The same day the Atlanta Journal-Constitution posted a story online concerning Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard’s use of tens of thousands of dollars in seized money for office parties, football tickets, charitable donations and other apparently non-law enforcement related expenditures, Howard called a press conference to defend the spending and to address one specific expenditure: wrought-iron security doors installed at his home.

Howard said that a media crew’s efforts to videotape the doors at his home earlier in the day had “crossed the line,” compromising his security and placing his family at risk.

According to the story, Howard’s office spent $2,800 on the doors last year, and another $5,700 on a camera system and other security measures.

Friday afternoon, standing before a knot of reporters and cameras in the portico of the Fulton County Justice Tower as a light rain fell, Howard said that he had provided the media “hundreds of documents” and made himself and his office available for hours of questioning concerning the spending, which he characterized as “money from criminals, particularly drug pushers, not taxpayer dollars.”

After defending the spending as valuable community outreach and in line with established guidelines for spending forfeited funds, Howard turned to the security doors. Howard said he and his staff are frequent targets of threats, and read from a 2010 letter from inmate at the Fulton County Jail warning that there would be two failed assassination attempts on his life, “but the third one will be completed.”

He also read from a 2005 email signed by “The Man That’s Going to Kill You,” and said that earlier this year the FBI and Atlanta Police had warned him that a gang had put out the word to “whack” one of his senior attorneys.

Read more »

TV crime drama fans are being misled, according to Jerry Scott, agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Statewide Crime Scene Program and coordinator of the GBI’s Body Recovery Team.

Scott was speaking at “Guns 101: What journalists need to know to shoot straight and get it right when reporting on firearms,” a seminar at the Georgia Press Association offices Thursday.

After presenting diagrams showing possible lines of travel for bullets and close up pictures of gun shots that look like those in TV crime shows such as CSI, Law & Order and Castle, Scott was asked,  what’s his favorite crime show?

“I don’t watch any of them,” he said. Of their realism, he added, “They’re not even close.”

Read more »

Should judges accept as Facebook friends lawyers who might appear in their courts? The audience at the Georgia Bar, Media and Judiciary Conference Saturday was about evenly divided on that question.

We asked the lawyers at the conference if they would consider asking a judge to recuse if he or she was Facebook friends with an opposing attorney. Thirty-four said yes, and 36 said no.

If you’re a judge in Florida, Facebook boundaries are clear. The Florida Bar has issued ethics opinions flat-out forbidding judges from accepting as Facebook friends or Linkedin connections any lawyer who might appear before them.

A Florida appeals court recently disqualified a judge in a case where he was friends with the prosecutor, and that case has resulted in a certified question to the Florida Supreme Court: “Where the presiding judge in a criminal case has accepted the prosecutor assigned to the case as a Facebook ‘friend,’ would a reasonably prudent person fear that he could not get a fair and impartial trial, so that the defendant’s motion for disqualification should be granted?”

The Florida Supreme Court hasn’t responded yet, but we asked our audience for their ruling. Thirty four said yes to disqualification, and 31 said no.

Our survey wasn’t scientific, of course, and may have been reflective of the audience’s social media quotient. Of those who answered our survey, 69 percent said they had a Facebook page, and 18 percent of that group claimed judges as friends. Sixty-five percent are on Linkedin, and 43 percent on Twitter. Eighteen percent self-selected on this question as “none of them, ever.”

The Georgia Bar hasn’t directly addressed social media questions, but the American Bar Association did so last week, and it seemed to say: go ahead, but be careful.

ABA formal opinion 462 offers the usual cautions that judges must conduct themselves in a matter that promotes public confidence in their independence, integrity and impartiality. After carefully loading up on these caveats, the opinion comment concludes that, with proper care, electronic social media doesn’t compromise a judge any more than old-fashioned forms of social connection such as the U.S. Mail, the telephone or email.

A federal judge in Albany has affirmed the constitutional principle that Georgia courts should be open to the public in a suit
challenging courtroom closures in the Cordele Judicial Circuit.

In a 27-page order, U.S. District Judge Louis Sands refused to dismiss a civil rights case against the circuit’s three judges – John Pridgen, Bobby Chasteen, and T. Christopher Hughes – brought by the Southern Center for Human Rights on behalf of a number of people who said they were barred from attending court hearings in the Ben Hill and Crisp County Law Enforcement Center courtrooms.

The suit claimed that the judges and county sheriffs, who were also named as defendants, systemically barred the public from attending court unless they were related to the defendants who appeared and those defendants were entering guilty pleas.

The judge rejected as “unpersuasive” the arguments put forth by the state attorney general, who is defending the judges. State lawyers argued that the judges were not closing the courts when they restricted access for reasons of space or security. Sands also rejected an argument that the public had no constitutional right to attend arraignments.

“Prohibiting the majority of the public from these proceedings often bars them from observing the entire justice system,” Sands wrote. “To deprive the public [of] the right to attend proceedings during which that process occurs could undermine the public’s faith in the modern criminal justice system.”

Southern Center Senior Counsel Gerald Weber called Sands’ ruling “a “public welcome’ sign for Georgia courtrooms that have presented citizens with untold hoops and hurdles to public access.”

