with the new attorney general position, she wanted the matter reviewed by the Supreme Court instead of returned to Riverside County.
The June 20 order was to return it to Riverside County.
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Friday, June 22, 2012

Barbra Streisand & Bill Clinton Team Up For Women's Heart Health (PHOTOS)


By SANDY COHEN 06/15/12 07:23 PM ET AP
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MALIBU, Calif. — In an elegant white tent at her oceanfront Malibu compound, Barbra Streisand sang and former President Bill Clinton spoke to a crowd gathered to raise funds for women's heart health.
Guests paid as much as $100,000 per couple to support the Barbra Streisand Women's Heart Center at the intimate fundraising dinner Thursday at the home Streisand shares with her husband, James Brolin.
The singer donated $10 million to create the research and treatment facility at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and solicited million-dollar donations from wealthy friends she called personally. Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone, NBCUniversal chief Ron Meyer, designer Donna Karan and actors Josh Brolin (Streisand's stepson) and Diane Lane were among the donors and guests.
Streisand said she was motivated to contribute to women's heart health because she "can't stand inequality, whether it's about civil rights, gay rights or gender discrimination."
Heart disease kills more women each year than all cancers combined, but most of the research on the disease for the past five decades has been conducted on men.
"Even in scientific research, women are still treated as second-class citizens," Streisand said, "and to me, that's just unacceptable."
So she raised her voice and opened her wallet, and invited her friends to do the same.
"It's kind of a selfish thing, because it's actually very fulfilling, to do something like that that's larger than me or my career," she said, acknowledging that her fellow donors must feel the same way.
"Think about all the good that we'll do, all the good that will come of it, because of your extraordinary generosity," she said.
Clinton, who was introduced by journalist Lisa Ling and welcomed with a standing ovation, saluted Streisand for her commitment to women's health.
"I never thought anybody could care a lot about more things than I care a lot about. She makes me look like a heartless dumb piker," he said. "Unless your heart has been taken out of your body, you need to care about this."
Clinton said that the issue of heart health and equitable research goes beyond politics.
"Our country has always believed in being not only a laboratory of democracy but a laboratory of science and advancement, and you can't do that with a straight face and leave women out," he said.
Singer Josh Groban performed before Streisand took the stage. Streisand sang four songs, including the Oscar- and Grammy-winning "Evergreen," which she dedicated to Clinton. He told her in 1992 that it was his favorite song of hers, and she sang it at his inauguration.
Streisand and Groban performed a duet of "Smile," and Streisand closed the evening with a special version of "Here's to Life," with new lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who were also among the guests Thursday.
"A woman's heart beats well tonight," Streisand sang. "Because of you, a woman's future's looking bright. And it gets even brighter with each check you write, so thanks with all my heart."
___
AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen is on Twitter:http://www.twitter.com/APSandy
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Thursday, June 7, 2012

Elizabeth Warren - Fixing the Banks, Lifting the Middle Class

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