They couldn't win in court so they smear a teen in the press. The Matt Bandy case returns.

I have posted extensively on the attack by the Maricopa County Attorney’s office on teenager Matt Bandy. You can read our posts here, here and here. If you know nothing about the case you will need to read these before this makes sense.

Our report was picked up by Wendy McElroy on Foxnews.com. She ran a very critical article on the case of her own. ABC News ran some very critical material including a rambling interview with Country Attorney Andrew Thomas where he bumbled his way through with nary a coherent sentence. All the bad publicity is hurting his political ambitions so out comes one of his lackeys to defend his reputation.

Rachel Alexander is the deputy county attorney In Maricopa, which is basically Phoenix, Arizona. That means she works for Thomas, who is basing his political ambitions on a reputation of being a hard ass. Well, he’s half right at least!

Alexander has written a long, deceitful attack on those who question the actions of Thomas and his department (her department too). This is no longer a legal matter. The case is over and Thomas didn’t get what he wanted. Matt Bandy is not in jail. Matt Bandy is not a registered sex offender. Thomas lost! He got a token admission that the boy showed a copy of Playboy to some friends. Stop the world! That’s worse than the ovens of Auschwitz!

Since this is not a legal case anymore, what is Ms. Alexander doing here? She is not doing the work she is paid to do. She is doing Public Relations work for Mr. Thomas -- again.

And who is paying for that? Where was she when she wrote her “rebuttal?” Was she at work? Was it on county payroll time? Did she run it past the ambitious Thomas in his office for his approval? Was he on county time when that was done?

All interesting questions. Don’t expect her to answer any of them. But, I would hazard a guess that there is a very strong likelihood that Mr. Thomas and Ms. Alexander both were involved in this PR campaign and both were being paid by the taxpayers at the time. That really would amount to theft in my view. But, thinking of Mr. Thomas merely as a thief would raise him several notches in my estimation.

Let us look at what Ms. Alexander wrote. She says this whole incident is “the result of the juvenile defendant’s parents denial of the evidence of their son’s guilt and unfortunate initiation (sic) of a media disinformation campaign.” Oh. A media conspiracy, maybe even a “liberal media” conspiracy, "liberal" like the column at FoxNews.com.

Matt’s parents believe him innocent. So do I. In fact Matt is legally innocent. That is what Thomas and Alexander don’t want to acknowledge. In the end they couldn’t convict him on the charges their department wanted to use. They had their chance in court and they failed!

Even the judge was appalled at how they were acting. Oh, wait, that must be one of those “activist judges” in cahoots with the “media” to defame the hard ass county attorney. No doubt ABC even scrambled the interview with him so as to make him appear incoherent, illogical and stupid. When he stumbled all over himself on camera that couldn't be real.

Most of Alexander’s tiresome rebuttal is a repetition of what Thomas’ team claimed in court. They didn’t win in court. So I don’t see how repeating the claims clarify things. In publicAlexander doesn’t have to prove her case, just sound plausible. In court she would have to prove her case. And it was in court that her office lost and in court where the judge very openly slapped them down for their actions.

Alexander lies in her rebuttal. She says that the experts who write on the Bandy site “were not given the specific facts of Bandy’s situation; they were simply asked broad questions about viruses hijacking a computer.” That is a lie! I mean a lie, a outright, total, intentional lie.

Who is the expert that is quoted on the Bandy web site? It is Tami Loehr. Alexander claims the experts quoted were only asked broad questions. Loehr was not just asked some broad questions. After the Bandy’s fought for access to the computer, which Country Attorney Thomas was trying to deny them, Loehr actually inspected the computer. It was not merely some broad questions but a forensic on-hands examination of the actual evidence. Why did Alexander lie about this?

Ms. Alexander is not under oath in the court of public opinion. So she is free to invent lies to make her ambitious boss look better in light of the fiasco of the Bandy case. In court she would not be allowed to make this statement. You can read Loehr’s detailed report regarding the computer. (PDF) This proves Ms. Alexander is a liar. You will also read in this report how the office of Thomas and Alexander kept trying to delay Loehr so she couldn’t examine the evidence.