Lauren Kane, a spokeswoman for Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens, said the office declined to comment because the matter was still ongoing.

The Daily Report will have a full story on its website late this afternoon.

Georgia judges who complain voters don’t know enough about their races may be jealous of Bridget Mary McCormack.

McCormack, a law professor at the University of Michigan, is running for a seat on the Michigan Supreme Court. As in Georgia, Michigan Supreme Court justices are elected in non-partisan elections.

As luck would have it, McCormack has a semi-famous sister: actress Mary McCormack. The actress, who recently had a starring role on the television series In Plain Sight, played Kate on the long-running series The West Wing.

A bevy of former West Wing cast members have joined together to create a TV spot for the judicial candidate.

It’s part public service announcement, with the cast members (in character) lamenting that voters often skip the non-partisan judicial races. “It’s a thing,” says fictional White House staffer Toby Ziegler, played by Richard Schiff. Of course, the piece also takes the opportunity to tout candidate McCormack’s credentials.

Georgia’s Supreme Court elections took place in July this year.  There were no open races, and none of the incumbent justices faced opposition.

Journalists walk off jobs in protest of censorship.

Ex-editors start revolutionary counter establishment website.

Boss manhandles and physically ejects a student from the building.

One might expect these scenes to be playing out in some second world country struggling under a floundering dictatorship. One would be wrong.

This is the University of Georgia’s highly respected student newspaper, The Red & Black, founded in 1893 and reorganized under a 501 © (3) non-profit corporation in 1980. Ten staff members – including the top two editors – resigned in protest Wednesday, August 15 over attempts by the board of directors and an increasing number of non-student employees to control the student run newspaper’s content.

By the end of the day, the students had started their own website and told their story their way on The Red and Dead. In her resignation letter posted on the new website, the former editor in chief said, “recently, we began feeling serious pressure from people who were not students. In less than a month, The Red & Black has hired more than 10 permanent staff with veto power over students’ decisions. “ Another issue was the elevation of an advisor to editorial director with control over content.

The students were most offended by a draft memo written by a board member for discussion with that editorial director regarding what would and would not be tolerated and suggesting that students be required to run more “good” stories than “bad” ones, and then defining what constitutes good and bad news.

By the end of the week, the board member who wrote the draft memo had resigned with a statement apologizing and explaining that the memo was merely his talking points for a meeting and never meant for public – or student – exposure.  And the general manager – a former advertising salesman who has been a paid employee of the Red and Black for 30 years — was outed by a blogger for pulling from the non-profit student newspaper a salary of $190,000 last year.

That same general manager was photographed manhandling and physically ejecting a student from a meeting he had announced the day before on the paper’s website as an open house.

The board of directors – which includes newspaper publishers, owner and business people as well as a former Red & Black general manager who is now a lawyer, Charles Russell – appointed one of its members as spokesperson, Melita Easters, who said the students overreacted, “blew it out of proportion,” and created a “firestorm.”

Here are the links to follow:

Red & Dead on Twitter

Red & Dead on Facebook

Red & Dead, the blog

Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens on Tuesday filed his office’s first civil suit under the state’s new sunshine laws against Cumming mayor Ford Gravitt and the city.

The suit stems from an April 17 incident in which Gravitt allegedly ordered a citizen to stop videotaping the City Council meeting in violation of the state’s Open Meetings Act.

The new law, which went into effect also on April 17, specifically allows visual and sound recording by the public during an open meeting.

The AG’s complaint, filed in Forsyth County Superior Court, states that the mayor ordered Nydia Tisdale to stop recording the proceedings and for the police chief to remove her camera from the auditorium where the meeting was held. It adds that Gravitt ignored Tisdale’s opposition, citing the new law and requesting the mayor consult the city attorney.

“Every person in Georgia is charged with knowing the law,” the complaint states. “Mayor Gravitt and the officers and employees of the city of Cumming had an obligation to be aware of Georgia law at the time of their violations of its express terms. … Moreover, they were pointedly told about their legal obligations before violating them and proceeded anyway. The actions of the defendants were neither legally nor factually performed in objective good faith.”

City Administrator Gerald Blackburn said the city’s attorney advised officials not to comment on the lawsuit. Dana Miles, the city’s general counsel and founding partner of Miles Patterson Hansford Tallant, could not be reached for comment.

The complaint asks the court to impose the maximum civil penalties allowed under the new law, which would be $1,000 for the first violation and $2,500 for each subsequent violation from the April 17 meeting. The AG is also seeking an award of attorney’s fees.

Prior to the new law, the AG could bring only criminal charges against an alleged open government violator.

Those cases required prosecutors to prove that the violator “willfully and knowingly” violated the law. The new civil provision has a lower proof standard, making plaintiffs show only that the defendants were negligent.

Emory law professor, Frank Alexander, is part of an exhaustive Frontline four hour series on the global financial crisis. Alexander appears in the segment about Atlanta neighborhoods taking the brunt of the subprime lending meltdown, starting around 9:40 into this clip.

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

H/T to Creative Loafing’s Thomas Wheatley for isolating the Atlanta-based portion of the documentary.