It's about as hard for a 20-something worker to find a job today as it was in 1986.
And gets you about the same amount of money, if even that, while prices have increased.
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MECOSTA COUNTY, Mich. — A Mecosta man is charged with a felony for obstruction of justice and misdemeanor of tampering with a jury for passing out fliers about jury nullification rights on the sidewalk of the Mecosta County courthouse.
Keith Wood, 39, faces these charges after handing out about 50 fliers on Nov. 24, which the Fully Informed Jury Association wrote, that describe juror rights that are typically not given by judges during jury instructions before a trial.
Wood's Attorney Dave Kallman told FOX 17 the charges are "outrageous," especially after Wood posted bond set at $150,000 last Tuesday. Obstruction of justice is a five-year felony with up to $10,000 in fines, and attempting to influence jurors is a one-year misdemeanor with fines up to $1,000.
Wood told FOX 17 he was speechless.
"When he (the Judge) told me the bond, again I was speechless," said Wood. "$150,000 bond for handing out a piece of paper on a public sidewalk? Speechless."
Wood said he charged $15,000 to his credit card to post bond. Kallman said he will fight for all of Wood's bond to be returned, and called these charges an attack on free speech.
"It's just a blatant illegal improper use of government power to squelch a person's Constitutional rights of free speech, that's what this is," said Kallman.
"There has to be push-back, and judges and prosecutors and people need to know: you cannot squelch people's free speech rights and get away with it."
Wood said he was motivated to educate the public on jury rights knowing of an upcoming Mecosta County trial.
"It's not illegal to fully inform jurors, it's just that judges don't do it anymore, " said Wood.
"To me, I just feel like the justice system would be much better off, and we the people would be much better off if jurors were fully informed again."
The pamphlets Wood handed out specifically discuss jurors' right to vote their conscience, also known as jury nullification of law. Jury nullification occurs when a jury acquits a defendant, despite evidence, because they either believe the law is immoral or wrongfully applied.
However, since the late 1800's many judges have omitted jury nullification from their jury instructions, though Kallman said it is implied.
"It's implied, it's not overt," said Kallman. "This is more overt, and I understand why the judge doesn't like it okay, but isn't that part of free speech? You allow speech you don't like."
Kallman said this is a violation of Constitutional rights including freedom of speech.
"It's free speech for goodness sake," said Kallman. "The Judge directly ordered him to be arrested for jury tampering, for tampering with a jury that didn't exist, now wrap your head around that."
Back on Nov. 24, Wood said the magistrate, then other court personnel and deputy, came outside three times, asking him to come into the courthouse because the judge wanted to speak with him. Wood said the third time personnel came outside a deputy threatened to call Big Rapids Police to arrest him. At that point, Wood went inside to speak with the judge, but was told he was not being detained.
"She (courthouse personnel) wasn't being rough but she was kind of corralling me and she was touching my jacket, and so I asked her again, I said, "Am I being detained?" And she goes, 'No,'" described Wood.
"Judge Jaklevic came out of his chambers, he looked at me, he looked down the hall, I didn't know who he was looking at, and then he looked back towards me and the deputy and he said, 'Arrest him for jury tampering,'" said Wood.
FOX 17 called the office of Mecosta County District Judge Peter Jaklevic, also the former county prosecutor; his office declined comment. FOX 17 also called the Mecosta County Prosecutor's Office, and has yet to hear back.
Wood refused to take a plea deal Tuesday morning and his preliminary hearing is set for next Tuesday. He and Kallman want his charges dropped and are deciding whether to pursue a federal lawsuit.
"I truly believe in my heart of hearts I didn't do anything wrong, I didn't break the law, so they need to drop all of the charges against me," said Wood.
Stay with FOX 17 for this developing case.
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Caption + Colorado Springs shooting suspect, Robert Lewis Dear, appears before Judge Gilbert Martinez via video feed with public defender, Dan King, at the El Paso County Criminal Justice Center for the advisement in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Monday, Nov. 30, 2015. THE GAZETTE/DANIEL OWEN
An El Paso County clerical error was apparently to blame for Planned Parenthood shooting suspect Robert Lewis Dear Jr. being listed as a woman on his voter registration card - a detail that fueled national speculation over his gender identity.
