Mistress Amber Frey has taken the stand in the Scott Peterson murder trial. Here's what she had to say so far about the first few dates:

Frey said Peterson did not wear a wedding ring when they met on Nov. 20, 2002. He poured champagne in his hotel room, putting a strawberry in her glass, and they had sex later that night. The next morning, he left her with his cell phone number, not his home number. On their second date, he carried her 22-month-old daughter as they went hiking. Later that day, he gave the girl a children's book. Then, he cooked seafood lasagna with wine before they had sex again. "He made the comment that there would be many more corks ... many more bottles to share," Frey testified.

The next day, Dec. 3, she gave Peterson a car seat and the key to her house, and asked him to pick up her daughter at day care. (empahsis supplied)

"He said he would be honored," recalled Frey, who returned home to find him warming up the previous night's dinner. Then all three went out to buy a Christmas tree. While trimming the tree, she Peterson he denied that he was ever "close to having children" with anyone else.

They didn't see each other from December 3, to December 9--at which time, having been confronted by her friend on December 6 with the knowledge that he was married, he cried and told her he had lost his wife and this was his first holiday without her. She assumed he meant his wife was dead.

Prosecutors say he began hatching the scheme to kill his wife and unborn child on December 7-8--after being outed on his marriage and before telling Amber he had lost his wife.

First off: What female single parent goes on a blind date, and after the second date a week later, gives the guy a key to her house and asks him to pick up her 22 month old kid at daycare? Either a very reckless person or one with extremely poor judgment and parenting skills. Is this a person to whom you would give much credence in deciding a matter of utmost importance to yourself or members of your family--one of the indicators of reasonable doubt?

Scott Peterson sounds like a guy trying to keep a piece of action on the side while his wife is going through the final months of pregnancy. It sounds like she thought she was in love because he told her he was a "successful businessman" --as in "rich businessman" and she recklessly glued herself to him because he was the answer to her prayers. As for Scott, it sounds like he knew a gullible gold-digger when he found one and played it for all it was worth.

Amber as a motive for murdering his unborn child--whose nursery he had recently finished decorating with a ship's motif? Not so far....stay tuned, the Amber sideshow will go on a while.

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Mark Hacking, accused of murdering his wife Lori Hacking, who reportedly was five weeks pregnant at the time she was killed, will not face the death penalty.

The prosecutor charged only first degree murder, punishable by five years to life--rather than aggravated murder. Without Lori's body, the state can't prove she was pregnant. She told friends she was pregnant and had taken a home pregnancy test, but never visited a doctor.

Hacking's defense lawyer and the prosecutor have been in continual contact. Hopefully, if Hacking's confessions to his brothers that he shot her in the head while she was sleeping are true, there will be a quick plea and resolution to this case. It sounds like this is in the works.

Update: 5/21/05. Mary Kay and Vili married today.

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Original Post

Mary Kay Letourneau was released from jail this week after serving 7 years in jail for raping her former 12 year old student--with whom she has two children. The children live with his mother. Vili Fualaau is now 21 and petitioned the Court Monday to allow them to reunite. He says he still loves her. She is now registered as a sex offender. The Court today granted his request.

Even the prosecutors couldn't think of a reason to ban the two from meeting--and thus didn't argue against the request.

The order was part of her sentence in 1997. The prosecutor's office said the court took into consideration that the victim is now a legal adult, and determined there was no legal basis to prevent contact between the two of them.

It's the right decision. She did her time. They have two kids together. Let them decide if it's really love and they want to be together, or whether their relationship belongs in the past.

Mark Hacking has been arrested for aggravated murder in the Utah case of his missing wife Lori Hacking. This is not much of a surprise considering authorities called off the search for Lori Hacking this weekend, saying that information they obtained from the husband made a volunteer search unnecessary.

Will he face the death penalty because his wife was pregnant? Could he be guilty of a lesser crime such as manslaughter because the killing was committed in the heat of passion ? Could he be not guilty at all because he is insane or because the killing was committed in self-defense or because it was a suicide? Or did he not kill her at all, but merely disposed of the body?

