Starvin Larry

Via The Aging Rebel

Yesterday in Waco, a judge named James Morgan, ruled that there was probable cause to arrest William and Morgan English, a nice, young couple from Brenham, Texas, for engaging in organized criminal activity. The charge carries a penalty of five to 99 years in prison.

The Englishes had attended a brunch sponsored by the Texas Confederation of Clubs and Independents on May 17 at the Twin Peaks restaurant. Multiple, informed sources said Judge Morgan did not appear to be drunk.

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Via The Aging Rebel

Abelino “Abel” Reyna, the McLennan County District Attorney who has transformed the investigation of the Twin Peaks massacre in Waco last May 17 into the Spanish Inquisition, has a long official history of stupidity, ignorance of the law and demagoguery. When Waco’s inevitable $10 billion legal bill comes due sometime in the next four or five years people will probably point to Reyna as the reason why.

Reyna defeated Democrat John Segrest as District Attorney in November 2010 and was sworn in on January 3, 2011. His father is Felipe Reyna who also served as McLennan County District Attorney and as an Appeals Court Judge.

Abel Reyna formed a natural alliance with the Waco Police Department, a political force in and of itself in Waco, which objected to Segrest’s 50 percent prosecution rate. Some criminologists see a prosecution rate of about 50 percent as an indication of efficiency. Reyna claimed county residents were “skeptical of the judicial system” and he promised his office would “be aggressive…and we will be efficient.”

Reyna is not a criminologist. He is a politician and his first official act was to hire an additional crimes against children prosecutor. The new prosecutor’s name was Greg Davis and he quickly became embroiled in a corruption scandal at his old job.

Tougher Plea Deals

Reyna immediately and fatuously began sabotaging the plea deal system with much tougher proffers. Some of his critics pointed out that his “tough-on-crime policies have contributed to a rise in the jail population and the associated costs of feeding and housing inmates. Those policies prevent cases from being resolved quickly, increasing the time defendants stay in jail awaiting trial.” The net effect of Reyna’s “toughness” was overflowing jails and trial dockets. Defendants had no incentive to take bad plea deals. The resulting drain on the county budget may explain some of the baffling actions Waco took after the massacre, including the seizure of vehicles.

He was nominated by one satirist as the “stupidest politician in America” after he refused to obey a Texas law called Chapter 64 that would require DNA testing to exonerate prisoners who claimed they had been wrongly convicted.

“Technically you have any and every defendant who ever pled to a crime or was convicted of a crime potentially could file a post-conviction DNA motion,” Reyna said. “What concerns me most as District Attorney is that there is absolutely nothing in Chapter 64 with regard to victims and their families.”

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h/t Grandtrines

Given a digital image of a person’s face, face recognition software matches it against a database of other images. If any of the stored images matches closely enough, the system reports the sighting to its owner. Research on automatic face recognition has been around for decades, but accelerated in the 1990s. Now it is becoming practical, and face recognition systems are being deployed on a large scale.

Some applications of automatic face recognition systems are relatively unobjectionable. Many facilities have good reasons to authenticate everyone who walks in the door, for example to regulate access to weapons, money, criminal evidence, nuclear materials, or biohazards. When a citizen has been arrested for probable cause, it is reasonable for the police to use automatic face recognition to match a mug shot of the individual against a database of mug shots of people who have been arrested previously. These uses of the technology should be publicly justified, and audits should ensure that the technology is being used only for proper purposes.

Face recognition systems in public places, however, are a matter for serious concern. The issue recently came to broad public attention when it emerged that fans attending the Super Bowl had unknowingly been matched against a database of alleged criminals, and when the city of Tampa deployed a face-recognition system in the nightlife district of Ybor City. But current and proposed uses of face recognition are much more widespread, as the resources at the end of this article demonstrate in detail. The time to consider the acceptability of face recognition in public places is now, before the practice becomes entrenched and people start getting hurt.

Nor is the problem limited to the scattered cases that have been reported thus far. As the underlying information and communication technologies (digital cameras, image databases, processing power, and data communications) become radically cheaper over the next two decades, face recognition will become dramatically cheaper as well, even without assuming major advances in technologies such as image processing that are specific to recognizing faces. Legal constraints on the practice in the United States are minimal. (In Europe the data protection laws will apply, providing at least some basic rights of notice and correction.) Databases of identified facial images already exist in large numbers (driver’s license and employee ID records, for example), and new facial-image databases will not be hard to construct, with or without the knowledge or consent of the people whose faces are captured. (The images need to be captured under controlled conditions, but most citizens enter controlled, video-monitored spaces such as shops and offices on a regular basis.) It is nearly certain, therefore, that automatic face recognition will grow explosively and become pervasive unless action is taken now.

I believe that automatic face recognition in public places, including commercial spaces such as shopping malls that are open to the public, should be outlawed. The dangers outweigh the benefits. The necessary laws will not be passed, however, without overwhelming pressure of public opinion and organizing. To that end, this article presents the arguments against automatic face recognition in public places, followed by responses to the most common arguments in favor.

From Here