Alexander says that her, and Thomas’, office had “overwhelming evidence” that Matt was guilty. So overwhelming that they were unable to secure a conviction! Evidence so “overwhelming” that they tried to make the case go away by pleading the matter down to him showing a copy of Playboy to some friends.

She is clever with her wording, clever in the way attorneys can be, so as to say one thing but make it appear that something else was said instead. Matt “admitted to detectives that he visited pornographic web sites as well as an online group known for sharing pornographic images of children.” The first part is irrelevant. The second claim is not. But, what is she actually saying? More importantly, what is she not saying? Aware of libel laws, she is being very careful. She doesn’t want to actually accuse Matt of downloading child porn, but she wants to make it sound as if she has. She is planting an impression with the reader.

She says he visited a web group. She says that somewhere someone on this group traded child porn. She does not say Matt knew it was being done or was involved in doing it. Let us take another example. You walk into a restaurant in “Little Italy” for some lunch. Some men in dark suits, who look rather threatening, are eating across the room. You don’t really notice them. You finish and head off back to work. The next day some petty bureaucrat says “you ate lunch at a known Mafia hangout.” The implication is that you are a criminal. The actual wording only says you ate at the restaurant. The statement is devoid of any importance but gives the false impression that it is very important. Alexander’s statement about Matt visiting a Yahoo group where child porn is alleged to have been traded is the same kind of statement.

Be aware that almost any group used for file sharing can be used to exchange pornography -- legal or forbidden. And thousands of people may be using this group. It may be “known” to someone that a few of those people traded such images. That doesn’t mean you knew it or that you traded them. A lot of people were in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was shot. That doesn’t mean they were involved. A lot of people go to file sharing groups, that doesn’t mean they share every file that someone may put there or exchange there.

The Bandy’s had a CD in their computer. Some images appeared on that CD. Alexander contends “that a virus could not have burned those images to a CD” and the “fact that child pornography was found on the CD at his home cannot be ignored.” Sounds strong. So why no conviction on those charges?

First, she is correct to say a virus couldn’t do this. But no one every claimed it could. Again she is intentionally dropping context in her PR campaign. A virus didn’t do it. But “zombie” software could do it. In other words, other problems with the computer could have done it.

Alexander has sent us on a wild goose chase after a virus while knowing the virus was never the object of interest. She conveniently ignores the ways in which this could have happened to concentrate on a way it didn't happened. She’s not interested in facts just the reputation of her boss and her department.

It is quite possible that a trojan could put the images there. I’m not expert, but I’ve had numerous experts explain it to me several times. Surely Ms. Alexander has access to the same information -- even if she would rather ignore it.

As I understand it, if a trojan gives a remote person control of your computer they can write files to various drives. One place that might appear as a drive is a CDRom. This person may write his files to that drive thus placing them on the CD. And, if the CD spends most its time in the computer, he could come back and use the computer to send those images to others. One day you might come along and take the CD out. Unless you open the CD and inspect everything on it you wouldn’t even know his file was there. And, if the file he planted is buried several layers deep, as it was on the Bandy computer, you would never know it was there. So again, I think Alexander is being dishonest.

She intentionally focuses on a claim not made while ignoring the actual claims that were made. She did not do this unknowingly. I think that is Lie #2.

She claims that the police detective who conducted the investigation for the County Attorney “is certified by the International Association of Computer Investigative Specialists.” Who are they? Some prestigious association of computer experts perhaps? Nope.

According to the Association itself the IACIS is “composed of law enforcement professionals dedicated to education of police officers”, that is people working for the prosecution. And they are so dedicated to their work that their next conference is being held at Disney World! Just in case they might want to skip a few sessions to spend time with Mickey Mouse. But, then if you work with Andrew Thomas, time with Mickey Mouse would be a bit redundant.

