Golden State Killer suspect Joseph DeAngelo expected to plead guilty

The man suspected of carrying out a string of burglaries, rapes and murders in the 1970s and 1980s is expected to enter a guilty plea at a court hearing later this month.

That guilty plea will likely spare Joseph DeAngelo from a death sentence and preserve millions of taxpayer dollars that would have been spent on a lengthy criminal trial, according to legal experts.

DeAngelo, a former police officer from Northern California, was arrested in 2018 after DNA submitted to a genealogy website reportedly match some of DeAngelo’s distant relatives. The DNA allegedly proved a link between DeAngelo and an unknown man whom police called the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker.

Prosecutors charged DeAngelo with 13 counts of kidnapping and 13 counts of murder. Though he is suspected of other crimes associated with the East Area Rapist and Original Night Stalker cases, statutes of limitations in California law prevented prosecutors from seeking charges for those alleged crimes.

Rumors of a possible plea deal began swirling in early March after attorneys representing the man said they were trying to “resolve” the case.

A footnote in a supplemental court filing seeking the dismissal of certain charges said DeAngelo had offered to plead guilty to other charges in exchange for a lifetime sentence.

Court hearings were delayed due to the ongoing COVID-19 global health crisis, but as proceedings started up again, the Sacramento Bee published a report on Monday saying attorneys had been contacting victims with information about a plea deal.

The Bee’s report said the deal is still in the works and had not been finalized, and that any plea deal could collapse due to DeAngelo’s erratic nature.

Sacramento criminal defense attorney Mark Reichel told CBS13 News a plea deal would save California taxpayers a considerable amount of money and spare victims and their families from what was sure to be a lengthy trial.

“Many times, this was referred to as what was going to be the biggest trial in the history of California,” Reichel said, adding that the costs associated with litigation were expected to be around $50 million.

DeAngelo’s plea could be entered as early as June 29, which would coincide with his next court appearance.

Sacramento County Judge James Arguelles to fill Eastern District vacancy

A Sacramento County Superior Court judge has been appointed by President Donald Trump to fill a vacancy in the federal Eastern District of California.

Judge James Arguelles is the second Trump nominee within the federal judicial district. The pick comes more than a month after the president appointed Fresno attorney Dirk Paloutzian to the Eastern District’s Fresno court, which has been burdened with criminal and civil case activity due to court vacancies there.

Prior to his term as a judge in Sacramento County, Arguelles worked as a partner at the Sacramento firm Stevens, O’Connell & Jacobs. He was also an Assistant U.S. Attorney  in the Eastern District prior to entering private practice.

Speaking to the trade publication Law.com, Sacramento criminal defense attorney Mark Reichel called Arguelles’ appointment a smart pick.

“He is a very smart lawyer, is very well-rounded as a person and has relatively broad experience,” Mark said. “He is personable and kind to litigants and their lawyers, works hard. Judge Arguelles might turn out to be all that is right with lifetime appointments.”

U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott of the Eastern District of California said any presidential administration would be “hard-pressed to find someone as well-qualified as Jim Arguelles for a district court position.”

Click here to read the full story on Law.com

Three officers charged with aiding and abetting murder in George Floyd case

Three former Minneapolis police officers who were present during the arrest of an unarmed black man have been charged in connection with his subsequent death.

The charges were announced at a press conference Wednesday by Hennepin County District Attorney Mark Freeman and Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison.

Court records obtained by a local news station revealed Thomas Lane, 37; Tou Thao, 34 and Alexander Kueng, 26 were each charged with one count of unintentionally aiding and abetting murder and one count of intentionally aiding and abetting manslaughter.

The charges stem from last week’s arrest of George Floyd, a Minneapolis resident who was accused by a deli employee of attempting to make a purchase with counterfeit money.

One officer, 44-year-old Derek Chauvin, was captured on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck during the arrest. Throughout the video, Floyd could be heard telling the officers he was in pain and unable to breathe.

Floyd’s lifeless body was placed on an ambulance stretcher and removed from the scene of the arrest. Video of the incident, first posted to Twitter, sparked a national outcry and led to days of protests in major cities across the country.

Last Friday, Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder and third-degree unintentional manslaughter. On Wednesday, prosecutors added a second-degree murder charge against the officer.

