Teacher accused of sending sex texts, images to student

Authorities said a La Mirada substitute teacher arrested on suspicion of lewd contact with a student met the girl in a classroom and soon developed a relationship with her on Facebook.

The Facebook friendship evolved into teacher Taylor Welch “sexting” the girl and sending her sexually graphic images, detectives said.

Welch, 22, was taken into custody Tuesday by detectives with the Los Angeles County sheriff’s special victims unit. He is accused of inappropriately touching the 13-year-old alleged victim in the classroom.

Welch was a substitute teacher at Arlie F. Hutchinson Middle School, which is part of the Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District. He was being held in lieu of $140,000 bail.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s Sgt. Dan Scott said investigators learned of the alleged abuse when the victim showed photographs of the suspect, which were stored on her cellphone, to a friend.

This led to a parent reporting the matter to school authorities, who notified the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.Welch was arrested on suspicion of felony lewd acts upon a child and distributing obscene material to a minor.

School district officials said they were notified Tuesday morning of Welch’s arrest and were cooperating with the investigation at Hutchinson Middle School.

Welch is the second substitute teacher in the district to be arrested this year. In March, Ted Nishihara was arrested on suspicion of molesting a student in a classroom at Los Coyotes Middle School.

Scott said detectives believe it is possible there are additional victims and urge anyone who may have been a victim to contact investigators at 1-877-710-5273 (LASD) or specialvictims@lasd.org

 

Mistie Atkinson Had Sex With 16-Year-Old Son, Faces Incest Charges, Cops Say

A Nice, Calif. woman faces incest charges after she allegedly had sex with her 16-year-old biological son.

Police said they found Mistie Atkinson with the boy in a hotel room in March as they were serving a warrant, the Napa Valley Register reported.

Atkinson pleaded not guilty on March 9 to incest and oral copulation of a minor among other charges.

Napa police said that videos captured on the boy’s phone show Atkinson allegedly performing oral sex and having sexual intercourse with the teen in February. She’s also accused of sending sexually explicit images to the boy electronically.

“Atkinson and the victim are aware they are biological mother and son,” cops said in a release.

The boy’s father, who has sole custody, obtained a restraining order against Atkinson,The Weekly Vice reported.

Atkinson is being held on $200,000 bail until her next hearing on May 10.

 

Man in $5.5 million gold scheme facing 130 years in prison

SANTA ANA – A fugitive who was arrested with a book entitled “How to Be Invisible” and later convicted of defrauding an elderly Laguna Niguel couple of $5.5 million in a gold mining scheme is expected to be sentenced in federal court here Monday afternoon.

An Orange County jury late last year found John Arthur Walthall, 56, of La Habra, guilty of four counts of wire fraud and one count of failure to appear, the FBI said.

Evidence presented at trial showed Walthall purportedly created a partnership to fund the extraction of gold from abandoned mines, telling the couple in their 80s he had conducted research on the gold mining process for 20 years, according to an FBI news release.

Prosecutors argued Walthall transferred the partnership funds to 27 separate bank accounts through which he spent the money, without the couple’s knowledge or approval, on personal items, including paying off vehicles, part of a $250,000 loan he received from a former fiancée, buying a hyperbaric oxygen chamber estimated to be worth $60,000, and paying for his child’s rent payments and $10,000 tuition for a film school, the FBI said.

Walthall remained a fugitive for a short time and was arrested on July 26, 2011, in Mesquite, Nev., under a false name, evidence introduced during the trial revealed. He faces a maximum statutory sentence of 130 years in federal prison, the FBI said.

 

MURRIETA: Marijuana collective suing city raided by DEA

Federal drug enforcement agents on Thursday raided a Murrieta marijuana collective for the second time in a month -– two days after it filed a $3 million suit against the city.

Agents wearing blue jeans, T-shirts and with handguns in their holsters surveyed the vehicles approaching Greenhouse Cannabis Club, located in a largely vacant commercial building on Jefferson Avenue. Inside, handcuffed volunteers wearing dress shirts and ties sat quietly while agents searched for evidence to support their belief that the collective was in violation of federal and local laws prohibiting the distribution of marijuana.

In a lawsuit this week, the cannabis club alleged that Murrieta invaded patient privacy and sought court orders to stop police patrols around the store and to strike down the city’s moratorium on marijuana collectives.

“I’m angry — so angry — that they think it’s right to deny sick people the medication they need,” collective Director Eric McNeil said moments after the agents released two volunteers and a patient who were handcuffed during the 10 a.m. raid.

A judge signed the warrant for the raid on Monday, the day before the collective filed its lawsuit.

