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SAN FRANCISCO -- A suspected gang member accused of killing a father and two sons escaped prosecution in a weapons case earlier this year when the San Francisco district attorney's office concluded it didn't have enough evidence to connect him to a gun that a passenger in his car was carrying, authorities said Thursday. Edwin Ramos, 21, of El Sobrante, who police say is a member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) street gang, was formally charged late Thursday with three counts of murder in the shooting deaths Sunday of Tony Bologna, 48, and his sons Michael, 20, and Matthew, 16....

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Monday refused to step into a high-stakes legal fight between the Justice Department and indicted Rep. William Jefferson over the unprecedented raid on the lawmaker's Capitol Hill office. The Justice Department said the court's action would not impede the bribery case against the Louisiana Democrat. The justices declined to review an appeals court ruling that said that, while the office search itself was legal, the FBI reviewed legislative documents in violation of the Constitution. Other documents seized in the raid were provided to prosecutors and were used to support a 16-count indictment of Jefferson...

The federal criminal investigation that has led to Eliot Spitzer's resignation as governor of New York illustrates the great dangers all Americans face from vague and open-ended sex and money-transaction statutes. Federal law, if read broadly, criminalizes virtually all sexual encounters for which something of value has been given. Federal money-laundering statutes criminalize many entirely legitimate and conventional banking transactions. Congress enacted these laws to give federal prosecutors wide discretion in deciding which "bad guys" to go after. Generally, wise and intelligent prosecutors use their discretion properly -- to target organized crime, terrorism, financial predation, exploitation of children and the...

What We Know About Client 9 From a redacted copy of the sealed complaint about the Emperor's Club prostitution ring, we were able to extract the following details about Client 9's dealings with the organization, and his Washington liaison. Client 9, according to the Times, is the one alleged to be Governor Eliot Spitzer. We have no official confirmation of this. But below are the things that we do know about this mysterious player from the legal papers: • He refused to use a "traditional wire transfer" to pay the organization but arranged for an Emperor's Club girl to take...

During some of the bloodiest years of the drug wars of the 1980s, crack was seen as far more dangerous than powdered cocaine, and that perception was written into the sentencing laws. But now that notion is under attack like never before. Criminologists, doctors and other experts say the differences between the two forms of the drug were largely exaggerated and do not justify the way the law comes down 100 times harder on crack. A push to shrink the disparity in punishments got a boost last month when reduced federal sentencing guidelines went into effect for crack offenses. Then,...

San Francisco imprisons African Americans for drug offenses at a much higher rate than whites, according to a report to be released today... *** San Francisco locks up a higher percentage of members of the African American community in drug cases than any other county in the study. In the county, 123 people out of every 100,000 are sent to state prison each year for drug offenses. Of those, whites are incarcerated at a rate of 35 per 100,000 white people, while blacks are incarcerated at a rate of 1,013 per 100,000 black people. "It is not that San Francisco...

A veteran political activist is facing 10 years in prison and a hefty fine for attempting to petition government for redress of grievances. The latest news from Pakistan? No, this is happening in Oklahoma. Last month Paul Jacob, the former head of U.S. Term Limits and current head of Citizens in Charge, was led out of an Oklahoma City courtroom in handcuffs after pleading not guilty to charges that he conspired to defraud the state. Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson, who's overseeing this bizarre prosecution, has accused Mr. Jacob and two fellow petition organizers--Rick Carpenter of Oklahomans in Action and...

Michael Vick's attorneys are engaged in plea negotiations with federal prosecutors and the Falcons quarterback could reach an agreement before new dogfighting charges are handed down next week, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations.

MIAMI - Federal prosecutors rested their case Friday against Jose Padilla and two co-defendants charged with participating in an al-Qaida support cell. The jury has listened to nearly nine weeks of testimony from 22 witnesses and tapes of dozens of FBI wiretaps collected during an investigation that lasted years. Defense lawyers for Padilla, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi will begin their case next week, with the trial likely to continue into August. Padilla, a 36-year-old U.S. citizen, was originally accused of plotting with al-Qaida to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb." He was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago's...

WASHINGTON — Internet cartoons show him with horns and the word "TRAITOR" branded on his forehead. Conservative talk radio derides him as "Johnny Satan." At least two Republican congressmen, normally staunch defenders of the Bush administration, have castigated him on the House floor. If the White House and Justice Department had added Johnny Sutton to the list of federal prosecutors to be fired, his ouster probably would not have raised an eyebrow among Democrats, and it would have pleased much of the president's conservative base. Sutton is the U.S. attorney in west Texas. Based in San Antonio, his border district...