Earlier this week, defense attorney Mark Reichel told FOX40 News he anticipated charges against the other three officers captured on cellphone videos during Floyd’s arrest.

On Wednesday, Mark said the additional second-degree charge is a more-serious offense that could carry a lengthier prison sentence, adding that prosecutors may have more evidence proving Chauvin’s intent.

“Second-degree murder charge means [Chauvin] intended the killing at some point,” Mark told FOX40 News. “Second-degree murder in Minnesota means there was a use of force and he intended to cause bodily harm, serious bodily harm, and during it someone died.”

Mark said it was unlikely prosecutors would have prevailed in court with a third-degree murder charge because Minnesota law requires proof that a person killed more than one individual during the incident.

“Had the case stayed with the county attorney and stayed as third-degree murder, [the officer] likely would have won the case,” Mark said.

Click here to watch the full video on FOX40.com

Accomplice charges likely coming for other officers involved in George Floyd’s death

One week after an unarmed Minneapolis man died during a police encounter, community members and activists continue calling for charges against three officers who were connected to the incident.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin is the only person so far to faces charges in connection with the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man whose arrest made international headlines following his death.

A bystander to the arrest captured cellphone video showing Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck during the arrest. Multiple times, Floyd could be heard telling Chauvin and other officers on scene that he was in pain and couldn’t breathe.

Floyd’s lifeless body was placed on a stretcher and taken away from the scene in an ambulance, the video shows. He was pronounced dead a short time later.

Chauvin was arrested last Friday and booked into jail on charges of manslaughter and third-degree murder. But three other officers at the scene — Thomas Lane, J.A. Kueng and Tou Thao —  have not been criminally charged in connection with Floyd’s death.

Sacramento criminal defense attorney Mark Reichel told FOX40 News on Tuesday he believes charges against the other three officers are forthcoming, and it’s simply a matter of time before prosecutors in Minnesota announce them.

“Once you’re aware a crime is being committed, if your presence is enough to prevent it from being stopped, you can be charged as an accomplice,” Mark said.

The three officers could be charged with accomplice liability — also known as aiding and abetting — for having reasonable knowledge that Chauvin was committing a crime but failing to stop it. Eyewitness video captured at the scene showed at least one officer repeatedly telling bystanders to stay out of the street while he was standing mere feet away from Chauvin and Floyd.

The video evidence is likely going to be key in charging the other three officers with accomplice liability in the future.

“It’s going to come down to, what did you see? What did you hear? What did you know?” Mark said. “It’s my understanding they’re looking at the facts right now. Some of those facts are, when were they aware there was no pulse? When were they aware those other officers are saying, roll him over…to the right side?”

In a separate but related legal action, state officials in Minnesota filed a civil rights complaint against the Minneapolis Police Department. That complaint opens the door for state investigators to comb through nearly a decade of police cases connected to the department to see if there are additional civil rights violations.

Why aren’t more police officers charged when people die?

Eyewitness video of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd sent shockwaves throughout the United States and sparked demonstrations in major cities across the country, including an organized protest in Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood on Friday.

Their message: Police need to be held accountable for their actions and brought to justice.

It’s extremely rare for police officers to be charged when a person dies as the result of a law enforcement encounter. In Sacramento, similar protests were sparked after police officers shot and killed Stephon Clark, a 23-year-old black man who was not armed when he was confronted by officers.

After a year-long investigation, Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert declined to file charges against the officers involved in the Clark case.

“There was no justice or accountability for my brother,” Stevante Clark, the brother of Stephon Clark, said at Friday’s rally, according to a report. “I think we have to wait to see how this plays out to see if George Floyd gets justice because at the end of the day, transparency with accountability means nothing.”

So why aren’t more law enforcement officers charged when people die during police encounters?

“The main reason is no prosecutor, for political reasons and to get reelected, ever wants to lose a high-profile case,” Sacramento criminal defense attorney Mark Reichel told FOX40 News. “It’s better to not bring it than to lose a high-profile case and, obviously, officer-involved killings are always high-profile.”

Prosecutors typically bring cases they feel they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt, legal experts say, and juries are typically more likely to believe police officers acted out of self-defense or a sense of danger when presented with conflicting evidence or testimony.

But the video evidence in George Floyd’s death showed precisely the opposite. The videos published earlier this week didn’t just triggered protests — they also led to calls for an investigation and charges from law enforcement groups across the country.