More facts are needed before coming to any conclusion. Fox News Legal Analyst Lis Wiehl and I will be discussing the new developments in the case, as well as the Scott Peterson case, tonight on Hannity and Colmes around 9:30 ET.

We have trouble believing this actually happened but it did. A crazed surgeon in Bucharest was supposed to operate on a man's testicles. Instead he cut off the man's p*nis and sliced it into three pieces:

A ROMANIAN surgeon underwent a fit of madness while operating on a patient's testicles and instead cut off the man's penis and sliced it into three pieces, hospital officials said. The surgeon, Naum Ciomu, was described as a senior member of the hospital staff and a professor of anatomy. He had been operating on a 34-year-old man for a testicular malformation when he committed the act, the officials said.

"We are shocked by what has happened. It is the first time we have had such a case," said Sorin Oprescu, head of the Bucharest emergency hospital where the patient was rushed for emergency reconstructive surgery. The operations have been entrusted to a highly respected Romanian plastic surgeon, Ioan Lascar, who said he would try to restore the man's urinary function but that he was unlikely to recover normal sexual activity.

Lesson: Never, never go to the emergency room in Bucharest.

Crime and Federalism, the blog that studies the intersection between federalism and federal criminal laws by a third year Pepperdine law student, has declared this week Ken Lay week. The author begins with some very complimentary words for Lay's lawyer, Michael Ramsey, and some criticism for the AUSA in the case. Mostly, the criticism is directed at the media coverage and spin.

Unfortunately, I learned that the press accounts are garbage. The "legal commentary" has mostly consisted of pop culture slogans and references to acts not charged in the Indictment. "He ruined the company and must pay," for example. Well, unless there is a federal crime for "ruining a company," and unless this crime is charged, such lines do not belong in any discussion of the Ken Lay case. We will have none of that here.

So here's what will be happening at C&F during Ken Lay Week:

My discussion will be based exclusively on the law and facts of the case. I hope you enjoy this feature. Please scroll down for the first entry - The Indictment. On Tuesday you can read Conspiracy. On Wednesay, Wire Fraud. Thursay will bring Securities Fraud. Finally, on Friday, we will discuss the Bank Fraud (the so-called Reg. U crimes).

We look forward to reading it.

by TChris

A cashier at a German grocery store thought she had devised a brilliant plan. She stashed the day's proceeds in her shoes, hit herself over the head, and told the police that she'd been robbed by a masked man who knocked her unconscious. Like most criminal schemes that require self-inflicted injury, this one didn't work. Doctors noticed that her head wounds didn't match her story, and the woman confessed when police confronted her with the discrepancy.

Close contender: the Florida man who allegedly hit his girlfriend with an alligator during a domestic dispute.

Update: Another contender: The man who forgot 88 bags of heroin, and his wallet, when he returned his rental car. (Thanks to Felix Deutsch for passing this along.)

Update: The transcript of our Washington Post live online chat today on Martha's sentencing is available here.

Bump and Update: Martha gets 5 months in federal custody, five months of home detention. The Judge recommended she serve her time at the federal prison camp in Danbury, CT. She is not contrite. The news is reporting she received a stay pending appeal, but since her lawyers haven't yet filed the Notice of Appeal (they have ten days to do so) we're wondering if the news is confusing release pending appeal with an order for a stay pending a voluntary surrender. We'll keep checking.

What do you think? Did she get off too light or was this a trophy conviction for the Government? In our view, it's the latter.

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Original Post 12:10 a.m.

At 10 am this morning, Martha Stewart learns her fate. We'll be doing the live chat for the Washington Post on the sentencing at 1:00 pm ET. Please join in.

It's expected the Judge will give Martha between 10 and 16 months. We've heard a lot of so-called experts on tv tonight, mostly former prosecutors who are still pro-prosecution, giving a lot of different scenarios. One former prosecutor gleefully said she's going to a federal penitentiary and she's going tomorrow.