Let us be clear here. This is a group of cops who certify other cops. They are not independent experts at all. Alexander doesn’t mention that fact does she? She gets more absurd by attacking the expert the Bandy’s hired because her “resume does not indicate she is certified with IACIS”. Since one must be a “law enforcement professional” (apparently with a passion for Disney World) then it is obvious that the Bandy expert would not be a member. In fact, it would be almost impossible for the Bandys to hire a member of the IACIS, since they are cops working for police departments and prosecutors.

To attack Tami Loehr for not being a member of the IACIS would be like attacking Matt’s defense attorney for not being a county prosecutor.

Again, Alexander is being deceptive. I think it is an intentional deception since the IACIS is a group of cops. She couldn’t say the following and be taken seriously: “The Bandy expert is not a police officer therefore she doesn’t have credentials.” That statement would be ludicrous on the face of it. Instead she made the same statement in a roundabout way. I think that is another lie on her part. Lie #3.

Remember that viruses can do nasty things to your computer, but the problem with placing images on the machine would also be related to having trojans on the computer -- software that allows others to control your computer. We have covered this in our earlier posts on this topic.

Alexander says that Bandy is guilty because the courts “upheld the child pornography conviction of a defendant who blamed a virus for placing child pornography on his computer. In that case, the prosecutions’ forensic analysis of his computer indicated there were viruses on his computer, but they were not capable of downloading child pornography.”

How is this relevant to the Bandy case? It isn’t. This is Alexander blowing smoke as part of her PR campaign. First, not all viruses are alike. Your computer could have 50 viruses and mine could have 50 viruses and we might not have the same viruses at all. It is possible to have a virus on your computer that does one thing while I have a virus that does something entirely different. It is irrelevant what viruses were on this other computer. Again she is ignoring the trojans. Interesting how she forgets them in her rebuttal.

Alexander is practically weeping crocodile tears by the end of her PR piece. She implores people to understand that her office didn’t plea bargain down so far because “we did not have a strong case. This too is not accurate.” No, not at all. They did it because they had a strong case. Okay the Bandy’s didn’t think so. Neither has anyone in the media who has looked at the case. Oh, and the judge wasn’t very impressed either. But really they had a strong case -- they are just old softies. See, Thomas isn’t a hard ass but a soft ass.

And Alexander informs everyone: “Our office never intended to ask for a sentence of 90 years in prison, as has been so greatly exaggerated.” Yes and no. She’s not be totally honest here -- again. The law says that if they file these charges then Matt will be sentenced to 10 years in prison, consecutively, per image if found guilty. When the prosecutor files these charges he does so knowing these are the only penalties that can be incurred.

Thomas and crew filed charges that would have put Matt Bandy in prison for life! They knew that would happen if he was convicted. For Alexander to say that the County Attorney never intended to ask for the sentence is more deceptive smoke. You decide whether she is being deceptive enough here for it to be classified as a lie. I think it is.

Then she goes into political rhetoric with lots of smoke and lots of bull. “The victim in this case is not Matt Bandy. The victims are the children who are exploited and made virtual sex slaves.” Excuse me, but the only child in this case was Matt Bandy. These other children were not in the case. They were not participants, witnesses or involved, though photos of them were -- photos which could be 50 years old for all we know. And Matt Bandy had nothing to do what may have happened to these children somewhere else. He did not make any children into “sex slaves” as Alexander drags up. The most she claimed was that he downloaded those images and even that charge didn’t stick when it went to court. Now, she makes it sound as if he was out enslaving small children to gratify his sexual desires. Shameful.

She is trying to divert attention away from the victim in the case. Matt Bandy was a child abused by her department. She and Thomas are, in that sense, child abusers. Since Matt did not take those photographs, and did not enslave any child, she is muddying the waters with emotive rhetoric to distract attention from the questionable actions of her own department. Shame on her.

She says “This case is not about pornography, it is about child pornography.” Well, sort of. But let us not forget that they were running into real problems when they made that claim in court. Those problems were sufficient enough that they dropped the charges of child pornography against Matt. If you drop the charges of child porn, and instead convict him for showing a copy of Playboy, well, then it is about pornography, not child pornography. At the very least she is being deceptive -- yet again.

