Convicted killer Erick Hall, who is on Idaho's Death Row for killing Lynn Henneman in 2000 and Cheryl Ann Hanlon in 2003, will never leave prison even if something happens to his death sentence in either case.I'm reminded of a case out of Texas where a guy was given a 3000 year sentence. With good behavior, he might have been eligible for parole in 2000 years.
That is because Hall was given a life sentence in prison for the rape of Hanlon Thursday by 4th District Judge Thomas Neville.
This means that in addition to his two death sentences, Hall is serving three life sentences, without the possibility of parole.
In 2005, Hall was sentenced to concurrent terms of life in prison without parole for separate rape and kidnapping charges in the Henneman case.
The sentencing came less than three months after Hall became the first man in Idaho to be given the death penalty by a jury for the murder charge.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Taking No Chances
From the January 3, 2008 Idaho Statesman:
Another Tragedy of Deinstitutionalization
From the January 3, 2008 Santa Rosa Press-Democrat:
One of the many downsides to deinstitutionalization is that people with serious problems who would not have access to deadly weapons in a mental hospital are released into the larger society. Now, in spite of the best efforts of California government to make the entire state like a low-grade mental hospital with increasingly restrictive gun control laws--there's no hope of preventing deinstitutionalized Californians from getting knives. And that makes tragedies like these unavoidable.
Much of the rationalization for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was that it was bad for their human dignity to be locked up in mental hospitals. But it's also bad for your human dignity to get shot (and killed) by a police officer. Freezing to death on the streets of San Francisco, or dying of pneumonia, or developing tuberculosis because of malnutrition caused by panhandling for alcohol, is also not very dignified.
I keep asking myself, "Am I the only person who sees the insanity of pretending that reducing human beings to a condition that we would not allow pets to suffer from is somehow good?" I talk to a lot of different people every week about what has gone wrong on this, and I seldom meet anyone who wants to argue that this great social experiment of the 1960s worked out for the benefit of the mentally ill. Yet inertia seems to be winning this public policy debate.
A Santa Rosa police officer shot a 24-year-old man who was wielding a knife Wednesday inside a home where he and several other tenants receive care for mental illness, police said.From this account, the officers did what they were supposed to do, and escalated to deadly force only as a last resort. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time that this has happened in Sonoma County--even the first time recently:
Police said officers responded after a social worker called to report that his mental health client was ``off his meds,'' violent and had a knife.
One of three officers at the A Street home fired on the man after a Taser stun gun proved ineffective and the man advanced toward them with the knife, police said.
Police declined to identify the man, say how many times he was shot or describe his injuries.
A source familiar with the situation, however, said the man was upgraded from critical condition Wednesday night and is expected to live.
The shooting was the third in the past year involving Sonoma County law enforcement officers and a person reported to have mental health problems.This particular incident involved a man in a program called "assertive community treatment"--which is an alternative to hospitalization, and apparently intended for those who are considered no longer so dangerous that they need to be locked up. Unfortunately, it appears that someone may have made a serious mistake in deciding that this guy didn't need to be hospitalized.
...
The other two shootings in the past year involving Sonoma County law enforcement officers and people reported to have mental health issues were in Sebastopol and Santa Rosa.
Two sheriff's deputies fatally shot Jeremiah Chass, 16, at his home near Sebastopol on March 12. He had resisted his parents' efforts to take him for help, and fought with the deputies.
On April 9, Santa Rosa police shot and killed Richard DeSantis, a 30-year-old bipolar man who fired a gun inside his house and later charged officers outside.
Those cases sparked a series of meetings involving Santa Rosa Mayor Bob Blanchard and other elected officials, law enforcement, mental health advocates, and representatives of civil rights and minority groups.
One of the many downsides to deinstitutionalization is that people with serious problems who would not have access to deadly weapons in a mental hospital are released into the larger society. Now, in spite of the best efforts of California government to make the entire state like a low-grade mental hospital with increasingly restrictive gun control laws--there's no hope of preventing deinstitutionalized Californians from getting knives. And that makes tragedies like these unavoidable.
Much of the rationalization for deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was that it was bad for their human dignity to be locked up in mental hospitals. But it's also bad for your human dignity to get shot (and killed) by a police officer. Freezing to death on the streets of San Francisco, or dying of pneumonia, or developing tuberculosis because of malnutrition caused by panhandling for alcohol, is also not very dignified.