Agents at the scene declined to comment. A department spokesman Jose Martinez for could not be reached for comment. Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, said he had no details about what was seized.

Greenhouse volunteers said agents seized less than an ounce of marijuana, a shipment of THC vaporizing tools, a desktop computer and baked goods that did not contain marijuana. Volunteers said the “fake edibles” were placed after the first raid and intended as a joke in case federal agents returned.

Scene of search

While volunteers were shaken when agents first raided the collective in mid-March, volunteer Kevin Ford, who was present during both raids, said agents were “nice” as they came through the door and ordered him and others to the ground. After agents handcuffed those inside, Ford said he “took the opportunity to educate them,” on medical marijuana issues.

“I told them ‘If you can convince me I’m wrong, I’ll come work for you,’” Ford said. “All I wanted to do was make them question if what they’re doing is right. I believe in what I’m doing.”

Outside, some patients turned away when they saw the agents, who were dressed in T-shirts and jeans. Others, like throat cancer survivor Eric Allbrook, decided to watch the scene from a distance.

Allbrook said he relies on cannabis for relief from after affects of the extensive treatments, including radiation, chemotherapy and surgery, that he has undergone in the past three years since his diagnosis. Cannabis, he said in a permanently guttural voice, has taken the place of 15 different prescriptions.

“It helps me eat, helps me sleep,” said Allbrook, who has surgery scars on both sides of his Adam’s apple. “Without it, I’d be dead by now.”

Legal battle

The collective has attracted much attention since opening in early January in defiance of a city-wide moratorium on marijuana-related establishments, particularly after a Riverside County Superior Court Judge declared that Murrieta cannot infringe on constitutional rights of assembly, which apply regardless of the presence of medical marijuana.

After that determination, the city’s legal team wrote, and the same judge signed, an order that says the collective cannot dispense marijuana to “more than two people.”

Since then, McNeil has continued to dispense medical marijuana to hundreds of card-holding patients under an interpretation that he can serve no more than two people at a time. A jury in June is scheduled to decide whether McNeil is in contempt of court for violating the order. A judge also has evicted the collective from its suite, although the club has not yet vacated.

In its lawsuit against the city, McNeil’s attorney, Richard Ackerman, has accused Murrieta Police Department enforcement officers of following patients as they leave the collective, pulling patients over and questioning their use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Those practices were detailed in the first federal search warrant served on the collective in mid-March.

 

MEDICAL MARIJUANA: Court rulings leave both sides uncertain of clinic bans

Advocates and opponents of California’s medical marijuana clinics are in a legal no-man’s land after a flurry of appellate court decisions that contradict each other on whether local governments can ban the dispensaries.

The decisions also conflict on how the clinics can supply themselves with marijuana.

“We have had a potpourri of various court rulings, and they’re all conflicting,” said Lanny Swerdlow, a registered nurse and board member of a Riverside-based Inland Empire Patient’s Health and Wellness Center.

“We have had one 4th District Court branch say cities can ban; we have had another 4th District Court branch saying ‘no,’ cities can’t ban; We’ve had the 2nd District court say you are allowed to transport, whereas the 4th District Court said you can’t transport – it’s just a total disaster,” he said.

The whipsaw of court rulings leave more than 200 cities that have instituted bans of medical marijuana clinics — as well as the clinic operators and patients who use them — uncertain of where they will land when the law gets settled.

The battle is over whether local governments can preempt the state laws governing medical marijuana clinics – the state’s 1996 Compassionate Use Act (Prop. 215) or the state Legislature’s Medical Marijuana Program.

Clinic advocates say local governments disregard state law by banning the clinics; attorneys for the counties and cities say they are within their right to use zoning laws to ban the dispensaries.

The courts’ north-and-south pole rulings are likely because of a lack of clarity in the laws, said Stanford Law School professor Robert Weisberg.

“Clearly the problem here is that there is some language in the medical marijuana laws that some people think is a little ambiguous,” he said. “That might invite municipalities to use local zoning laws that restrict or forbid the clinics, and there seems to be some ambiguities about that.”

The Riverside decision cites, “Where, as here, there is no clear indication of preemptive intent from the Legislature, we presume Riverside’s zoning regulations…are not preempted by state law,” Associate Justice Carol Codrington wrote.

A ruling regarding the City of Long Beach took another turn. The coastal city decided it would allow dispensaries, but wanted to regulate them with its own ordinances. A court decided that the city could not make such rules because under federal law, marijuana is illegal.

The latest twist in the dispensary legal saga came Feb. 29, when the 4th District Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana ruled that the City of Lake Forest in Orange County could not ban medical marijuana dispensaries.