Former Edwards County Deputy Sheriff Gilmer Hernandez was sentenced to 12 months plus one day by Federal Judge Robert T Dawson. We will have a full story and pictures by 4 p.m. Hernandez was convicted December 1, 2006 for violating the civil rights of an illegal alien when the Suburan in which she was hiding attempted to flee a traffic stop made by then-Deputy Hernandez. Hernandez fired his handgun at the Suburban's tires and a bullet fragment struck the illegal alien in the mouth.

STAFFORD, Va. — A woman convicted of a felony for throwing a cup of ice into a car that cut her off in traffic was sentenced to probation instead of prison, a judge ruled Wednesday. Jessica Hall faced between two and five years in prison after she was convicted last month of maliciously throwing a missile — the cup of ice — into an occupied vehicle. No one was injured in the incident last summer. "The facts of this case ... suggest that the sentence in this case should be reduced," Judge Frank A. Hoss Jr. told Hall, who thanked...

A Texas deputy sheriff who fired shots at a fleeing vehicle after the driver tried to run him down faces 10 years in prison for injuring one of the passengers, a Mexican national being smuggled illegally into the United States. The U.S. attorney, who won lengthy prison terms last year for two U.S. Border Patrol agents in the shooting of a drug-smuggling suspect, also prosecuted Edwards County Deputy Sheriff Guillermo F. Hernandez, who is to be sentenced next month. The deputy's boss, Sheriff Donald G. Letsinger, said his officer -- who had been on the job for a year --...

It is unfortunate to see Wendy McElroy, a former writer for my website intellectualconservative.com (who has always been very open about her libertarian views on pornography) drink the kool-aid of 20/20 and other media spin regarding the prosecution of Matt Bandy. The prosecution by my boss Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas was not about adult pornography, it was about child pornography. Bandy admitted to frequenting a Yahoo child porn group and a CD was found next to his computer with child pornography on it. That's no "trojan virus." Read the full article on Fox News McElroy's article defending Bandy McElroy's...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Prosecutors in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial showed chilling videos of gassed children lying in a field and villagers fleeing clouds of white smoke, arguing Tuesday that the former president and his regime used chemical weapons against the Kurds of northern Iraq in the late 1980s. "These children are the saboteurs that the defendants talk about," prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon said sarcastically as the footage showed scores of dead children on the ground, partially covered by blankets. Defense attorneys had argued that Saddam and his co-defendants were fighting Kurdish insurgents during the 1987-88 military offensive that was code named...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Saddam Hussein on Tuesday attacked prosecution witnesses in his trial for genocide against the Kurds, accusing them of sowing division among Iraqis for the benefit of Israel. The deposed leader addressed the court after two Kurds testified that during a military offensive in northern Iraq in 1988, they were detained in a camp where conditions were so bad that hundreds of prisoners died of malnutrition. "This will only serve the separation," Saddam said, referring to the deepening division among Iraqis as shown by the rising death toll in the insurgency and sectarian fighting. "The Zionists are the...

In the last few years, we've witnessed the ongoing battle between newspapers like the New York Times and the federal government and the "right" of newspapers to hold their sources confidential. The audacity of the Times to release classified secret or top secret information because of the industry's classic "the people have a right to know" argument was highlighted by NYT executive editor Bill Keller's decision to release info about the National Security Agency's efforts to monitor phone calls without court-approved warrants. The Times had held back on the story for over a year, but now, President Bush had stepped...

Members of Congress petitioning the president to pardon two U.S. Border Patrol agents convicted of assaulting an illegal alien who was trying to smuggle drugs into the U.S. are now calling for an investigation of the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the agents. "These were good agents doing their job," said Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.). "There is something that stinks to high heaven." On Feb. 17, 2005, U.S. Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean were on duty when they encountered Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila in a van carrying 743 pounds of marijuana. When the agents tried to stop Aldrete-Davila, he...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal government has fallen back to prosecuting international terrorists at about the same rate it did before Sept. 11, according to a study based on Justice Department data. The surprising decline followed a sharp increase in such criminal prosecutions in the year after the attacks, according to a study released Sunday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research group at Syracuse University. The analysis of data from Justice's Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys also found: _In the eight months ending last May, Justice attorneys declined to prosecute more than nine out of every 10...

So much for having Karl Rove "frog-marched" out of the White House "in handcuffs." That's the fate Democratic partisan Joe Wilson once predicted for President Bush's political guru, and yesterday his hope and accusations vanished like fog on the Potomac. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald informed Mr. Rove's lawyers on Monday that he'll bring no charges as part of his investigation into who leaked the CIA identity of Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame. Mr. Wilson's original claims that Mr. Bush lied about Iraq intelligence have been discredited many times over, including in a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee. And...