By | Associated Press – Nov. 5, 2012
JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. (AP) — The caped figure on the surveillance video came running out of the darkness to the edge of a remote Army outpost in southern Afghanistan. Blood was smeared on his face, prosecutors said, and soaked into his clothes.
Less than a mile away, 16 Afghans, including nine children, were dead, some of their bodies on fire in two villages.
As fellow soldiers stopped him at the base's gate, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was incredulous, prosecutors said. Then, as he was taken into custody, Bales said, "I thought I was doing the right thing."
The details, from a prosecutor as well as Bales' comrades, emerged Monday as a preliminary hearing in his case opened, offering the clearest picture yet of one of the worst atrocities of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
If Proposition 34 passed, such prisoners would be given less legal assistance than they have no
A Naperville mother who left her daughter in the care of a baby sitter while she went to work learned after a frantic search Tuesday night that her little girl had been slain by the caretaker, who also killed her own son, officials said.
The baby sitter, Elzbieta M. Plackowska, 40, was charged with two counts of first-degree murder Wednesday night, DuPage County State's Attorney Robert Berlin said. Sources said the woman had given various explanations for what happened, including hearing demonic voices that led her to stab the children to death.
The bodies of the children — identified by sources as Olivia Dworakowski, 5, and Justin Plackowska, 7 or 8 — were discovered by police in a bedroom of the girl's town home in the western suburb, officials said.
Juan Rivera Jr., who was exonerated in January of three murder convictions, is suing law enforcement officials in Lake County alleging they framed Rivera for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Holly Staker in 1992.
In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Rivera's lawyers allege he was coerced into giving a false confession after four days of "intensive and abusive interrogation." The lawsuit further claims Rivera suffered a mental breakdown on the third night of the interrogation:
"As he was experiencing this mental collapse, the Defendants “hog tied” [Rivera] and placed him in a padded room. Medical personnel who observed Plaintiff soon thereafter diagnosed him with acute psychosis and observed that he had torn out pieces of his scalp."
Rivera's attorneys called their client's questioning by Lake County police one of the most "monumentally, psychologically abusive interrogations” in Illinois’ history," according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is OConnor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Also available from Amazon
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