That came after a series of rulings that favored cities and counties exerting greater local control over the clinics, topped by a decision by the 4th District Court in Riverside’s November ruling that local governments could ban the dispensaries outright, said John Higginbotham, an attorney with the Riverside-based law firm of Best Best & Krieger. The law firm has represented several cities in the legal fight to ban the clinics.

“The Lake Forest decision was kind of a surprise to many people,” Higginbotham said. “It’s hard to reconcile all those previous cases with that.”

The Riverside decision was vacated when the state Supreme Court in January took it and three other medical marijuana cases to eventually rule on the already tumultuous legal structure of California’s medical marijuana laws.

Attorneys for Lake Forest have petitioned to the state high court to take their case as well; but for now the published decision, which says local governments cannot ban the clinics, is the only effective one in the state.

And that left a new tear in the legal fabric for the more than 200 local governments that now have laws banning medical marijuana dispensaries, an estimate from the Coalition for a Drug-Free California, a group that opposes the clinics.

In March, a Shasta County Superior Court judge denied the City of Redding’s bid for a court order to shut down dispensaries in that city. The judge cited the Lake Forest case.

Redlands attorney James De Aguilera, who represents several clinics, says he has started sending legal challenges called demurrers on behalf of his clients to cities that banned the dispensaries. The demurrers cite the Lake Forest case, and say that ruling leaves the cities trying to ban clinics without jurisdiction to do so.

De Aguilera said he has filed on behalf of two clinics in Upland and one in Jurupa Valley.

“There is going to be a lot of activity,” he said. “Lake Forest is the law of the land right now.” De Aguilera added that he expects the Supreme Court will take the Lake Forest case and vacate it as well. But until then, he said, “The city clerk has a duty to issue business licenses. If they law changes again, we’ll already have our business licenses. That is our plan.”

And there’s another twist: the Lake Forest decision, while saying cities and counties could not ban dispensaries, also ruled that each dispensary must grow all their marijuana on location. Dispensary advocates said that part of the ruling guarantees to shut down most operations.

“That would put 98 percent of the collectives out of business,” Swerdlow said.

But Higginbotham of BB&K said it would only end small outlets and allow dispensary operators with big money to open storefronts attached to warehouse-sized operations, to comply with the court ruling.

But it’s not a settled issue. A few days before the Lake Forest decision, a Los Angeles appellate court ruled in a criminal case that it was not illegal for a man to bring a pound of marijuana from one medical marijuana establishment to another, in this case from Humboldt County to Los Angeles.

How that sets with the civil ruling saying dispensaries have to home-grow all their supply is unclear, like much of the rulings regarding medical marijuana.

 

UC Davis pepper-spray report to be released without most cops’ names

The close-range pepper spraying of the Occupy demonstrators at UC Davis triggered national outrage. (Wayne Tilcock / Associated Press / November 18, 2011)

By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles TimesApril 10, 2012

The University of California’s investigative report into the controversial pepper-spraying of student protesters by UC Davis campus police is expected to be released publicly Wednesday — with most officers’ names removed.

After a monthlong legal battle delaying the release, UC and its police union reached a tentative legal settlement Monday that would allow the public disclosure of most of the report about police tactics and UC Davis administrators’ roles in the November incident. However, the agreement calls for the names and ranks of most of the UC Davis police officers to be stripped from the document.

Under the agreement, only the names of Lt. John Pike, the officer shown spraying students in a highly viewed online video, and that of UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza would be included. More than 15 UC Davis officers were reportedly named in the original version of the report that the union sought to block, contending it would violate privacy rules and lead to harassment.

The report now is tentatively scheduled to be released online at noon Wednesday on the UC Davis home page, http://www.ucdavis.edu. Later Wednesday, the UC panel that investigated the event is expected to present the findings and field questions from students and faculty at a UC Davis campus forum.

The close-range spraying of the mainly seated Occupy demonstrators triggered national outrage. In response, UC Davis formed a task force, headed by former state Supreme Court Justice Cruz Reynoso, to study the matter and hired former Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton‘s Kroll security firm to consult. The much-anticipated document originally was to be released March 6, when the police filed a court action against it.

At a Superior Court hearing scheduled for Tuesday in Oakland, both UC and the union will ask the judge to approve the settlement. The police union Monday agreed not to appeal the court’s decision last month that rejected most of the union’s arguments; the judge also had given the union several more weeks to appeal and granted a preliminary injunction temporarily keeping most of the names confidential.

UC spokesman Steve Montiel said Monday the university agreed to the settlement because UC wanted to make public the substance of the report as quickly as possible and did not want delays by a possible union appeal over the names.

