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VINYLONE said:
I thought the same thing until I came across some comment on some news media's website that stated NC is one of two states in the union where 16 is considered an adult in the legal of framework of the state.
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In many states I believe there is an option at age 16-17 to charge as either an adult or juvenile

At any rate, here's a real uplifting story

https://www.businessinsider.com/jason-brown-quit-football-farmer-2014-11

In 2009, Jason Brown signed a five-year, $37.5 million contract with the St. Louis Rams that made him the highest-paid center in the NFL.

Five years later, after earning more than $25 million of that contract, Brown is a farmer who is helping to feed the hungry.

CBS News caught up with Brown in Louisburg, North Carolina, where he runs a 1,000-acre farm after learning how to grow crops on YouTube.

Brown was drafted 124th overall in 2005 and played nine seasons in the NFL before getting cut by the Rams in the spring of 2012.

At age 29, he still had plenty of NFL years ahead of him. He wasn't playing at the level he was in 2009, but his career was far from over. He had interest from numerous teams, including an offer from the Baltimore Ravens.

But he walked away from the game. The NFL world was surprised, and ESPN ran a story with the headline, "The Curious Case Of Jason Brown."

"My agent, he told me, 'You're making the biggest mistake of your life,'" Brown told CBS. "And I looked right back at him and I said, 'No I am not.'"

Brown is doing this to help the less fortunate. He grows sweet potatoes and other vegetables and donates his harvest to food pantries. According to the New & Observer, he has given away 46,000 pounds of sweet potatoes and 10,000 pounds of cucumbers this fall.
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https://www.wmcactionnews5.com/stor...cy-after-family-turned-away-due-to-age-of-son

JOHNSON CITY, TN (WJHL) - The Johnson City Salvation Army is reviewing its emergency shelter policy after the organization turned away a homeless family with a teenage son on a cold night earlier this month, all because of the boy's age.

Tim Lejeune says on one of the coldest nights of the year, despite the organization's white flag waving outside the shelter, the Salvation Army turned his family away, because his son is 15 years old.

"They said he's too old to stay on the women's side, because of the women running around in their pajamas and they said he's too young to stay on the men's side in case some pervert wants to do whatever," Lejeune said.

Lejeune says his wife, their 15 year-old son, 16 year-old daughter and five year-old son, all down on their luck, have been living in their car for the last several weeks.

Lejeune says it was so cold one night earlier this month he took his family to the Salvation Army. Noticing the organization's white flag blowing in the cold air, generally a symbol that all are welcome due to hazardous weather conditions, he says he expected the organization to welcome them with open arms. Instead, he says the shelter told them there was no way they could stay there with a 15 year-old boy.

"He said, 'I'm sorry, your son, y'all can't stay here, because of his age,'" Lejeune said. "I said, 'Are you kidding me?'"

"It was just heartbreaking," 15 year-old Dustin Lejeune said late last week.

Prepared to return to their cars to sleep in 18 degree weather, Johnson City police officers came upon the family and took up their cause. However, that proved unsuccessful.

Certain the family should not be expected to sleep in their car on one of the coldest nights of the year, the officers brought the family to the Johnson Inn and then did something remarkable. They pooled their resources and were prepared to pay for a motel room for the family with money out of their own pockets.

"They collected money to put the family up and when they were at the Johnson Inn, the clerk that was working there that night realized what was going on, so they themselves comped the room for the family," Maj. Garry Younger said. "In return, the officers took the money they collected and went and bought groceries that they gave to the family. I'm very proud that we employ people with that fortitude that care about the citizens."

Police officers AD McElroy, Justin Jenkins, Toma Sparks and Robert McCurry were not the only ones to help this family with a selfless act. Along with police, Washington County-Johnson City 911 dispatchers on shift two helped raise enough money to buy this family groceries, dinner and leave some cash behind for them.

Salvation Army Captain Michael Cox says the organization has a longtime policy that prohibits boys ages 12 to 16 from staying at the shelter. According to Cox, the policy is in place for safety reasons; ultimately to protect children.

Cox says space limitations at the shelter do not allow the building to house maturing boys. He says that policy has only been an issue once before in the last decade or so. That said, he says the Salvation Army is now revisiting its shelter policy.

"It was an unfortunate situation altogether, because we did not have the facilities to put that family in place," Cox said of the situation. "We did offer further assistance and that was denied."

