what the hell?

So my completely non-explosive bag gets picked up at security screening, but two 13 year olds carrying a Ruger revolver, a .22 calibre pistol, 14 knives and an assortment of other stolen weapons manage to fly from Karratha to Perth to Cairns before anyone notices they've got them?!

And they were accompanied by a QANTAS staff member, who also obviously didn't know about it!

Sheesh.

Oh I feel totally safe on Australian aircraft now. Good thing that explosive trace detector thingy is so sensitive.

links.

Saving Anthony Harris.

The thing that really blew me away about this? Besides the obvious how the hell did this case ever get past the police station door to the courts, let alone as far as it did when blind Freddie could see that it was ridiculous?

Prosecutors are shielded by absolute immunity for anything they do as prosecutors, no matter how unethical. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 held in Imbler v. Pachtman (where a prosecutor knowingly presented perjured testimony) that prosecutors need this immunity to protect them from "harassment by unfounded litigation".

Are you serious?!?

Wow. No wonder people line up for that job. Good pay, carte blanche... I could see why you'd apply.

And then you have this one.

A chain-smoking, African-American rapist who used a knife. That was the man the Lubbock police should have been looking for. But it was a nonsmoking, asthmatic black man they eventually settled on.

"Well, you know, he's black, he probably uses a knife... hey, almost two out of three ain't bad!"

(It worries me that the only other time I've heard of Lubbock is the sex education documentary. Or rather, lack of sex education documentary.)

It's incredible though:

After Cole was convicted, the real rapist quietly waited for the statute of limitations to run out. Then, in 1995, Johnson wrote a letter to the district court in Lubbock in which he confessed to raping Mallin. He got no reply. So he wrote another letter asking for an attorney so that he could legally confess. Again, he was ignored.

Unbelievable. Even allowing for crank letters and the like, surely a follow up phone call might have been in order?

The Innocence Project of Texas sought relief in court to clear Cole's name, but no judge in Lubbock would grant them a hearing.

And again, what?!?

So far this decade, 34 men in Texas, most of them black, have been exonerated by modern DNA testing. They spent 10, 15, 20, even 27 years wrongly imprisoned for rape before being released. No such remedy is available for Cole, a bright, likeable young man who got along well with everyone and who, in the spring of 1985, had his whole life ahead of him.

Got to say sentences for rape are a hell of a lot harsher in Texas than here.