That evidence, prosecutors in Minneapolis said, was key in bringing charges against Chauvin.

“This is by far the fastest that we’ve ever charged a police officer,” Mike Freeman, the top prosecutor in Hennepin County, Minnesota, said at a press conference.

Late Friday afternoon, U.S. Attorney William Barr said the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were also investigating whether Floyd’s civil rights were violated.

“Both state and federal officers are working diligently and collaboratively to ensure that any available evidence relevant to these decisions is obtained as quickly as possible,” Barr said.

Click or tap here to read the full story from FOX40 News

Senate, Trump likely to reject bill that would have lowered cost of prison phone calls during pandemic

A massive second stimulus package that would have provided $3 trillion in relief due to the ongoing coronavirus health pandemic included a much-needed cap on the cost of phone calls placed by inmates in prisons and jails to loved ones.

Passed on May 18, the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act included programs and policies that would have expanded health insurance, rural broadband connectivity, benefits for veterans, financial assistance to the U.S. Postal Service and assistance to federal aviation and railroad workers. In addition to that assistance, it would have provided another $1,200 economic relief check to millions of Americans at a time when unemployment filings are at a record high.

One little known provision of the HEROES Act is a cap on the cost of phone calls placed between inmates and their families.

Telephone calls from jails and prisons are often portrayed in TV shows and the movies as a lifeline between characters in custody and those on the outside world. Often left out of the script is just how much those calls can add up in a relatively short period of time.

At one federal prison in California, phone calls cost $3.25 and are capped at 15 minutes per session. That works out to more than 21 cents a minute, more than double what Sprint charged for long-distance service in the mid-1990s.

One woman in Massachusetts said she spends more than $6,000 a year connecting with her incarcerated husband over the phone. Her calls costs between $5 and $6 a minute each, and that’s before the prison’s phone service tacks on administrative fees.

While inmates may make for unsympathetic subjects, the exorbitant cost of phone calls is problematic for everyone: Studies have shown that when inmates have contact with their family and friends, it helps them become positive, productive members of society at the end of their sentences. But the expense of phone calls has the opposite effect on disenfranchised inmates who are too poor to afford them.

To make matters worse, the ongoing health crisis brought on by the novel coronavirus COVID-19 has led to jails and prisons halting in-person family visits. The phone remains one of the few tools available to inmates who need to maintain their relationships with loved ones on the outside.

Advocates have long pushed for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the federal agency that regulates telecommunication services in the country, to impose a per-minute fee cap on the cost of prison phone calls. Lawmakers finally appeared ready to act with the passage of the HEROES Act, which capped collect phone calls at $0.75 per 15-minute session, making the per-minute cost around $0.05. Prepaid phone calls, where inmates pay for the cost of the session, would be limited to $0.04 cents per minute.

The HEROES Act passed on May 15 with a 208-199 vote that was largely divided along party lines, with Democrats largely favoring the bill and Republicans opposing it.

“This is the most significant federal legislative vote on prison phone justice in history, and it is needed now more than ever,” Bianca Tylek, an executive director with the advocacy group Worth Rises, said in a statement. “Right now, in the middle of an economic crisis, predatory prison telecom corporations are still charging families as much as $25 for a 15-minute call with an incarcerated loved one. The exorbitant cost of these calls has long pushed families—disproportionately Black and Brown due to racist policies and policing—into debt, but times are even harder due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

But the measure still has to be passed by Senate lawmakers and signed into law by President Donald Trump. Both of those things are unlikely after lawmakers in the Senate and officials with the Trump administration said they were hesitant to go forward with a second economic stimulus package.

Republican senators have called the House bill “dead on arrival” and have resisted efforts to take up the measure. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell has acknowledged the need for further economic relief, but says he intends to work with officials within the Trump administration to determine what’s needed and what’s not.

Whether that need will include a financial break for inmates who need to connect with their loved ones remains to be seen.

New records reveal how ICE, Border Patrol use secretive cellphone surveillance tool

For years, law enforcement agencies across the United States have attempted to keep details of a dragnet cellphone surveillance tool under wraps. But their efforts have fallen short time and time again thanks to intrepid journalists and civil liberties groups who have successfully filed public records requests seeking information about these spy devices.