She says: “Our office did what it thought was right in this situation...” No doubt they did. That’s what is so scary. The worst tyranny is always done in the name of a greater good.

Alexander laments that a “media disinformation campaign cannot change the overwhelming evidence of Bandy’s guilt.” Again that “overwhelming evidence” failed in the end. Matt Bandy was not convicted of the crime for which she claims they have “overwhelming evidence.” That means that he is “innocent until proven guilty.” They haven’t repealed that yet, have they? So Matt Bandy IS innocent in every legal, and I think actual, sense of the word. For Alexander to say he is guilty is once again deceptive.

She then whines that “the court removed the sex offender registration terms from Bandy’s guilty plea so he will not receive the treatment he needs to avoid this happening again.” Why would the court do that? Oh, yes, they thought the prosecution was full of crap! Apparently they were unconvinced by the “overwhelming evidence.” What is needed to make sure this doesn’t happen again is for Thomas, and I dare say Alexander, to both lose their positions. Thomas should go work as a rodeo clown. The costume fits and he’s used to working with lots of bull. And Alexander could sweep up the bullshit after the show. Much as she is doing now.

One final word as to why I am so disgusted with Alexander’s PR tactics for her clownish boss. She once again smears Matt Bandy as a “sex offender” in need of psychiatric help. She implies that if he doesn’t get that “help” he will attack children. She is smearing a teenager who has not been convicted of any crime remotely similar to that of attacking children.

This is a vile, libelous attack on his character. Her department could not win the case in court, where facts count. Instead she mounts her own “media disinformation campaign” to publicly smear Matt Bandy in the worst way possible. That is a disgusting thing to do to a teenager. It is unprofessional and inhumane. Rachel Alexander is not fit to hold the public trust. In fact, she isn’t fit for most things. What she has done is disgusting to the hilt. I would be tempted to give her our Moron of the Week award. But this is far lower than being a moron. There literally are no words that adequately describe the moral character of someone who would do this. No words at all.

Now for some facts on Ms. Alexander. She is a Right-wing partisan. A Right-wing web site she runs says: “Rachel Alexander and her brother Andrew are co-Editors of Intellectual Conservative.” (Talk about a contradiction in terms.) She is identified on the site as a “Deputy County Attorney with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.” No wonder the expose of her office’s antics on Fox News so unrattled her. It was Fox News after all. That had to hurt.

We also get some insight into possible reasons they were so anxious to prosecute Matt, in the end, for showing Playboy to some friends. Rachel has something of a passionate hatred for the magazine based on her religious beliefs. (Anyone want to lay odds on whether or not she is a fundamentalist, or at least a Mormon?). I suspect the former, more than the latter myself.

Rachel wrote an essay as to why men shouldn’t look at Playboy. She knows men don't buy it because they read the articles, she says. She uses herself to explain why. She notes that she likes men. Oh, good! I can sleep better knowing that. And she doesn’t look at male bodies “for three very simple, obvious, important reasons: 1) it is immoral from a Biblical perspective, 2) the men I date do not approve of it, and 3) it has been proven to destroy relationships and become an addiction transforming the brains neurons.” Rachel Alexander lives in The Twilight Zone. She then mentions an additional reason, I guess that is reason 3A, it would be embarrassing “if anyone found out.”

She does what every authoritarian I’ve ever met in the Republican Party does (and she is a Republican--but you guessed that didn’t you?). She plays up how she is “fairly libertarian” followed by a real explanation of why she isn’t remotely libertarian at all. She says “naked pictures” are not speech and not protected by the First Amendment. Strictly speaking she could be right on that (she isn’t), but she is no libertarian even if she is right. She clearly wants the images banned and that disqualifies her from the libertarian label. Ms.Alexander, I have known libertarians all my life. I am an libertarian. You are no libertarian. You are not even “fairly libertarian.” To be precise, you are socialist of the soul, a collectivist when it comes to one's private life, an advocate of big government and the Nanny state. You just want Nanny to do different things than your comrades on the Left.