I keep asking myself, "Am I the only person who sees the insanity of pretending that reducing human beings to a condition that we would not allow pets to suffer from is somehow good?" I talk to a lot of different people every week about what has gone wrong on this, and I seldom meet anyone who wants to argue that this great social experiment of the 1960s worked out for the benefit of the mentally ill. Yet inertia seems to be winning this public policy debate.
If You Lean 80 Degrees Left....
Everyone else looks right. From the January 2, 2008 Santa Rosa Press-Democrat:
Sebastopol Councilwoman Linda Kelley is seeking to have her misdemeanor vandalism case moved to another county, arguing in court papers that because she is a lesbian, liberal and a politician, she can't get a fair trial in Sonoma County.For those of you not familiar with Sonoma County, this request for a venue change because of being liberal, lesbian, and a politician is roughly equivalent to a Klansman in 1955 Alabama accused of assault on a civil rights activist demanding a change of venue to a less hostile jury pool.
Kelley argued that news coverage and reader comments posted on The Press Democrat's Web site have subjected her to ridicule such that she will be prejudged as guilty.
Kelley, 53, a two-term councilwoman, has pleaded not guilty to keying a truck parked on a street in front of her home in September. If convicted, she could be sentenced to a year in county jail, fined $10,000 and ordered to pay restitution.
Kelley also faces unrelated misdemeanor drunken driving charges stemming from a May 20 arrest in Guerneville. That case also is pending.
A hearing on the change-of-venue motion is scheduled for Jan. 31.
Assistant District Attorney Christine Cook said the prosecutor is preparing papers to oppose Kelley's motion.
"We're confident the defense and the people can get a fair trial before the people of Sonoma County," she said.
A change of venue is rare in Sonoma County, usually reserved for the most heinous and attention-grabbing cases. The last trial to be moved was a case involving the 1998 murder of a Petaluma plastic surgeon. Theresa Ramirez, a disgruntled former patient, was convicted by a San Jose jury.
Legal experts said Kelley's motion has a slim chance of succeeding because it involves a minor crime that hasn't sparked much public outrage.
The vandalism case was reported to police by Alameda author Michael Zinsley, who was sleeping in his truck in front of the house of a friend, Sebastopol City Councilman Sam Pierce. Zinsley said he heard a loud scratching sound and got out of his truck's camper shell to see Kelley standing nearby.
Adjunct Faculty Status
Adjunct Faculty Status
My wife is adjunct faculty for several universities. While visiting some friends over the holidays, she expressed disappointment at the failure to be picked up for the coming semester by one of her employers. (They are short of students for the spring.) One of our friends, not being part of the university world, asked, "Adjunct faculty are 'at will' employees?" Before my wife had a chance to respond, I chimed in with, "Actually, more like 'at whim' employees."
My wife is adjunct faculty for several universities. While visiting some friends over the holidays, she expressed disappointment at the failure to be picked up for the coming semester by one of her employers. (They are short of students for the spring.) One of our friends, not being part of the university world, asked, "Adjunct faculty are 'at will' employees?" Before my wife had a chance to respond, I chimed in with, "Actually, more like 'at whim' employees."
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
When Fighting Important Legal Battles
It always helps for the other side to be fighting among themselves. From the January 2, 2008 Washington Post:
Acting D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles has fired the city lawyer who had been preparing to defend the longtime District ban on handguns in the high-stakes Supreme Court case this spring.Okay, maybe who is at the top of the team doesn't make that much of a difference on this, especially since DC's brief is due at the Court on Friday. But at a minimum, it means that the new guy either is, or has been, playing catch-up on the work that Morrison was doing.
Alan B. Morrison, who has argued roughly 20 cases before the high court, was asked to leave his post as special counsel by the end of this week, Morrison said today. Morrison had been hired by former Attorney General Linda Singer, who resigned two weeks ago, and put in charge of arguing the handgun case.
The city has appealed to the Supreme Court to maintain the handgun ban after a lower court overturned the ban in the spring. The high court agreed to hear the case, probably in March, which would mark the first time the Supreme Court has examined a Second Amendment case in nearly 70 years.
Singer cited frustration that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) had relied more heavily on Nickles, who had been his general counsel, to make key legal decisions. Upon Singer's resignation, Fenty replaced her with Nickles, a former high-powered corporate litigator at Covington & Burling and friend of Fenty's family.
Solar Technology
The January 2, 2008 Wall Street Journal has an article which, unfortunately, isn't visible except to subscribers, about United Technologies' Hamilton Sundstrand division. They are building a type of solar power plant that is a bit different. Part of it is unsurprising--the use of an array of mirrors to concentrate heat on a boiler filled with salt. This is similar to the Solar One project built near Barstow back several decades ago, which failed to meet its design goals because of the amount of power the plant consumed.