One of the most-recent requests of this type comes from the American Civili Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union who for two years have fought federal immigration agencies to learn more about how their law enforcement officers use so-called Stingray devices to catch targets and gather evidence.

Sold by the Florida-based Harris Corporation, a “Stingray” is a cell site simulator device that tricks phones to connect to it instead of a legitimate communications tower. When deployed, Stingrays force all phones in a given area — sometimes as large as a few city blocks — to re-route phone signals to it. Using attached computers, law enforcement officers are able to obtain phone data like call and text message logs and geographic location.

While officers may be using Stingrays to capture criminal suspects, their design means ordinary, often innocent individuals also have their phone data swooped up by the devices. Few law enforcement agencies have acknowledged using the devices, and even fewer have offered details about how they purge data of innocent individuals who are not the targets of their investigations.

The shroud of secrecy around Stingrays and similar devices runs so deep that prosecutors have been known to drop criminal cases to keep police use of these devices hidden from public knowledge. Some criminal cases have later been re-opened after judges and defense attorneys learned that “confidential sources” used in investigations were actually Stingrays.

Law enforcement agencies say they’ve been directed by federal officials to keep their purchase and use of Stingrays and other devices a secret because of non-disclosure agreements forged between those agencies, the federal government and Harris Corporation. But judges have routinely sided with the ACLU and other organizations who file records requests for information about Stingrays, and details about the devices have trickled out for years.

One of the most-egregious details learned from public records requests is how state, county and local law enforcement agencies are able to obtain the devices. Records show departments routinely request Department of Homeland Security grants to purchase Stingrays and accessories, which can total in the thousands of dollars.

Grant applications say police departments, including some in California, need to obtain the devices for use in anti-terrorism investigations. But documents obtained by local media outlets show the devices are often used in ordinary criminal investigations with no nexus to terrorism or homeland security matters.

In 2017, the Detroit News published an article describing how immigration agents there were using Stingrays to track down undocumented immigrants following a crackdown issued by President Donald Trump. That report was the basis for a series of public records requests filed by the ACLU seeking information on how often Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE), Border Patrol and other federal immigration agencies were using Stingrays and for what purpose.

After waiting two years, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against ICE and their sister agencies, the Customs and Border Patrol (CPB). The lawsuit worked, and earlier this year, those federal agencies started handing over hundreds of documents (PDF 1, PDF 2) related to their use of Stingrays and other devices.

According to the ACLU, the documents show ICE spent hundreds of thousands of dollars securing Stingrays and upgrading to newer hardware called Crossbow that allows immigration agents to track 3G and 4G LTE smartphones of targets. The documents show ICE had used either a Stingray, Crossbow or some other kind of cellphone transmitter simulator more than 400 times between 2017 and 2019.

One of the most alarming revelations in the document is that law enforcement agencies have known since at least 2016 that ordinary phone users can deploy so-called “IMSI catchers” that simulate the very data collection activity that Stingrays and Crossbows possess. While federal officials suggested deploying anti-IMSI catchers in the wild, they worked hard to keep knowledge about this vulnerability a secret, even though it had the ability to threaten the privacy and security of ordinary phone users.

Worse, while officials in other countries have measured whether use of Stingrays or Crossbows can impair a person’s ability to make emergency phone calls (they can, studies conducted by these governments show), federal agencies have so far failed to carry out their own similar testing to see if using these phone surveillance tools could interfere with 9-1-1- calls.

“There can’t be accountability without transparency,” the ACLU said in a statement issued earlier this week. “The release of these records — albeit with redactions — provides some helpful insights into what was previously an extremely secretive surveillance practice. …  That’s good news, but concerns remain.”

Those concerns include how ICE uses these surveillance tools in ordinary immigration cases while telling the public that it doesn’t and CPB’s failure to turn over documents under the ACLU’s FOIA (the CPB says it has no responsive records, but the ACLU said this is unlikely because documents already made public revealed CPB had spent $2.5 million to obtain 33 cellphone transmitter simulator devices).

“We’re demanding the court order CBP to explain how it conducted its prior searches for records responsive to our FOIA request and to conduct a new search for responsive records,” the ACLU said. “The use of powerful, surreptitious surveillance equipment is concerning in any context. But when agencies such as ICE and CBP, with a long history of abusive practices, evade requests for information and then obfuscate provided information, we should all be concerned.”