In the moments after we first met the family we shared their contact information with the Salvation Army. Monday their car was parked outside the organization. The organization has filled up their gas tank and even let them spend a couple nights at the shelter, but not because of any change of heart. Lejeune says their 15 year-old son is now receiving mental help at an area hospital.

"He ended up having a breakdown and ended up at Woodridge and felt it was all his fault that we were homeless that we couldn't go anywhere, because of him," Lejeune said.

While the family awaits the release of their son, they say they are now trying to get their kids enrolled in school and find a permanent housing solution.
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https://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/12/18/5391897/70-year-old-murder-conviction.html#.VJKCGGTF8gk

Posted: Thursday, Dec. 18, 2014

70-year-old murder conviction of S.C. teen overturned

By Bristow Marchant
Published in: Crime & Justice

The wheels of justice sometimes turn slowly, and in the case of George Stinney Jr., they turned very slowly indeed.

Stinney was only 14 years old when a South Carolina court found him guilty of murdering two young girls.

It was 1944. Stinney was black; the two children he allegedly killed in the Pee Dee mill town of Alcolu were white.

In the atmosphere of the Jim Crow era, barely two months passed between Stinney’s conviction in a Clarendon County courtroom and his execution in the electric chair.

He was the youngest person legally put to death in the United States in the previous hundred years.

On Wednesday, an appeal of Stinney’s conviction brought by his two surviving siblings bore fruit when a judge vacated Stinney’s conviction in its entirety, bringing an end to a legal drama that spanned seven decades.

The speed in which the state meted out justice against the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century was shocking and extremely unfair, Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen wrote in her ruling Wednesday.

“I can think of no greater injustice,” Mullen wrote.

Long-ago crime

On March 24, 1944, the bodies of 11-year-old Betty June Binnicker and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames were discovered in a ditch in Alcolu partially covered with brush, one day after the girls disappeared while out riding bicycles. Both had suffered fatal blows to the head.

Stinney, a black teen who lived nearby, was arrested for the killings of the two white girls that same day, apparently based on the fact that Stinney was the last person to have seen the girls alive.

Stinney’s father lost his job at the local lumber mill, and his family had to flee their home for fear of retaliation after the teen’s arrest.

“There’s not going to be a new trial after this,” said Matt Burgess, one of the attorneys who handled the Stinney family’s appeal. “The judgment has been vacated entirely, because the judge found it was a fundamental violation of due process.”

Mullen heard arguments in the appeal Jan. 21 at the Sumter County Courthouse, when it was decided Clarendon County didn’t have a facility large enough to hold the crowd expected to turn out for the hearing, which eventually spilled over into an adjoining courtroom.

The appeal focused on the brevity of the original trial – only two hours elapsed between the beginning of the trial and the imposition of the death penalty, and Stinney’s white, court-appointed attorney apparently offered no defense – and the fact that no evidence or even a transcript of the case could be found. The only apparent evidence against Stinney was a confession obtained by a white police officer without any parent or guardian present.

Third Circuit Solicitor Ernest “Chip” Finney III, even now one of only three black solicitors in the state, handled the state’s case in the initial hearing on Jan. 21 of this year, arguing too much time had passed to second-guess the state’s judgment from 70 years ago and the little evidence available was not sufficient to set aside Stinney’s conviction.

“Solicitor Finney handled the case with incredible poise. He did the job he had to do,” said Miller Shealy, a professor at the Charleston School of Law who contributed to the defense’s case. “Nobody who left that courtroom could have thought this result was a foregone conclusion.”

It may not have seemed that way to Mullen either, who took nearly a year to consider the case before issuing a ruling this week. The last briefs in the case were filed before Mullen at the end of February.

Stinney’s family was reportedly overjoyed at the judge’s decision.

“I spoke to Amie (Ruffner, Stinney’s sister and one of the plaintiffs in the case) just 10 minutes ago, and she is very happy to have her brother’s name cleared,” said Burgess, the attorney. “They’ve had to live with this for seven decades, and I could just hear it in her voice how happy she was, and I’m even happier for her.”

Mullen issued her ruling in the form of a writ of coram nobis, a sweeping ruling to correct fundamental errors of due process where no other legal remedy exists. The broad nature of the ruling precludes the possibility of a retrial of George Stinney, even if that were possible at such a late date, when everyone involved in the original case is long gone.

“The remedy for a successful petition under the writ of coram nobis is not a retrial of the factual issues relating to the defendant’s guilt or innocence,” Mullen wrote in her opinion. “The judgment should be vacated based upon a showing of fundamental error.”

