A high school student’s hopes for leniency from an Ohio court were dashed recently when he was sentenced to life in prison without parole for his part in a series of killings.

The 17-year-old defendant was charged with aggravated murder and attempted murder in the deaths of three men and the wounding of another. He was allegedly an accomplice in a plot hatched by an older man to lure victims with a phony Craigslist posting.

The posting was for a job opportunity doing farm labor. Three men in their 40s or 50s were killed, one near Akron and the others in southeastern Ohio at a farm where they had come expecting job interviews.

The victims were selected because they were single, out of work and unlikely to raise red flags with law enforcement if they disappeared. Robbery was the motive for the crimes, said prosecutors.

The man who escaped death was lured like the others by the promise of an employment opportunity. When the potential victim showed up at the farm, the older man tried to shoot him, but succeeded only in wounding him in the arm as he fled.

Boy Claimed Influence From “Evil” Adult

The wounded man testified at the 17-year-old’s trial, identifying him as the 53-year-old shooter’s accomplice. Prosecutors did not claim that the teen had actually shot any of the victims himself.

The older man, who has a prison record and presented himself as an Akron street minister, apparently had become the young man’s spiritual mentor. The youth claimed that he could not see his way clear to any alternatives when he was drawn into the murder plot, though he now realized that his mentor is evil.

The teen’s defense attorneys had asked the judge to consider that the youth came from a broken home and had no prior record, and to take his age into account. Additionally, the high schooler said he did not realize that his mentor intended to murder the men until he shot the first victim.

Pleas For Leniency Denied

The young man’s defense attorneys tried to negotiate a more lenient sentence in exchange for testimony against the triggerman in his upcoming trial, and sentencing was briefly delayed for talks. The attorneys had hoped for a deal that would allow the young man to be released within 20 to 30 years.

In the end, the judge said that despite any mitigating factors the defense presented, the killings were cold-blooded executions, and the 17-year-old had had an opportunity to stop them.

Every case is different, and every defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Having a capable defense attorney is a criminal defendant’s best chance for acquittal or a reduced sentence. Whatever the outcome, it is wise to engage an experienced criminal defense attorney, because life and liberty may be at stake.

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Washington, U.S.A. — Strangers committed about 1.8 million nonfatal violent crimes in 2010, or about 38 percent of all nonfatal violent victimizations during the year, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced on December 11. This represents a 77 percent decline from 7.9 million nonfatal violent crimes committed by strangers in 1993, according to the earliest available data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).

During a more recent period from 2001 to 2010, the rate of violence committed by strangers declined 47 percent and the rate committed by offenders the victims knew declined by 41 percent. The percentage declines for these two rates were not statistically different.

In the NCVS, nonfatal violent crimes include rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault and simple assault. Simple assault (assault not involving an injury or a weapon) made up 60 percent of violent victimizations committed by strangers in 2010, followed by aggravated assault (20 percent), robbery (17 percent) and rape or sexual assault (two percent).

More than half (52 percent) of all robberies in 2005-10 were committed by strangers, down from nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of robberies in 1993-98. Aggravated assaults and simple assaults committed by strangers also declined between the two periods, while the percentage of rapes and sexual assaults remained stable.

Based on data from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), among homicides in which the victim-offender relationship could be determined, strangers committed between 21 percent and 27 percent of homicides from 1993 to 2008, compared to between 73 percent and 79 percent of homicides committed by offenders known to the victims.

In 2010, males (9.5 victimizations per 1,000 males) experienced violence by strangers at nearly twice the rate of females (4.7 per 1,000). From 1993 to 2010, males (down 83 percent) experienced a larger decline than females (down 76 percent) in the rate of violence committed by strangers.

In each time period studied, young adults ages 18 to 24, people who were never married, and American Indians or Alaska Natives had the highest rates of violent victimization by a stranger among all groups in the respective categories. In 2005-10, people age 65 or older experienced the lowest rates (1.6 per 1,000) of violent victimization by strangers.

Other findings from 2005-10 include:

• Persons in urban areas experienced higher rates of violent victimizations by strangers than persons in suburban and rural areas.
• A higher percentage of violence by strangers occurred in public places (51 percent) (e.g., commercial establishments, parking lots or garages, open areas, streets or aboard public transportation) than in private places (26 percent).
• Strangers committed about nine percent of violent crimes that occurred in the victim’s home.
• About half of violent victimizations committed by strangers occurred while the victims were away from home traveling, shopping or doing leisure activities.
• About 10 percent of violent crimes committed by strangers involved a firearm, compared to five percent of violent crimes committed by someone the victim knew.
• About 22 percent of victims of violence committed by strangers were injured, compared to 31 percent of victims who knew the offender.

The NCVS collects information from victims on the frequency, characteristics and consequences of criminal victimization, using a nationally representative sample of about 40,000 households comprising nearly 75,000 persons. In the FBI’s SHR program, a part of the Uniform Crime Reporting program, law enforcement agencies report monthly supplemental data about homicide incidents with details on location, victim, and offender characteristics.