Let's be real. If her guideline range is between 10 and 16 months (Zone C of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines,) the minimum term may be satisfied by --

• (1) a sentence of imprisonment; or

• (2) a sentence of imprisonment that includes a term of supervised release with a condition that substitutes community confinement* or home detention (pdf) according to the schedule in subsection (e), provided that at least one-half of the minimum term is satisfied by imprisonment.

So Martha's best case scenario is five months in federal custody, followed by five months of home detention.

Not a big surprise, really, as Martha's lawyers have caught a lot of flak in the media for their percieved poor handling of her case. Alan Dershowitz takes the criticism a step further, asking, Was Martha's Dream Team a Nightmare?

Martha Stewart is almost certainly going to prison because of her lawyers. It's really as simple as that. Every act for which she was convicted was committed after she retained some of the fanciest lawyers in New York. These lawyers let her walk into perjury traps and obstruction-of-justice charges by encouraging her to speak to prosecutors rather than insisting that she remain silent.

Now some members of her legal team have apparently been leaking information designed to show that the conviction was her fault, that she was guilty and should have accepted a plea bargain. With defense lawyers like that, who needs a prosecutor?

The reality is that Stewart could easily have avoided prison if she had simply kept her mouth shut — as she had the constitutional right to do — after the investigation began....Her lawyers, who are former prosecutors, probably thought that by taking their client in to speak to the prosecutors she could talk her way out of a jam. Instead, she talked herself into a conviction.

Ouch. Could it be that Alan has already been signed on for the appeal?

by TChris

This is an interesting approach to witness tampering.

Real estate developer Charles Kushner hired a New York City call girl to have sex with a cooperating witness in a grand jury investigation, had the sex act videotaped and sent photos and a copy of the tape to the witness' wife, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said.

Kushner was retaliating against the witness, a former employee, for cooperating in a criminal investigation of Kushner for possible tax fraud and illegal campaign contributions, and was trying to discourage him from cooperating further, Christie said.

Kushner's attorney, Benjamin Brafman, says the charges "are entirely baseless." More on the story here.

The judge in the case of former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson has thrown out her 14 year state sentence and ordered a new sentencing hearing within 60 days.

Olson — who had changed her name from Kathleen Soliah, married and was raising a family in St. Paul — pleaded guilty in 2001 to taking part in two attempts to bomb Los Angeles Police Department cars in 1975.

She was initially sentenced to five years and four months. The state Board of Prison Terms scrapped that sentence in October 2002 in exchange for a 14-year sentence, saying Olson's crimes had the potential for great violence and targeted multiple victims. The three-member board also cited Olson's flight and years as a fugitive. Cecil, in a ruling released Monday, said there was "no analysis" of how the state Board of Prison Terms decided 14 years was an appropriate sentence.

Lea Fastow, wife of former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow, begins her year-long jail sentence today in the downtown Houston federal detention center. As we explained here, this is no club fed. It's an 11-story jail. She'll be in an 8' by 10' cell, which she will share with a roomate. She will live under florescent lights and rarely get outside. There are no facilities for visiting children.

Mrs. Fastow will get no good time off her sentence. There is no federal parole. She'll have to do every day of the year sentence.

We're still angry at her Judge for refusing to recommend a camp. While a Judge's recommendations aren't binding on the Bureau of Prisons, BOP generally tries to follow them. If a Judge's recommendation is not followed, BOP has to write a letter to the Judge and explain the rejection. (The letter is secret, and not provided to defense counsel, only to the Judge and Probation Department.) The Judge in this case played hardball with Mrs. Fastow all the way through, first rejecting the Government's sentencing recommendation, and then refusing to make her requested designation recommendation.

It was Mrs. Fastow who convinced her husband Andrew to cooperate with the Government and take a ten year hit. But for Andrew Fastow cooperating, there would be no Indictment of Ken Lay. She's cooperated with the investigation as well.