The ruling reviews each aspect of the case against Stinney and finds all of them wanting. The interrogation that produced Stinney’s confession was likely inadmissable due to his age and may have been involuntary; Stinney’s attorney failed to put in a competent defense and filed no appeals to his death sentence, violating his right to counsel; the all-white jury pool was unrepresentative; and the execution of a minor has since been found to be unconstitutional.

Shealy, the Charleston law professor who pushed the coram nobis argument at the hearing, agreed with Mullen’s statement the the unique circumstances around Stinney’s case are not applicable to all decades-old criminal cases.

“I spent 20 years as a prosecutor, and I responded to many requests for coram nobis and post-conviction relief, and the circumstances in this case are very special,” he said.

Even in 2014, old racial divisions are evident in the reactions to recent grand jury decisions not to indict white police officers accused of killing blacks. A decision in Stinney’s case at this time is fortuitous, Shealy said, even 70 years later.

“With all the other things going on in the country right now, this shows people that the justice system can work,” he said.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS CONTRIBUTED TO THIS STORY.

Bristow Marchant • 803-329-4062
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I think it's a bloody shame that this thread doesn't get updated more.

https://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-mone-davis-twitter-20150323-story.html

Mo'Ne Davis may be a young teenager, but she's showing more maturity than a certain former college baseball player.

Joey Casselberry was kicked off the Bloomsburg University baseball team over the weekend after he sent out an offensive tweet regarding Disney Channel's plans to make a movie about Davis, the first female player to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series.

Davis, who was 13 when she became a star pitching for the Taney Dragons from Philadelphia last summer, said Monday on ESPN's "SportsCenter" that she emailed the university asking for the junior first baseman's reinstatement.

"Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone deserves a second chance," Davis said. "I know right now he's really hurt and I know how hard he worked to get to where he is right now. I was pretty hurt, but I know he's hurt even more."

In announcing Casselberry's dismissal from the team via Twitter, Bloomsburg said it was “deeply saddened” by his tweet, in which he used an offensive word in reference to Davis.

But Davis said Monday that "I know he didn't mean it in that type of way."

She added: "Sometimes you just got to think about what you're doing before you actually do it."

Davis said that she wasn't sure if she had gotten a response from Bloomsburg because she hadn't checked her email yet.
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Beer said:
I was talking about the person that walks the kids to the door idiot. Could be the mom though, in the house, where she belongs.
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I think it's the stripper ordered for Jayden's birthday party.
 
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory...-inmate-pens-apology-29888475?singlePage=true

Ex-Prosecutor of Exonerated Death Row Inmate Pens Apology
NEW ORLEANS — Mar 25, 2015, 4:59 AM ET
By KEVIN McGILL Associated Press
Associated Press

It was a long journey of conscience for a former Louisiana prosecutor. He went from celebrating a death sentence with rounds of drinks three decades ago to writing an anguished, open letter of apology after the convicted man was recently declared innocent and set free.

"I apologize to Glenn Ford for all the misery I have caused him and his family," A.M. Stroud III wrote in a letter published in The Times of Shreveport. "I apologize to the family of Mr. Rozeman for giving them the false hope of some closure."

Ford is the exonerated prisoner released earlier this month from the Louisiana State Penitentiary after serving just shy of 30 years on death row. Isadore Rozeman was the elderly victim who was killed in a 1983 robbery.

Stroud's letter was more than just an apology. It was a condemnation of the state's decision to oppose compensating the now cancer-stricken Ford for three decades' lost. It was also a firm statement against capital punishment.

"Glenn Ford deserves every penny owed to him under the compensation statute," Stroud wrote. "This case is another example of the arbitrariness of the death penalty. I now realize, all too painfully, that as a young 33-year-old prosecutor, I was not capable of making a decision that could have led to the killing of another human being."

The letter hit The Times' website Friday. Stroud said in a telephone interview Tuesday that he has been overwhelmed at the attention it has drawn.

He spoke slowly in a Louisiana drawl and measured his words during long pauses as he discussed his certainty, in 1984, that Ford was guilty. And the gnawing doubts about the fairness of Ford's trial that began even before he left the Caddo Parish District Attorney's Office for private practice in 1989.

"I began to question the trial itself, the more I thought about it, because of the inexperience of defense counsel," Stroud said. "They'd never had a jury case before, much less a capital case."

Also the evidence was circumstantial. "That, to me, is always troubling," he said.

