South Africa has agreed to extradite former SLA member and long time South Africa resident and teacher James Kilgore to the U.S. to answer to charges of murder and bank robbery pending in California. Kilgore has been a fugitive for some 27 years.

Four of the other charged former SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) members, including Sara Jane Olson, formerly Kathleen Soliah, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder in the bank-robbery case. The plea bargain avoided possible sentences of life in prison, if they were convicted at trial.They will be sentenced in February and are expected to receive six to eight year prison terms.

"The same deal was offered to Kilgore, 55, who admitted his true identity and did not resist arrest. His lawyer, Michael Evans, said last month Kilgore had agreed to a plea bargain on the murder and robbery charges."

A spokesperson for Justice Minister Penuell Maduna said the deal was a key factor in agreeing to the extradition.

An armed patrol of vigilantes have set out to lower the crime rate in Houston. Two weeks ago they went out looking for gang members. The Houston police department asked them to stop their patrols, and they have temporarily agreed.

We find this group's actions unacceptable - we hope that roaming around public streets in Houston with a gun and with intent to do bodily injury is a crime--and that these vigilantes find themselves in jail.

We have nothing against citizens being armed. We support Colorado's "Make My Day" law which allows a citizen to use deadly force against an intruder in their home. But to let citizens run around the streets with guns in search of members of a particular group they don't like is just pure lawlessness--and anarchy. This is not a Second Amendment issue. Vigilante justice simply has no place in a civilized society.

The prosecutor in the Winona Ryder shoplifting trial recommends drug and psychiatric counseling along with restitution and community service for Winona Ryder, convicted last month of shoplifting at Saks in Beverly Hills.

The People filed their sentencing memorandum Monday, you can read the whole thing at Smoking Gun, which summarizes the DA's recommendations as a request for the Judge "to order the actress to serve 480 hours of community service and to cease using aliases, specifically the handle "Emily Thompson." When the 31-year-old actress was arrested last December for shoplifting, Beverly Hills cops found Ryder carrying a remarkable array of painkillers (liquid Demerol, Percodan, Vicodin, Morphine Sulfate, etc.), some of which were prescribed to the Thompson alias. Prosecutors also want Ryder sentenced to a provision that would allow law enforcement officers to search "her person and property" at any time, "with or without a warrant or probable cause."

Sentencing is set for Friday. With the DA not seeking jail, the hearing will likely focus on conditions of probation.

Another lengthy, insightful article by investigative journalist Jim Dywer on the Central Park Jogger case in Sunday's New York Times: New Light on Jogger's Rape Calls Evidence Into Question.

The new evidence, of course, refers to new DNA testing excluding the five convicted youths, the confession by Reyes and a new review of the taped confessions.

One interesting facet of this article is that it goes throught the confessions and actions of each of the youths individually, for example, whose parents were there, whose weren't, and whether the parents were there for part or all of the interrogations. It also reviews the youths' lawyers attempts to have evidence of low IQ's introduced at trial.

Towards the end:

"Over the last decade, DNA testing has cleared 27 people nationwide who were convicted of crimes based on some form of confession, according to records kept by the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School. In another category, Prof. Steven Drizzen at Northwestern University School of Law, and Prof. Richard Leo, at the University of California at Irvine have identified 130 people who falsely confessed but were cleared before trial."

"Many people close to the case feel that the legal verdict is bound to be overturned in the coming days. If Mr. Reyes's statements and the recent DNA tests do not exonerate the original five defendants, they qualify as "newly discovered evidence" for which verdicts may be vacated under the New York State penal code."

We wonder how much clout former DA Linda Fairstein, widely reported to want the job for DA when Morgantheu retires, still has. If it's a lot, it's unlikely there will be a lot of fault directed at her for (what we believe is) mishandling the investigation. See our prior posts on this here.

From the crimes in the news department:

Dominatrix Pleads Not Guilty in Client's Death

"A dominatrix pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges she chopped up a client after he died of an apparent heart attack during a bondage session, and then dumped the body parts in a trash bin, court officials in Massachusetts said."

Sniper suspects John Muhammad and 17 year-old John Lee Malvo have been cleared in three Baton Rouge murders . DNA evidence has excluded them.

This is one of the problems with presuming a person is guilty of a crime based solely on allegations that he has committed other similar acts in the past. Much of the public has already decided, based upon media reports and leaks by cops and/or prosecutors or high government officials that the two suspects likely committed every unsolved murder in the South in the past year. How do you unring the bell to assure the suspects a fair trial?

There hasn't been a single leak we are aware of attributable to defense counsel in the case. Read our prior coverage (click on the Crimes in the News archived section on the right) and let us know if you find any.

The FBI issued a report today showing a dramatic surge in hate crimes against Arabs since Sept. 11. You can read the whole report here.

"The judge overseeing the long-delayed capital murder trial of Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols unexpectedly stepped down on Friday, blaming the grinding delays that have stalled it on his docket for more than two years."

"State District Judge Ray Dean Linder became the second judge to leave the case, which has been beset by a host of problems and has already seen the original prosecutor and judge removed."

We heard late yesterday that funding for the defense has been restored, and a preliminary hearing for Mr. Nichols has been set the first week in February. We're curious as to any connection between those these events.