The report, Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010 (NCJ 239424), was written by BJS statistician Erika Harrell. The report, related documents and additional information about the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ statistical publications and programs can be found on the BJS website at http://www.bjs.gov.

Image Courtesy : Daryl Lang / Shutterstock.com

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Sweden has recently begun moving away from paper money, favoring instead money of the electronic kind.  Not to say the country has completely eliminated the need for physical money, but bank notes and coins make up a meager 3 percent of the Swedish economy, contrasting with a 7 percent average for the rest of Europe and 7 percent for the United States.

In major cities, public modes of transport have stopped taking cold, hard cash.  Tickets are instead bought in advance or with a text message from a cell phone.  These businesses are not alone.  Many other businesses now accept only cards, and a few banks no longer handle physical money in any way, preferring to profit from electronic transactions.

Even churches have made the jump, with many now accepting cards when worshipers make donations. Many have expressed concern at the technological jump.  Those that prefer coins and bills are worried about the complexities that appear with such an economy.

The young and others may have a good grasp on technology, but for the elderly in rural parts, these new methods present all sorts of problems.  Many do not even have credit cards, and most of those that do, do not understand how to withdraw money or use their card in many transactions.

This move to digital money, however, has undeniable benefits.  There is now much less room for shadow economic activities, like concealing profits when tax season comes in Sweden, especially when compared with the rest of Europe. In Italy, Prime Minister Mario Monti has moved towards limiting cash transactions to payments of up to one thousand pounds.

Another beneficial effect is a reduced number of robberies in cash-holding organizations. The number of bank robberies went from 110 in 2008 to 16 in 2011, the lowest since data began to be recorded 30 years ago. Robberies of security transports have also lessened.

Not that this switch has not caused any problems. Cyber-crime is on the rise, with the number of reported crimes up from 3,304 in 2000, to the astronomical 20,000 in 2011.

Oscar Swartz, the creator of Sweden’s first Internet provider, Banhof, thinks that a digital economy also complicates matters of privacy, due to electronic trails resulting from transactions.  “One should be able to send money and donate money to different organizations without being traced every time,” he says.

It is unlikely, however, that physical money will be completely phased out anytime soon.  A much more likely possibility is that it will slowly play less of a role in the economy, though not disappearing completely anytime soon.

Sweden was ranked number one in the Global Information Technology Report, first shown at the World Economic Forum in January, for the second time in a row. The Economist Intelligence Unit listed Sweden first in 2010, in its most recent digital economy rankings. These rankings track how much countries have integrated information and communication technologies within their economies.

In 1661 Sweden was the first European country to introduce bank notes to its people, a move that very much helped all countries move forward.  Now, as the country phases them out, could they be on the right track once more?

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The police in California recovered a stolen laptop after a software program sent the owner of the laptop the suspect’s information and picture – taken by the installed camera in the laptop. A thief had broken into his apartment through a window while the owner was not home in his Oakland apartment on March 21^st. Joshua Kaufman, an Oakland interaction designer, reported the theft in March, according to BBC news. The suspect, a cab driver named Muthanna Aldebashi, 27, has been charged with felony possession of stolen property.

Kaufman told the BBC how excited he was to get his Macbook back. He was “very happy and relieved that I don’t have to sit and watch someone else use my old computer.”

A program named Hidden, supplies the owner of the computer with the location and photographs taken by the Macbook’s internal camera, as well as shots of the Macbook’s screen display.

The program sent Kaufman pictures of a “bearded man with shaggy dark hair sleeping on a couch, sitting shirtless on a bed in front of the computer, and driving.”

Kaufman describes how “the photos were pretty boring – just some guy staring into a screen or sleeping or watching Youtube videos on his bed.” After failing to get a serious response from the Oakland investigators, Kaufman started blogging about the theft on his personal site http://thisguyhasmymacbook.tumblr.com/ where readers could follow Kaufman as he followed the bearded man’s use of his stolen computer – in both words and images.

Kaufman’s monitoring of the potential suspect started to attract attention of the US news media. Officer Joshi was contacted by ABC television’s Good Morning America, which revealed that Kaufman’s initial report had been filed in “error with theft reports for which no leads existed to aid the investigation.”

Officer Joshi describes how “law enforcement is always looking at technology as a way to be smarter with capturing criminals and solving crimes”, <showing that> technology that could be useful for us”.

When authorities eventually tracked down the new owner of the stolen Macbook, Mr. Aldebashi was not charged with the burglary and Mr. Kaufman has indicated that Mr. Aldebashi might have bought the laptop on the streets. However, had it not been for the information gathered through the program Hidden which Kaufman himself provided, investigators might never have found the stolen hardware. He wrote on his blog how he had provided an e-mail address linked to a car service. Since the media attention following the tracking and repossession of the stolen computer, the Hidden program has received a lot of attention by other consumers, who are willing to invest in this type of software as an extra guarantee in case of burglary.

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