The Freedom Bulletin

The Middlesex County D.A.’s office filed their brief in the appeal of Neil Entwistle, the British man convicted of killing his wife and baby daughter in 2008. They tried to refute the claims that Entwistle made in his appellate brief, arguing that police acted reasonably by entering his Hopkinton, MA home without a warrant and that pretrial publicity did not bias the jury selection process.

The Boston Herald has the full text of the prosecution’s brief here.

You can read more from the Herald and the MetroWest Daily News.

The conspiracy theories about Dominique Strauss-Kahn have continued to be in the news, especially now that security footage from the Sofitel hotel has been released by French TV channel BFM. The video (which you can watch below) shows DSK calmly checking out at the front desk and leaving in a taxi. Later, it shows Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid who accused DSK of sexual assault, appearing to describe and act out the alleged crime to security personnel. And, strangest of all, the tape shows two hotel employees doing a 13-second victory dance immediately after the police are called.

Diallo’s lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, who has filed a civil case against DSK, had the audacity to hold a press conference, declaring that the tapes are ”further proof that Ms Diallo is telling the truth” because she “is shown on video demonstrating to her supervisor and hotel security how he pushed her down the hallway to the back of the hotel suite.” That is quite a leap of logic. All the video shows is that Diallo told security that Strauss-Kahn assaulted her. I don’t think anyone is denying that. Yes, some of the gestures she makes in the surveillance footage seem to match details she gave in interviews and other descriptions of the alleged assault, but that doesn’t prove that the totality of her story was consistent, let alone that it was true.

Plus, as DSK’s biographer Michel Taubmann points out, ”At no point in time…does Ms Diallo seem to complain or to cry. The fact that she does not cry does not mean she was not raped but it contradicts the account of her lawyers, who say she was overwhelmed, that she suffered horribly from pain in her shoulder. She is seen leaning against a wall, waving her arms about.”

And the celebratory dance, although not the three minutes originally described by investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein in his excellent article about the case, sure looks suspicious. Either the two employees were involved in a conspiracy to bring down DSK, or they decided to high-five and congratulate each other about sports in the middle of dealing with an alleged sexual assault. Either way, not classy.

What the video does show clearly is that Strauss-Kahn was in no particular hurry to leave. This contradicts Diallo’s civil complaint, which says that DSK “fled the hotel like a common criminal…In his haste to flee the scene of a crime, he rushed out of the hotel with toothpaste smeared on the outside of his mouth and was looking over his shoulders.”

It is beyond me how Diallo’s lawyers can claim victory in a video that shows that they lied in their complaint. My verdict? Although the video doesn’t definitively prove that DSK was the victim of a conspiracy, it sure helps his case more than it helps Diallo’s.

Plus, French government officials may have called the Manhattan D.A.’s office to tell them of other allegations against DSK, which were not yet publicly known, in order to ruin his chances of being granted bail. According to Liberation, DSK’s lawyers had reached an agreement with prosecutors to release him on $250,000 bail, but after learning about attempted rape allegations by author Tristane Banon (which have since been dismissed) and links to a prostitution ring in northern France (which DSK is still waiting to be questioned about by French police), prosecutors backed out of the agreement, and DSK ended up spending about a week in jail.

Photo by International Monetary Fund, via Flickr

A new article came out today in the New York Review of Books and Financial Times that reveals new details about the day Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a hotel maid in New York City. It gives new support to the theory that he may have been the victim of a plot by his political opponents, the UMP party of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Among the new revelations about DSK’s day at the Sofitel hotel:

• DSK suspected that his IMF-issued BlackBerry had been hacked, after a friend who worked as a researcher for the UMP texted him to warn him that at least one of his emails had been read by UMP members. On the morning of the fateful day, May 14, he called his wife, Anne Sinclair, and asked her to arrange for a friend to check out the phone to see if it was bugged.
• According to DSK’s own account, he packed his suitcase, which he left near the foyer of his room, number 2806, before taking a shower at about noon. If this is true, then the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, would have known that he was still in the room.
• The Sofitel’s security director, John Sheehan, called his superior, Rene-Georges Querry, as he was making his way to the hotel after Diallo reported the alleged assault. At the time, Querry was watching a soccer game with Sarkozy.
• Three minutes after receiving a message from Sheehan, hotel staff called the police. This was a full hour after Diallo reported the alleged assault to her supervisor.
• The Sofitel’s chief engineer and an unidentified man high-fived, clapped, and did a celebration dance that lasted three minutes after police were called.
• Diallo entered room 2820, on the same floor as DKS’s room, both before and after the encounter with DSK. The hotel refused to reveal who was staying in that room, but they had not yet checked out at the time Diallo entered the room. Diallo lied about this to investigators, telling them that she hadn’t gone in any rooms after the alleged assault because they all had “do not disturb” signs.
• When DSK left the hotel to meet his daughter for lunch, he inadvertently left his IMF BlackBerry behind. It was mysteriously deactivated at 12:51, and no one knows what happened to it since. It has never been recovered.

The truth may never be known, but one thing is for sure: many people jumped to conclusions far too quickly about what happened that day in room 2806.

As almost the whole world knows, Dr. Conrad Murray was convicted on Monday of involuntary manslaughter for giving Michael Jackson a dose of propofol that ultimately caused his death. After thinking about this for a couple of days, I don’t think this was the right verdict.

In court, the case came down to how exactly Jackson received the fatal dose. Prosecutors claimed that Murray administered the propofol to Jackson, while the defense claimed Jackson injected it himself. But neither side denied that Jackson wanted and asked for the anesthetic. According to Murray, “He was pleading and begging to please please let him have some milk because that was the only thing that would work.”

So basically, Murray did what Jackson asked for. Jackson weighed the risks and the benefits of taking propofol in a home setting to help him sleep, and decided that the benefits outweighed the risks. Yes, this is a dangerous thing to do, and many people would consider it stupid, but people have the right to do dangerous things if they want to, and doctors have the right to help them carry out their decisions. Manslaughter convictions should be reserved for those who cause people’s deaths against their will. Although Jackson’s family members, friends, and fans are understandably upset at his death, and want to see someone punished, the truth is that Jackson died as a result of his own choices (choices he had a right to make). Convicting Murray of manslaughter is not justice.

Murray is appealing his conviction. It’ll be interesting to see how the appeal goes.

The European Arrest Warrant – which allows anyone in any European country to be arrested and extradited by any other European country without evidence needing to be produced – has come under scrutiny thanks to Julian Assange and his battle against extradition from the U.K. to Sweden over sexual-assault allegations. But his case is far from the only one that makes this system look unjust. For example, Tracey Molamphy, from Lancashire, England, was arrested at an airport in Germany, strip searched, and forced to pay large sums in legal fees, because 12 years earlier, her boyfriend unknowingly possessed counterfeit money while on vacation in Portugal. Sounds pretty ridiculous, right? She is now suing the Portuguese government for wrongful imprisonment and mental anguish (as she should be, in my opinion!).

Ms Molamphy told The Sunday Telegraph: “I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it. Even the German police officer who took me to prison said it was ridiculous.” After a full body search, Ms Molamphy was forced to change into a prison uniform. She spent the next 14 days in a small cell, shared with a heroin addict, in which she was locked for 22½ hours a day.

“Nobody told me anything,” she said. “I’ve never been in trouble with the police apart from this and I didn’t have any idea what it was about at first.”

Read the rest at the Telegraph.