Joe Bryan Denied Parole for Seventh Time

On April 7, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Pamela Colloff

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied Joe Bryan parole for a seventh time on Friday, citing the brutal nature of the crime he stands convicted of — the 1985 shooting death of his wife, Mickey — in concluding that the 78-year-old “poses a continuing threat to public safety.”

Bryan has twice been convicted of Mickey’s murder, which took place in their Clifton, Texas, home. Bryan, then a beloved high school principal, had been attending an education conference in Austin, 120 miles away, in the days surrounding the murder. He has always maintained that he was asleep in his hotel room at the time of the crime. His conviction, for which Bryan has spent 31 years in prison, rested largely on bloodstain-pattern analysis, a technique still in use throughout the criminal justice system, despite concerns about its reliability.

At an evidentiary hearing last year in Comanche, Texas, Bryan’s attorneys presented new evidence that jurors who convicted him never heard — most notably, that the forensic testimony used to convict him was erroneous. “My conclusions were wrong,” retired police Detective Robert Thorman, who performed the bloodstain-pattern analysis in the case, wrote in a sworn affidavit submitted to the court. “Some of the techniques and methodology were incorrect. Therefore, some of my testimony was not correct.”

Last July, before the hearing, the Texas Forensic Science Commission — which investigates complaints about the misuse of forensic testimony and evidence in criminal cases — announced that the blood-spatter analysis used to convict Bryan was “not accurate or scientifically supported.”

In December, however, Judge Doug Shaver, who presided over the evidentiary hearing, recommended that Bryan’s conviction stand, and that he not be granted a new trial. Shaver adopted the prosecution’s findings in their entirety. This included an argument by Bosque County District Attorney Adam Sibley acknowledging that parts of Thorman’s testimony were incorrect but arguing that it didn’t matter: “Thorman’s testimony was not important to the case.”

Bryan’s plea for a new trial is currently before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Its justices may take as long as they like to consider the case, a fact that does not work in Bryan’s favor, since he suffers from congestive heart failure.

The board’s denial followed a concerted effort on the part of Bryan’s parole attorneys, Allen and Shea Place, and the Bryan family to win his release. They hoped that Bryan’s sterling disciplinary record, combined with the revelations of the Comanche hearing, would bring a different result.

The parole board’s reasoning in rendering its decision will never be known. Its members’ deliberations, as well as the documents and testimony they reviewed, are exempt from state open record laws. Who opposed Bryan’s bid for parole, and what they told parole board members, also is confidential.

“I’m in total disbelief,” said Joe’s oldest brother, James, from his home in Houston. “How is a 78-year-old man whose heart is failing, who can barely walk 20 paces without breathing hard, a danger to society? How is a man who hasn’t had a single disciplinary problem in over 30 years in prison a danger?”

Sibley was not available for comment at the time of publication but has previously declined to comment on the Bryan case.

Bryan’s attorney Jessica Freud sees Texas’ highest criminal court as Bryan’s last chance for redemption. “All we can do is continue to anxiously await a decision from the Court of Criminal Appeals,” she said, “and hope that the court will act in time to prevent an innocent man from dying in prison.”

Navy Assembling Hacker Team to Fight Off Small Drones…

On April 7, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

The Navy Is Assembling a Hacker Team to Fight Off Small Drones

Lifting an idea from the Army and a name from the Star Wars universe, the U.S. Navy is assembling a team of engineers, researchers, and even hackers to develop ways to fight off swarms of cheap commercial drones.

The so-called JYN effort is the latest in a series of steps the Pentagon has taken to speed up development of new systems that can defend against drones that are readily available for purchase and easily modified for war..

“This is necessary to enable the [Navy] to gain a competitive advantage over the commercial advancement of unmanned systems technology and potential for nefarious use against [Navy] facilities and assets,” James “Hondo” Geurts, who leads Navy acquisition, wrote in a March 28 memo.

Navy officials are working with the Defense Digital Service to create a “team of highly technologically skilled and driven military and civilian…personnel” to work “in collaborative, startup-like spaces to rapidly develop new [counter-drone] products to address the evolving [drone] threats,” Geurts wrote.