Check out this totally impressive site dedicated to the Central Park Jogger case--called One People's Project.

There is an excellent, very long article recapturing the Central Park Jogger case, and particularly the conduct of the original prosecutors, in this week's Village Voice, When Justice Is a Game: A Journey Through the Tangled Case of the Central Park Jogger by Sydney H. Schanberg. We recommend you read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

"Morgenthau has a court date of December 5 to deliver his recommendations on whether the convictions should be vacated. Unseen backstage, the two assistant district attorneys in charge of Morgenthau's reinvestigation, Nancy Ryan and Peter Casolaro, are said to be under heavy lobbying from the players who produced those convictions. It's now a tug-of-war between a fair decision and one that would try to protect some carefully crafted reputations. "

Of prosecutor Linda Fairstein, Schanberg writes:

"So intense was the push for confessions that Fairstein, who had sought and achieved celebrity from her sex-crime prosecutions, bullied and stalled and blocked the mother and two friends of one suspect, Yusef Salaam, from gaining access to him. Fairstein's apparent purpose was to keep the suspect under wraps because she had been informed by the interrogating detective that the questioning was in a delicate phase where Salaam had begun to make some admissions. A short while later, Fairstein realized she could not bar the mother any longer, and the angry parent halted the interrogation."

"Linda Fairstein, a fiercely competitive, driven professional who was 41 at the time of the jogger rape, has since left the D.A.'s office to write novels about an assistant district attorney who prosecutes sex crimes. When the rape occurred, she raced into the fray to wrest the case away from Nancy Ryan, 39, another upward A.D.A. who was Fairstein's chief rival in the Morgenthau constellation. Now, Morgenthau has put Ryan in charge of his reinvestigation of the case. Those who know Fairstein say she harbors a dream of succeeding Morgenthau as Manhattan D.A. The latest developments could wreck that dream."

"....People sometimes use the phrase "the game" to describe how big systems like government and multinational corporations often get manipulated not for the common good but for the good of the people who run them. It's not a description of evil, but rather of human nature. It explains what happens when individuals have been doing things a certain way for a long time and come to believe this is always the right way. One symptom is when a player begins to focus only on winning, on trouncing the opposing side. Another is when people become so habit-formed and sure of themselves that they stop asking the question: "Could I possibly be wrong about this?"

"The story of the Central Park jogger case may be in large part a story about people in the justice system playing the game—when they should have been doing the right thing. "

The second article is about DA Linda Fairstein, and three cases she's botched, not just the jogger case, leading the author and others to speculate that her quest for higher office and greater power and fame may be at a dead-end:

"Following a confession to the Central Park attack by imprisoned serial rapist Matias Reyes, whose DNA links him to the brutal crime, the jogger case seems to be cracking open to reveal prosecutorial failures. Worse, this appears to be the third flub of a major case from the glory days of a prosecutor who was once a Clinton administration candidate for United States Attorney General and who is still considered by some a contender to replace current district attorney Robert Morgenthau should he retire."

"Fairstein's behavior seemed so outrageous that in the 1993 appeals decision on Salaam's case then appellate court judge Vito Titone specifically named her in his dissenting opinion and blasted the entire interrogation process. He recently told Newsday, "I was concerned about a criminal justice system that would tolerate the conduct of the prosecutor, Linda Fairstein, who deliberately engineered the 15-year-old's confession. . . . Fairstein wanted to make a name. She didn't care. She wasn't a human."

"Though Fairstein retired from the D.A.'s office last spring, many attorneys agree that she still has devotees both in that office and among detectives. And according to some close to the case, the rivalry between her and Ryan, who is said to believe the Central Park Five were not linked to the crime, still exists."

"But there is the possibility that Fairstein's power is beginning to diminish. She recently pressured producers at ABC's Primetime not to run a story featuring interviews with a few of the Central Park Five. ABC not only ran that show, but aired a clip of it on Good Morning America, which is co-anchored by Diane Sawyer, a longtime Fairstein friend who wrote praise for her first book. Of course, her staying power remains to be seen in February, when the D.A.'s office is scheduled to release its final decision on the Central Park case."

Also not to be missed on the Jogger case are the recent Voice articles, Marked as the Enemy by Dasun Allah in which the five convicted youths speak and Across 110th Street by Rivka Gewirtz Little, about the changed lives of the families of the five convicted youths.

Via Atrios we learn that Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts 23 year-old son was busted for possession with intent to distribute marijuana , a felony. He had less than two ounces in his possession. This sounds like overcharging to us.

On the other hand, we question whether the the younger Watts may have received preferential treatment for not being charged with domestic violence after his girlfriend said he struck her twice in the face. It's a rare jurisdiction these days that still leaves the decision whether to prosecute up to the purported victim. The usual course is for the police to arrest one or both participants, no matter what.

"City police officers said they went to a location at Boyd Street and Classen Boulevard Sept. 9 in response to a report of a fight between a man and woman. Jerrell Watts was taken into custody after the woman said he had hit her twice in the face. Kuykendall said his office declined to file a domestic abuse complaint in the case "upon request of the victim."

The Judge in the sniper case refused to issue a gag order on the FBI and police today saying he needed more time to study the source of the leaks.

We disagree. He could and should have issued a gag order on all the parties. Why? See our prior post here.