Ryan Parsell, El Paso County's chief deputy clerk and recorder, said his office incorrectly recorded Dear's gender in October 2014, leading to the issuance of both a driver's license and voter's registration card erroneously identifying him as a woman.
Scroll below to see the original voter registration documents
"The Clerk and Recorder's Office processes over 500,000 transactions a year," Parsell said. "Mistakes are going to be made, and it is a reminder to us of the important job that we do to see that a mistake made by us has had national implications."
What Parsell described as a data entry error occurred after the 57-year-old Dear moved to tiny Hartsel in Park County, which doesn't have a driver's license office.
Records show Dear traveled 65 miles to a Colorado Springs clerk and recorder's office to obtain his driver's license and his voter's registration card, Parsell said.
Although Dear clearly identified himself as a man, the information was incorrectly logged into a computer, Parsell added.
"Our employee inadvertently clicked on 'female' and gave the confirmation to Mr. Dear to review," he said. "He missed it and signed it."
Thirteen days later, Dear received the erroneous driver's license in the mail. Records show he traveled to a Department of Motor Vehicles office in Salida to report the error and request a corrected license, which he received, Parsell said.
To change his voter's registration card, however, Dear would have had to mail a separate request to his local clerk and recorder's office.
Documents obtained by The Gazette on Monday suggest Dear did just that - mailing a "Change in Voter Registration Information" form to the Park County Clerk and Recorder's Office in which he both updated his P.O. Box and apparently marked a box for "male."
No correction was made, however, because the marking was so faint that a deputy clerk concluded it wasn't intentional, said Park County Clerk and Recorder Debra Green.
Green described the marking as "a small dark spot" that doesn't completely fill the box next to "male."
"She just looked at it and she was like, 'Did the pen hit there? Did the mail put a mark through there when it went to the Post Office?' It's just not clear to either one of us what the intent was."
Green noted that Dear voted twice using the voter registration card - once in November 2014 and again this fall.
Parsell said that his office made "similar errors" during the same time period, chalking them up to heavy workloads and "antiquated systems."
"If there's a mark in the male portion of that card, taking it in totality, I think it's safe to assume at this point it was probably an attempt to change his gender on the voter registration form."
Parsell said that because Park County doesn't offer driver's licensing, they wouldn't have access to the same databases demonstrating that Dear listed himself as a male elsewhere or that he took steps to have his driver's license corrected.
Confusion over Dear's gender identity provided fodder for social media commentators and conservative news sites, not to mention the political spin machine.
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz recently downplayed reports that Dear said "no more baby parts" by saying that he's also been reported to be a "transgendered leftist activist," a claim that appears to be limited to conservative blogs and news sites.
Dear, who lived with a woman neighbors identified as a girlfriend, is being held without bond at the El Paso County jail pending a Dec. 9 hearing where he is likely to be charged with multiple counts of first-degree murder.
The jail log likewise lists his gender as male.
-
Maria St. Louis-Sanchez contributed to this report.
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UNION, N.J. (CBSNewYork/AP) — A New Jersey woman has been charged with making fake threats against black students at Kean University last month.
Kayla-Simone McKelvey, 24, of Union Township faces one count of creating a false public alarm.
The Union County prosecutor's office says McKelvey participated in a Nov. 17 rally on racial issues at Kean and then went to a computer station in a campus library and posted anonymous threats on Twitter against black students.
McKelvey then allegedly returned to the rally and tried to raise awareness about the threats. One tweet made reference to a bomb on campus; others were about shooting black students.
She's scheduled to make a court appearance in two weeks.
It wasn't immediately known Tuesday if McKelvey had retained an attorney.
Kean released a statement saying it is "saddened" to learn a former student and rally participant was allegedly behind the threats.
"As a diverse academic community, we wholeheartedly respect and support activism, however, no cause or issue gives anyone the right to threaten the safety of others," the school said. "We hope this information will begin to bring a sense of relief and security to the campus community."