One of the great difficulties with solar power is that it is highly synchronized with sunlight. It doesn't help at night--or even much past 5:00 PM. Peak demand for power in areas where solar power makes sense is often in late afternoon and early evening, because of air conditioning demand, and use of dishwashers, washing machines, and other domestic electrical appliances.
I am reminded of one of the 1960s attempts to produce and sell "appropriate technology" solar ovens in India. It didn't work, because solar ovens only really worked in the middle of the day. (A friend of mine and I, along with our fathers, built a solar oven as a demonstration project in 6th grade. It worked great at cooking hot dogs and hamburgers--until about 2:30 PM, at which point it became quite disappointing.) As the song goes, "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun." Indian women, not being in either category, weren't too keen on using such an oven, and in addition, the main meal of the day in rural India wasn't lunch, but dinner.
What makes this new design by Hamilton Sundstrand interesting is that it is using the power not necessarily to directly produce electric power (which would limit it to morning to late afternoon), but to heat up the salt until molten, then pump the molten salt into insulated containers. The molten salt will stay hot for a very long time--long enough to boil water to turn generators during the night. This might have some merit, in large industrial applications. I don't see that it has much potential on a small scale, such as domestic power production. And I do not find it implausible that the same problem that made Solar One not work--that there's enormous energy inputs in making the components--might be hidden by the government subsidy involved.
The other problem of solar power being sun synchronized is not just day vs. night, but winter vs. summer. The farther you get from the tropics, the more severe the problem becomes. Not only do days get much shorter in winter, the farther north you go, but the sun angle becomes a problem. Here at 44 degrees north latitude, the maximum altitude of the sun above the horizon is 69.5 degrees--and that's at the summer solstice (when the sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer). At the winter solstice, the sun is directly above the Tropic of Capricorn, or 47 degrees farther south--and then the highest position the sun can get for us is 22.5 degrees above the horizon.
You can store heat in molten salt over night, or even for a couple of days (which might solve the problem of cloudy days). But I shudder to think of the amount of heat that you would need to store to get you through the winter. This kind of system, however, does make sense for peak load power production.
UPDATE: A couple of readers pointed out that if you can solve the energy storage problem, it would be beneficial not only for solar power, but any energy production method that is not completely at your control, such as wind or hydropower. The difficulty is that batteries are not perfectly efficient at accepting a charge, they don't hold a charge indefinitely, and they don't last forever.
Another strategy that I have seen proposed is to pump water to an higher elevation. If the water is stored in a covered container, there shouldn't be any evaporative losses, and because the stored energy is gravity pulling the water to a lower level, the energy so stored will last for decades, if need be. But pumping water against gravity isn't terribly efficient, and turning it back into electricity later isn't terribly efficient. There is also a big capital investment in creating such a water storage mechanism, especially if it is covered. Of course, if you don't have access to natural elevation changes, building an artificial slope is extremely expensive.
One reader points out that perhaps too much energy is being spent on the electric car problem when the real problem that needs to be solved is: why are people living so far from work? If everyone lived a couple of miles from work (or telecommuted most days, like I do), it wouldn't so much matter what fuel we used for our cars. Of course, that would require social changes probably more dramatic than the technical challenges of electric cars.
UPDATE 2: Another reader points to this article on Wikipedia that claims that pumped water storage schemes can return 70%-85% of the original input energy, depending on evaporation of the body of water.
One of the great difficulties with solar power is that it is highly synchronized with sunlight. It doesn't help at night--or even much past 5:00 PM. Peak demand for power in areas where solar power makes sense is often in late afternoon and early evening, because of air conditioning demand, and use of dishwashers, washing machines, and other domestic electrical appliances.
I am reminded of one of the 1960s attempts to produce and sell "appropriate technology" solar ovens in India. It didn't work, because solar ovens only really worked in the middle of the day. (A friend of mine and I, along with our fathers, built a solar oven as a demonstration project in 6th grade. It worked great at cooking hot dogs and hamburgers--until about 2:30 PM, at which point it became quite disappointing.) As the song goes, "Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun." Indian women, not being in either category, weren't too keen on using such an oven, and in addition, the main meal of the day in rural India wasn't lunch, but dinner.