Subscribe

Receive daily email updates:

Subscribe to the Defense One daily.

Be the first to receive updates.

The project expands the Defense Digital Service’s “successful efforts forming, training, and managing joint-service and Army teams,” he wrote.

The Defense Digital Service’s Army counter-drone project is called Jyn Erso after the character in the Star Wars film Rogue One.

Sailors, Marines, and Department of the Navy civilians can apply for the positions on the counter-drone team. Specifically, they are looking for “software engineers, hardware engineers, hackers, security researchers, and other military and civilians with outstanding technical abilities,” Geurts wrote.

“This is an opportunity to grow the talent within the organization, leverage top technologists, learn new approaches, and bring them back to the [Navy],” he wrote.

The new announcement isn’t the first time that the Navy has sought ways to protect ships from swarms of small drones. In 2014, the Navy deployed a 30-kilowatt laser called the XN-1 LaWS aboard the amphibious transport dock Ponce in the Persian Gulf and released test footage of the laser shooting down a ScanEagle drone. Navy officials liked the idea of fending off enemy drone swarms with a laser that costs about a dollar per shot rather than $750,000 Standard missiles. The Navy bought two more of the lasers at $150 million each, with deployments scheduled for FY 2020.

Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria have weaponized small commercial drones, rigging them with explosives. Last year, a drone was reportedly used in an assassanation attempt on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Even unarmed drones can cause chaos, particularly if struck by aircraft traveling at high speeds. In recent months, authorities have shut down major airports in London, Dubai, and Newark after small drones were found in the area.

Patrick Tucker contributed to this report.

Alabama Senator to the IRS: Stop Picking on the South

On April 7, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

by Paul Kiel

On Monday, ProPublica published a map showing where IRS audits are most concentrated. The South stood out.

The reason, we explained, was because of an intense focus at the IRS on auditing recipients of the earned income tax credit. The EITC is one of the country’s largest antipoverty programs, in the form of a tax refund for low-income workers, especially those with children. The typical EITC recipient earns less than $20,000 per year.

In practice, the IRS’ emphasis on EITC recipients means states with concentrations of low-income workers see the highest audit rates. One of those states is Alabama. Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., wasn’t pleased.

“To take such a large portion of limited IRS resources and to focus them so intensely on rural communities in Alabama and the Southeast makes little fiscal sense,” Jones wrote in a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig. “Moreover, the practice appears to be blatantly discriminatory.” (An IRS spokesperson previously told ProPublica that audit subjects are chose without regard to race or where the taxpayer lives.)

The map, which stemmed from a study by Kim M. Bloomquist, formerly a senior economist in the IRS’ research office, showed that the highest audit rates were to be found in rural, mostly African American counties in the South. Among states, Alabama had the fifth highest audit rate in the country, behind Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and Florida.

“In an effort to focus its resources and ensure fair treatment of all taxpayers, I believe the IRS should undertake a full and thorough review of the policies and practices that led to such a disparate geographic impact of its annual audits,” Jones wrote. He ended his letter with a number of questions about IRS audit policies.

As we explained in December, Republicans in Congress have pressured the IRS since the 1990s to prevent payments of the credit to people who aren’t eligible for it. Meanwhile, critics, some within the IRS, such as Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, have long criticized the focus on EITC audits as disproportionate, especially since IRS studies show that far more revenue is lost through cheating by those higher up the income scale. Furthermore, in recent years, budget cuts have hampered the IRS’ ability to pursue wealthy taxpayers, while audits of EITC recipients, which are largely automated, have been slower to decline. The result is an increasingly unequal mix of audits.

Lawmakers will have an opportunity to ask Rettig about the IRS’ audit choices in a hearing next Wednesday before the Senate Finance Committee.

“There are two tax codes in America, and there are also two enforcement regimes,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the committee’s ranking member. “It takes significant resources to go after wealthy tax cheats with savvy lawyers and accountants, and the IRS simply doesn’t have those resources after years of Republican attacks. Ensuring wealthy taxpayers pay what they owe shouldn’t be a partisan issue, and this will be a focus with Commissioner Rettig.