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The Federal Reserve is cutting its lifeline to big banks in financial trouble.
The Fed officially adopted a new rule Monday that limits its ability to lend emergency money to banks.
In theory, the new rule should quash the notion that Wall Street banks are "too big to fail." Translation: the government has to save them during a crisis.
The Fed's new restrictions come from the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which brought in a wave of reforms after the financial crisis.
Under the new rule, banks that are going bankrupt -- or appear to be going bankrupt -- can no longer receive emergency funds from the Fed under any circumstances.
If the rule had been in place during the financial crisis, it would have prevented the Fed from lending to insurance giant AIG(AIG) and Bear Stearns, Fed chair Janet Yellen points out.
Politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren have pushed the Fed to end such emergency lending to banks that are going under.
She does not think the Fed's new rule goes far enough.
"There are still loopholes that the Fed could exploit to provide another back-door bailout to giant financial institutions," Warren, a Democrat, told CNNMoney.
At first glance, the new rule sounds like a common sense change. If a bank is going under, American taxpayers shouldn't be bailing it out.
However, it's important to note that the new rule allows the Fed to judge by its own measures whether a firm qualifies for its emergency aid.
The idea is the Fed can still lend to banks during times of emergency, but the bank must be able to pay it back. Yet the true health of a bank in turmoil can be very difficult to assess.
"It's very hard to judge in real time whether a firm is insolvent or just having liquidity problems because it becomes impossible to price assets," says Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, a research firm.
That's why Warren wants clearer guidelines.
"It's up to Congress to close those loopholes and ensure that Fed emergency lending is limited to protecting the economy and not to saving a few favored banks," Warren says.
The rule is the latest in a series of reforms the Fed has put on the biggest banks in an effort to prevent the next crisis.
The Fed performs "stress tests" on banks to see how they perform in a mock financial crisis scenario. It's also forced banks to increase the amount of cash they have stashed away to weather the next rainy day.
The new rule can be seen as a warning sign from the Fed to big banks: don't expect another bailout next time. Yellen emphasizes that its emergency lending to banks is a last-resort option.
Yellen said the Fed "has long had" this lending authority, but it was only used "sparingly" and in "severe financial crises."
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Last Modified: Monday, November 30, 2015 at 4:24 p.m.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama is ending its effort to cut off Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood clinics after losing in federal court.
Lawyers for the state and Planned Parenthood Southeast submitted a settlement agreement Monday to a federal judge. In the agreement, the state says Planned Parenthood Southeast has been reinstated as a Medicaid provider.
Planned Parenthood took Alabama to court after Republican Gov. Robert Bentley cut off Medicaid funds to the organization in the wake of undercover videos that anti-abortion activists say show the group's personnel negotiating the sale of fetal organs.
The Alabama clinics do not participate in the donation program.
In the settlement, the state agrees to pay Planned Parenthood's lawyers $51,000 in legal fees. That's about nine times the amount of Medicaid dollars that have gone to the Alabama clinics in the last two years.
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http://ift.tt/eA8V8J State of Alabama ends effort to cut off funds to Planned Parenthood. State will pay the $51k in legal fees. via top scoring links : news http://ift.tt/1OAV25A
Just so people are aware, these were all comments publicly posted on a FaceBook page of a News channel in Brazil. They didn't dig through peoples FaceBooks to find racist comments, and they weren't private in any way. It was from a professional and public page.
On July 3th, the National Day to Combat Racial Discrimination, criminals published racist comments against Maria Julia Coutinho, the weather presenter of the most important news show in Brazil.
In partnership with billboard media companies, we put on the streets real comments posted on Facebook against the journalist. We omitted names and faces of the authors - we had no intention of exposing the agressors. We just wanted to raise awareness. This way people can think about the consequences before posting this kind of comment on the internet.
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http://ift.tt/eA8V8J People's racist Facebook comments are ending up on billboards near their homes -- The campaign, "Virtual racism, real consequences," is using the location tag from Facebook posts to find where the offenders live. via top scoring links : news http://ift.tt/1OrPR9U