What makes this new design by Hamilton Sundstrand interesting is that it is using the power not necessarily to directly produce electric power (which would limit it to morning to late afternoon), but to heat up the salt until molten, then pump the molten salt into insulated containers. The molten salt will stay hot for a very long time--long enough to boil water to turn generators during the night. This might have some merit, in large industrial applications. I don't see that it has much potential on a small scale, such as domestic power production. And I do not find it implausible that the same problem that made Solar One not work--that there's enormous energy inputs in making the components--might be hidden by the government subsidy involved.
The other problem of solar power being sun synchronized is not just day vs. night, but winter vs. summer. The farther you get from the tropics, the more severe the problem becomes. Not only do days get much shorter in winter, the farther north you go, but the sun angle becomes a problem. Here at 44 degrees north latitude, the maximum altitude of the sun above the horizon is 69.5 degrees--and that's at the summer solstice (when the sun is directly above the Tropic of Cancer). At the winter solstice, the sun is directly above the Tropic of Capricorn, or 47 degrees farther south--and then the highest position the sun can get for us is 22.5 degrees above the horizon.
You can store heat in molten salt over night, or even for a couple of days (which might solve the problem of cloudy days). But I shudder to think of the amount of heat that you would need to store to get you through the winter. This kind of system, however, does make sense for peak load power production.
UPDATE: A couple of readers pointed out that if you can solve the energy storage problem, it would be beneficial not only for solar power, but any energy production method that is not completely at your control, such as wind or hydropower. The difficulty is that batteries are not perfectly efficient at accepting a charge, they don't hold a charge indefinitely, and they don't last forever.
Another strategy that I have seen proposed is to pump water to an higher elevation. If the water is stored in a covered container, there shouldn't be any evaporative losses, and because the stored energy is gravity pulling the water to a lower level, the energy so stored will last for decades, if need be. But pumping water against gravity isn't terribly efficient, and turning it back into electricity later isn't terribly efficient. There is also a big capital investment in creating such a water storage mechanism, especially if it is covered. Of course, if you don't have access to natural elevation changes, building an artificial slope is extremely expensive.
One reader points out that perhaps too much energy is being spent on the electric car problem when the real problem that needs to be solved is: why are people living so far from work? If everyone lived a couple of miles from work (or telecommuted most days, like I do), it wouldn't so much matter what fuel we used for our cars. Of course, that would require social changes probably more dramatic than the technical challenges of electric cars.
UPDATE 2: Another reader points to this article on Wikipedia that claims that pumped water storage schemes can return 70%-85% of the original input energy, depending on evaporation of the body of water.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
More Evidence Of Global Warming
From the January 1, 2008 Worcester [Mass.] Telegram & Gazette:
December 28, 2007 KWTX channel 10 (central Texas):
New Hampshire residents awoke up yesterday to big flakes, gusting winds and a treacherous morning commute as the latest in a string of storms piled more snow onto what was already on the ground from the state’s snowiest December in more than a century.From the December 31, 2007 News-Press:
Concord saw 10.1 inches, beating its December record — 43 inches in 1876 — by an inch and a half. Elsewhere in the state, Wolfeboro got 13 inches.
Record-breaking temperatures are expected to arrive in Southwest Florida on Wednesday and Thursday.From the December 29, 2007 Farmingon [N.M.] Daily Times:
The National Weather Service has issued a Hazardous Weather Outlook for West Central and Southwest Florida.
The weather service e is warning that a strong cold front will move across the Florida Peninsula Tuesday ushering in much colder and drier air.
A freeze watch is in effect for the overnight period of Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. A combination of cold weather and winds will produce low wind chill temperatures.
The coldest night is expected to be Wednesday night-Thursday morning. Freezing temperatures are expected inland.
Predictions range from 37 to 31 degrees in Lee County. Temperatures are expected to drop even lower. The record low for Lee County on Jan. 2 is 37 degrees in 1949. The record low for Jan. 3 is 34 degrees set in 1979.
December 28, 2007 KWTX channel 10 (central Texas):
(December 28, 2007)—How cold was it Thursday morning?From the December 31, 2007 Wisconsin State Journal:
Cold enough to tie the record low for the date, the National Weather Service says.
The temperature dropped to 24 degrees Thursday morning, tying the previous record set in 1938.
But 2000 also logged a record for cold — with a temperature of minus 21 at 1 a.m. Christmas Day, surpassing the previous low of minus 15 set on Dec. 25, 1983. And 2000's record snow and cold caused the roof of the Dane County Coliseum — now the Alliant Energy Center — to reach its load limit, forcing postponement of a Harlem Globetrotters game.Until global warming advocates start to die of frostbite while attending conferences on Bali, or start being mauled to death by polar bears attending conferences in San Francisco, the evidence will continue to be selectively used by the news media.
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