A star player accused, and a flawed rape investigation

Yet another university community has been accused of denying justice to a female sexual assault victim in order to protect a star male athlete. The New York Times today chronicled the shortcomings of an investigation by Tallahassee police into a reported sexual assault in which Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston was the alleged assailant.

Police failed to conduct a proper investigation when the incident was reported, the Times found. Even after the accuser identified her attacker to the police, Winston was never interviewed and DNA evidence was not collected. By the time prosecutors began to investigate 11 months later, the trail had gone cold.

The university also failed to conduct any investigation of its own into the incident, though there is evidence that the athletics department was aware that there was an open police investigation.

Read the story here.

After Gregg Thomas pleaded guilty in 2004 to killing a teenager, a Baltimore judge ordered him to serve 15 years in prison. He was out in less than 10, and by last week he had been charged in the shooting ambush of off-duty Baltimore Police Sgt. Keith Mcneill.

The shooting, which left Mcneill in critical condition, put the spotlight on a poorly understood feature of corrections policy that reduces most Maryland sentences. Thomas was able to leave prison early because he had received credit for good behavior and had completed work and education programs that helped him shave off more than a third of his sentence.

Jared Remy had glided through his first five criminal cases, but prosecutors thought the sixth one would be different.

Compared to what he had been charged with in the past — beating and choking his ex-girlfriend while she held their baby, cracking a friend over the head with a beer bottle in a jealous fit, elbowing and cursing out a police officer — the case that landed in Lowell District Court in January 2001 seemed minor: Threatening to commit a crime.

But for the first time, prosecutors had a victim willing to testify against Remy, son of one of the most beloved figures in New England.

Across the United States, police and prosecutors are allowing tens of thousands of wanted felons — including more than 3,300 people accused of sexual assaults, robberies and homicides — to escape justice merely by crossing a state border, a USA TODAY investigation found. Those decisions, almost always made in secret, permit fugitives to go free in communities across the country, leaving their crimes unpunished, their victims outraged and the public at risk.

Read the USA TODAY report. Check out some of the local reporting that’s come out of the project.

Since taking office in 2009, State Attorney Angela Corey has had the chance to speak to a lot of people trying to get their loved ones’ killers sentenced to death. She has put more people on Death Row than any other prosecutor in Florida.

Corey’s office has sent 21 people to Death Row, and 18 of them are still there with the other three getting off Death Row on appeal. No other current prosecutor in the state has put more than seven people on Death Row since the start of 2009.

During the 26 years that James Preston spent incarcerated for murder, he always told his family that he didn't commit the crime.
            
Now, the FBI says their analyst's testimony about key hair evidence in the case exceeded the boundaries of science, raising the possibility that Preston, who died in custody, was wrongfully convicted if not, as his family believes, innocent.
            
"I sat with him as he passed away and I kissed him and I told him, I said, ‘I'll let everybody know that this is not right, this is not true, and you shouldn't be here,'" his brother, Erick Preston told WFXT-TV in Boston. "That's all they had from the FBI lab, a hair with ‘negroid features'… but he swayed it to make it look like it was my brother's."
            
The FBI's review of Preston's file is part of a nationwide effort by the Department of Justice and the FBI to re-examine the testimony of FBI forensic experts in serious cases like murder and rape, all done before the advent of DNA testing. More than 2,000 cases involving hair analysis are being reviewed.

Watch the report here.

Attorneys for an inmate accused of murdering a federal correctional officer cited a Citizens' Voice investigation into the case as they laid the groundwork Wednesday to spare him from the death penalty.

For a December story the paper obtained closely guarded prison documents that showed a stark shift in the way the inmate Jessie Con-ui was disciplined. Treatement ranged from a near zero-tolerance approach for minor offenses in 2008 to leniency shown in 2012. The change came as political leaders and civil liberties groups pressured the Bureau of Prisons to reduce the number of restricted-housing inmates and as the bureau started tying those reductions to bonuses for wardens and other high-ranking officials.

Now attorneys are demanding a federal investigation to determine the source of confidential material that aided The Voice's reporting, including inmate Jessie Con-ui's discipline and transfer records and a report on a psychological evaluation he submitted to less than 48 hours after the killing.

Mizzou did not pursue alleged assault | ESPN
The University of Missouri did not investigate or tell law enforcement officials about an alleged rape, possibly by one or more members of its football team, despite administrators finding out about the alleged 2010 incident more than a year ago, an "Outside the Lines" investigation has found. The alleged victim, a member of the swim team, committed suicide in 2011.

Mass. spent millions on secret settlements | The Boston Globe
For years, the state has used confidential settlement and severance deals to make embarrassing problems go away, often requiring workers to promise to keep the payments secret and avoid saying anything critical about the agencies. When the Globe first asked for copies of all the pacts worth at least $10,000 statewide, it took a four-year legal fight to obtain the names of workers who received the money.

Free game tickets, hot concert seats: The politics of higher education in Missouri | The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Missouri’s public universities have spent almost a million dollars since 2011 on contracts with professional lobbyists to represent their interests in Jefferson City — while plying state legislators with tens of thousands of dollars more in free meals, sports outings, concert tickets and other perks.

Consumers With Canceled Insurance Plans Shifted to New Ones Without Their Permission | ProPublica
The California Department of Insurance said it is exploring whether any laws were broken when insurance companies withdrew money from consumers’ accounts for plans they didn’t select.

Data breach likely will happen to you | The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Most people and companies use anti-virus software, but it only guards against threats it recognizes, and the bad guys are constantly tweaking their weapons to circumvent such protections. Adding as little as a few lines of code will evade most anti-virus programs.

Patients' deadly surgery wait as toll soars | The Herald Sun, Melbourne, Australia
More than 840 people - 16 a week - died waiting for surgery in Victoria in the past year. The revelation comes as the length of time patients spend on elective surgery waiting lists continues to grow

Charity Checker | The Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting
The Tampa Bay Times, in partnership with The Center for Investigative Reporting, has built an online tool to make charity research a little easier. Our “Charity Checker” website, for the first time, aggregates the ratings and reviews already offered by several of the nation’s most prominent watchdog organizations. With a simple search, you can see their results, all in one place, then click through to dig deeper into a charity through GuideStar, Charity Navigator, GreatNonprofits and the Better Business Bureau. The idea for Charity Checker grew out of our reporting on America’s Worst Charities, a yearlong investigation into charities that have chronically steered most of their donations to for-profit telemarketers. The full series can be found here: www.cironline.org/americasworstcharities or tampabay.com/charity.

"The 4th Judicial Circuit, which consists of Duval, Clay and Nassau counties, dramatically leads the state in the number of juveniles incarcerated through a method called direct commitment," The Florida Times-Union reports. "That’s usually a plea deal reached between a juvenile’s lawyer and the prosecutor. When juveniles agree to plea deals, they are often incarcerated without the chance to hear the evidence against them, examine police work or interview witnesses."

"The University of Missouri did not investigate or tell law enforcement officials about an alleged rape, possibly by one or more members of its football team, despite administrators finding out about the alleged 2010 incident more than a year ago, an "Outside the Lines" investigation has found. The alleged victim, a member of the swim team, committed suicide in 2011," ESPN reports. Read the full story here.