Officials at the University of Massachusetts Amherst acknowledge that they allowed a student who confessed to raping a friend on campus last fall, a felony, to remain enrolled and avoid significant discipline, according to a report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University. Newly obtained Justice Department data show that reports [...]
Archive for February, 2010
Few touch sanctions imposed in New England campus sexual assault cases
February 26th, 2010 
Mark Horvit 
Posted in 
Education Deparment’s enforcement of campus sexual assault cases is lacking
February 26th, 2010 Mark Horvit The Education Department is charged with enforcing laws on how schools deal with sexual assault, but its Office of Civil Rights rarely investigates student allegations of botched proceedings. When cases do go forward, the civil rights office rarely rules against the schools, and virtually never issues any sanctions against institutions, according to an investigation by [...]
Agencies in New Mexico impeded fraud and elder care investigations
February 23rd, 2010 Beth An ongoing series in The New Mexico Independent explores allegations that state agencies interfered with fraud and elder abuse investigations. The Medicaid Fraud Division stated that Human Services Department and the Health Department had “withheld, ‘filtered’ and ‘sanitized’ information and documents requested by investigators, hindering numerous investigations.“ Medicaid Fraud The series led to an attempt [...]
Deadly military aviation accidents on the rise
February 23rd, 2010 Beth “U.S. soldiers have been twice as likely to die from aviation accidents as they were from ground mishaps or incidents over the past two and a half decades, according to an Aerospace DAILY analysis of U.S. Army data.” An increased reliance on aviation has contributed to the increase in these deadly air accidents. There have [...]
Texas slow to penalize nursing homes where residents suffer
February 19th, 2010 Mark Horvit Through interviews with families and advocates and a review of thousands of pages of public records, the San Antonio Express-News reports that some of the city’s most frail and vulnerable residents are suffering at the hands of their caregivers in Texas nursing homes. Yet state officials allow troubled nursing homes to continue operating with little [...]
California lawmakers turn perks into profit
February 19th, 2010 Mark Horvit The Orange County Register’s Brian Joseph exposes how overlapping laws allow California state lawmakers to leverage their tax-free travel allowance to buy homes, secure tax deductions and sometimes pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. “This legal patchwork has created a benefit legislators in other states rarely see and blurred the lines between allowance [...]
DUI checkpoints prove profitable for cities
February 18th, 2010 Beth “Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunken drivers,” according to a report by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley and California Watch. It is estimated that in 2009 such checkpoints generated $40 million [...]
Many wrongly arrested by Louisville officer
February 18th, 2010 Beth A package of stories by The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Ky.) reveals that a Louisville Metro police detective has been accusing people of crimes they did not commit. Many of the accused have been juveniles. “Detective Crystal Marlowe has pursued charges against some defendants for crimes they could not have committed because they were already in jail. [...]
Ex-residents slow to be notified of toxic water on Marine base
February 17th, 2010 Beth Despite a 2007 law requiring the Marine Corps to notify former residents of Camp Lejeune, N.C. that they may have been exposed to contaminated water between 1957 and 1987, many have never been notified while others are just now finding out, according to a report by Barbara Barrett of McClatchy Newspapers.
Police under investigation for fatal shooting days after Katrina
February 16th, 2010 Beth Times-Picayune reporters Brendan McCarthy and Laura Maggi and ProPublica’s A.C. Thompson report that “a former New Orleans police officer is under investigation for shooting Henry Glover” four days after Hurricane Katrina.