And, he said, there was the fact that Ford, a black man, was convicted by an all-white jury.

But it wasn't until he learned about a year ago of evidence exonerating Ford — information law enforcement investigators received from a confidential informant that cleared Ford and implicated another man — that Stroud's doubts were fully realized.

"I was upset with myself. After I heard it, I was stunned. But I said, 'Well, this man's getting out. Thank God for that. He's got some time left.'"

Then he learned that the state was opposing paying compensation to Ford.

The Attorney General's Office said in court filings that to be eligible for compensation, an exonerated defendant must prove he did not commit any crime based on facts that led to his conviction. It said Ford failed to prove he did not illegally possess items stolen in the robbery of Rozeman.

An editorial in the Shreveport paper taking the state to task for its position stirred Stroud to write.

"I think that's when I just, well, as I said in my letter, this is the first time I've ever written a letter to any newspaper, and probably the last."

The concerns about Ford's trial that began creeping into Stroud's conscience all those years ago coincided with doubts about the death penalty in general. A Catholic, Stroud recalls reading a statement against capital punishment by bishops in the U.S. that he found well-reasoned.

And aside from theological considerations, Stroud says there is the practical matter of what he sees as the impossibility of the punishment being carried out fairly or in a manner guaranteeing that an innocent person won't be put to death.

He notes statistics from the Innocence Project, an organization involved in the effort to free Ford, that show 144 death row inmates have been cleared of charges since 1973. "That should tell anyone that our system doesn't work."

Stroud describes himself as an introvert. He doesn't foresee becoming an anti-death penalty crusader at age 63. But he said he would probably be willing to testify at a legislative hearing were a bill to abolish the death penalty introduced.

He doesn't see such a bill going far in Louisiana. "The political reality is: This state is steeped in the death penalty right now."

Stroud said he has offered, through an Innocence Project lawyer, to offer a personal apology to Ford, who is seeking compensation under state law and, who has also filed suit in federal court seeking compensation for his wrongful arrest and conviction and for denial of medical care that might have caught his cancer early.

Ford hasn't met with Stroud and isn't giving interviews currently because he is going through chemotherapy to battle his lung cancer, said Innocence Project lawyer Kristin Wenstrom.

The Attorney General's Office, meanwhile, defends its position in opposition to compensation for Ford.

"We do not understand Mr. Stroud's opposition to our request that the Louisiana judiciary review the record in this case and make a factual determination in this matter," spokesman Steven Hartman said in an email.
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https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Bus-driver-hailed-as-hero-for-spotting-3-year-old-6310722.php

Bus driver hailed as hero for spotting Milpitas kidnap victim, 3
By Henry K. Lee Updated 2:21 pm, Saturday, June 6, 2015

A man who kidnapped a 3-year-old boy from the Milpitas Public Library on Friday was arrested an hour later after an alert bus driver saw the two on his bus, ending a terrifying ordeal, police said.
Tim Watson, a Valley Transit Authority driver, was being hailed as a hero for spotting the boy in the company of Alfonso David Edington, 23, of Pittsburg, authorities said.
“The bus driver is a hero, absolute hero, and I credit the Valley Transit Authority for receiving the information from us, quickly disseminating that to their bus drivers in the field and the bus driver just being alert,” said Milpitas Police Chief Steve Pangelinan.

The incident began at 10:40 a.m. when the boy’s mother realized that her son was missing during a visit to the library at 160 N. Main St. Officers began searching for him in the library but then received a chilling report from a witness: The boy was seen leaving the library with a man in a black hooded sweatshirt, jeans and a backpack, police said.

Watson told reporters he was driving his bus when he realized that a boy and a man on board appeared to match the description of the two involved. So he devised a cover story. He stopped the bus, announced that he was looking for a missing green backpack and casually looked at the boy’s shoes. They were red, just like the ones the missing boy had on, Watson said.
Watson called his dispatcher, who in turn notified the Santa Clara County sheriff’s office. Milpitas police were notified, and soon Watson reported that he was approaching the Fremont BART Station. That got Fremont police involved as well. Officers spotted the bus at 11:40 a.m. and saw Edington getting off the bus with the child in his arms, police said.
An officer had to pry the child away from the suspect, who briefly struggled with police before he was arrested, authorities said.
“Thank the Lord we were able to find the child safely,” Pangelinan said. “All appearances are, the child is unharmed.”

The chief said why the suspect allegedly took the boy was not yet known.

Henry K. Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: hlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @henryklee
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