“An appeal would have tied it up for months,” he said. Montiel emphasized that the report’s basic findings and policy recommendations would not be affected by the withholding of the officers’ names.

John Bakhit, attorney for the Federated University Police Officers Assn., could not be reached for comment. Five officers face disciplinary probes and other officers who were witnesses to the spraying and were interviewed for the report have been promised immunity, UC officials have said.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, a party to the lawsuit, said it may proceed to seek public release of all the officers’ names under the state public records law. ACLU attorney Michael Risher said his organization would not block the settlement but would study whether it should move forward to obtain the names. The Los Angeles Times, which has sought the full report, is continuing to press for the officers’ names.

 

Electric bill skyrockets after smart meter; opt-out option coming, but will cost

The electric bill in January 2011 was $150.23, the usual cost of the monthly bill and typical for this small Laguna Woods home.

One year later, the bill was $514.34.

What could have possibly caused this$364 increase – a leap of 243 percent? A new state-of-the art Jacuzzi? Millions of holiday lights to rival Disneyland?

No, Pat Wiseman said. The only change to his parents’ home was a new smart meter from the electric company, Southern California Edison. It had been installed at the end of October.

Smart meters are part of the new Edison SmartConnect grid. They connect to “a secure wireless network” that SCE says gives customers greater control to manage their usage – even from a cellphone, many miles from home. Smart meters are also read remotely, so employees don’t have to trek to the house to read the meter.  By the end of this year, 5 million smart meters are slated to be installed in Southern California. SCE is almost done installing them in Orange County – but there may soon be a way to opt out (at a price).

It was after his mother’s smart meter was installed that Wiseman started seeing problems. Between Nov. 10 and Dec. 13, the usage for the 1,600 square-foot home was 62.4 kilowatts per hour, he said. Between Dec. 13 and Jan. 12, it was 102.1 kilowatts per hour.

Wiseman argues that there’s no reason the consumption should have changed, because his mother’s habits did not. She lives alone, spends most of her time in her bed, and has one 24-hour care person with her. He lays the blame for the astounding increase squarely on the new meter.

When we first spoke to SCE, a spokesman said there is no way of telling if there are accuracy problems without examining  the individual usage of the consumer.  But the company said it has not had complaints about accuracy. Instead, he said, consumers say the new meters improve their ability to track their usage.

However, since December of 2008, theCalifornia Public Utilities Commission has received 946 complaints on SCE’s smart meters, ranging from concern over health dangers to privacy and billing issues, to simply not wanting the smart meter at all.

The health issues people complain about include dizziness, nausea and headaches – symptoms some say are caused by the radio frequency (RF) radiation that the smart meters emit – as well as worries about being exposed to possible carcinogens.

SCE has compared the strength of smart meters’ RF signals to other household devices, and says that a cellphone next to your ear emits a signal that’s tremendously stronger than a smart meter three feet away (the cellphone signal being 4,960 microwatts per-centimeter-squared higher than the smart meter’s, to be exact).

Due to the complaints and various citizen action groups banning together against smart meters, the state Public Utilities Commission will consider an opt-out proposal for consumers at its April 19 meeting.

The proposal was put forward March 15, and lays out the options on how to best institute an opt-out program, as well as the cost. Choosing to opt out will not be free of charge.

The Public Utilities Commission’s Division of Ratepayer Advocates and the Consumer Power Alliance are pushing for an analog meter opt-out option, because that’s what Pacific Gas and Electric Co. had to do for its customers in Northern California.

The DRA is dedicated to “obtaining the lowest possible rate for service consistent with reliable and safe service levels,” according to its site.  The CPA is a group of concerned citizens and organizations that formed to oppose the transitions to smart grids and smart meters.

SCE argues that it would be better if the opt-out option allowed customers to keep the meter they currently have, or had, prior to the smart meter installations.

The opt-out proposal does not talk about the problems ratepayers had with privacy or health.

According to one proposal, if a customer wants to opt out now, he would have to pay an initial fee of $75, and after that a monthly fee of $10. SCE estimated in the proposal that 61,000 of its customers would choose the opt-out option, and it will be filing “updated costs associated with the opt-out option in the future.” But at $75a pop, that initial $75 charge would cost folks $4.6 million, and the ongoing monthly $10 charge would haul in $610,000 a month.

These rates may change after the CPUC meetings conclude.

“The big issue is that rates need to be lowered to compensate for the higher readings you get with smart meters and ‘opt out’ does nothing about this,” Wiseman said. “And yet all of the electricity providers are going to the CPUC requesting higher rates. I think the CPUC is heavily tilted in favor of the electricity providers and hardly anyone at the CPUC is looking out for the interests of consumers. Unless the public is aware and upset, nothing will change.”

The CPUC said that the utility companies it regulates  are required to submit rate applications every threeyears, so requests to change rates are nothing new.

But the possibility of an opt-out program isn’t enough for Maureen Howman of Stop OC Meters.

“People need to be made aware and they need to tell people they have a choice,” Howman said. “They have a choice to keep the original system they have right now or switch. It’s not right constitutionally.”

If you want to weigh in on this issue, you can file a comment with the CPUC at public.advisor@cpuc.ca.gov. We will update you after the April 19 CPUC meeting.

 

Supreme Court signals health-care case go ahead

The U.S. Supreme Court began with the case of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 today by considering an argument by an outside lawyer that the case cannot be taken up until somebody is actually forced to buy health insurance. But principal attorneys for both sides argued that the case should be heard now and justices signaled that they agreed – although The New York Times and Fox News frame the news slightly differently.

Fox News characterizes the the issue as a technicality. Its report immediately moves into discussing the issue.

The New York Times quickly points out in its second sentence that both sides agree and takes a broader overview of the whole case in the top of its story.

(We’re launching an OC Political Pulse poll on what you think should be done with health care. I’ll add a link to the poll here shortly.)

While Fox News’ and the Times’ approaches are different, I think both are valid and neither displays a particular bias. Personally, I’ve read a lot about the larger nature of the case and appreciated Fox News getting into the details of the technicality – even though it’s somewhat arcane and is likely to be quickly forgotten as the high court moves to more substantial issues.

Meanwhile, Politico.com addresses five key questions in court’s proceedings: How will politics enter the chamber? What do the tea leaves tell us? How does the government handle the “broccoli” question? If the mandate goes, then what?

Politico also details six possible outcomes.

 

Vatican Makes Money Laundering List Of U.S. State Department

VATICAN CITY, March 8 (Reuters) – The Vatican has for the first time appeared on the U.S. State Department’s list of money-laundering centres but the tiny city-state is not rated as a high-risk country.

The 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report was made public on Wednesday and Washington’s list of 190 countries classifies them in three categories: of primary concern, of concern and monitored.

The Vatican is in the second category, grouped with 67 other nations including Poland, Egypt, Ireland, Hungary and Chile.

It was added to the list because it was considered vulnerable to money-laundering and had recently established programmes to prevent it, a State Department official said.

“To be considered a jurisdiction of concern merely indicates that there is a vulnerability to a financial system by money launderers. With the large volumes of international currency that goes through the Holy See, it is a system that makes it vulnerable as a potential money-laundering center,” Susan Pittman of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, told Reuters.

Last year, the Vatican adapted internal laws to comply with international standards on financial crime.

 

$3.2 million given to attorneys who sued county

A federal judge awarded more than $3.2 million in attorney’s fees and expenses to three law firms who successfully sued the county to make Orange County jails more accessible to the disabled.

The multi-million dollar award comes after 10 years of legal battles between county attorneys and three law firms that sued the county back in October 2001, arguing that inmates were being denied their rights of worship and exercise and that the jails were not in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Structural changes to the county jails have already taken place as the Orange County Sheriff’s Department has been working with a court-appointed monitor since June 2011.

Timothy Conn, a quadriplegic inmate, sued the county in 2001 after alleging he had not been able to shower by himself while he was in custody in county jail. According to his attorney, he would sometimes go days without showering because doing so required having other inmates lift him and his wheelchair over a concrete barrier to get to the shower area. Conn described the situation as humiliating.

Conn was in county jail in 2009 on a misdemeanor drug possession case, and had been in and out of jail for other drug-related misdemeanor charges.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins ordered the county to pay more than $3.2 million in attorney’s fees and expenses in connection to the 10-year suit.

The court had previously ruled in favor of the county found no violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but the case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which found violations had occurred because “physical barriers that deny disabled inmates access to certain facilities.”

The firms that would receive the fees are Hadsell, Stormer, Keeny, Richards and Renick; Litt, Estaur and Kitson; and Newport Beach attorney Richard Herman.

Attorneys argued some of the fees should be larger because of the “unique circumstances in the case,” including its complexity and the time it has spent in litigation, but Collins disagreed.

“The court has already compensated Plaintiffs for the delay in payment and risk of loss by accepting Plaintiff’s counsel’s current hourly rate, which were at least commensurate (if not in the high end) of reasonable rates of the most talented attorneys in the community,” Collins wrote in the decision.