Of course, right after saying she is fairly libertarian, she begins attacking libertarians. She also says that erotica is: “Trying to show through pictures that some people are stupid enough to allow themselves to be exploited so others can feel superior to them is not something the founders intended to protect.” Now, you don’t have to like erotica. But, that has to be the lamest psychologizing I’ve ever seen concerning why erotica is produced.

She mentions that she had “dated a man 12 years ago who had” who read Playboy and she didn’t like it one bit. Now, I wonder how much of a role Rachel Alexander had in the Bandy case. We might have an explanation for why he was banned, even when he turned 18 years of age, from looking at any erotica as part of his probation (for the crime of showing Playboy to friends.) I said at the time that it was clear that the probation requirements were part of a campaign against adult erotica. If Rachel Alexander was part of the case we may now know why. It is immoral according to the Bible, and she doesn’t like it. But, then she and Thomas a ideological peas from the same pod and I suspect his whole department is now riddled with Theopublicans.

Ms. Alexander, according to one Right-wing group does “pro bono” work for a Religious Right outfit called Alliance Defense Fund. You can find the outfit here. They promote a video interview with a teen who is claiming his religious faith was under attack because of a “religious” T-shirt he was wearing. The video never tells anyone that the t-shirt was an attack on gay students. His “faith” was wearing a t-shirt which attacked other students for being gay. What would happen if teens wore t-shirts to school attacking people for being black, Jewish, Catholic or such? Of course the school would forbid it, as it is really an attempt to pick a fight by flinging insults. The Fund is a major group promoting a theocratic Religious Right viewpoint. One of their law suits is to try to force the Michigan Family Independence Agency to place abused children with “Teen Ranch a Christian-based facility.”

The state agency asked Teen Ranch to stop religiously indoctrinating children placed there by the state with state funds. The group refused to comply and the state stopped placing children there. Apparently Teen Ranch could only survive on state funds and without access to children and funding from the state it closed down. Rachel Alexander, the “fairly libertarian” attorney gives “pro bono” work to the group that is fighting this case. Seems she got the definition of libertarian wrong again.

Photo: The photo is the "intellectual conservative" Rachel Alexander herself.

UPDATE: See our post on Alexander and her role as PR frontman for Thomas.

One law for us, another for you.

The stench from the legal prosecution of Matt Bandy continues and desperate hacks for Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas are doing their best to smear Matt.

Several times people have commented about how easy it is for unwanted and unknown images to appear on one’s hard drive. And the question has come up what the prosecutors do if it happened to them, their family or their allies. Now we know.

The full force of the law was used against Matt Bandy. He faced a compulsory, 90 year minimum sentence in prison because nine images were found on his computer and representatives of Andrew Thomas’ office said he put them there willingly. In reality there are half a dozen ways minimum that images can end up in your computer files without your consent or knowledge.

But when it was discovered that Don Lafrenier, who had been with Sahuarita, Arizona police department, had 17 images, defined as child pornography, on his lap top what did the authorities do?

Remember Lafrenier was a full grown adult when his case arose and Matt Bandy was a 16 year old kid. So surely they went after Lafrenier with more force and authority than they did to this kid. Add onto the case the fact that Lafrenier had been a public official, an officer of the law, and you’d think that they would really throw the book at him. They didn’t. They did nothing. I’m not saying they were wrong here. I’m merely illustrating the difference of how the law treats one of their own and how they treat the serfs, I mean the average person.

Lt. Ryan Young of the the local police explained why the Attorney General decided not to prosecute Lafrenier. I quote how it was reported by the Grass Valley (AZ) News.

The decision not to press charges was made by the Attorney General’s office, which typically does not press charges unless there is evidence that someone with pornographic images actively used those images, Young said. That’s because Internet users can find unwanted images, including pornography, “popping up” on their screens, and even if they delete the images, a record of that image will remain in their computer, Young said.

The justification is partially reasonable and partially not. First, this is what happened to Matt Bandy yet he was prosecuted and faced what amounted to life in jail. And if Lafrenier had been prosecuted he would have faced a minimum term of 170 years in prison. Arizona is bonkers folks. One man recently received a 200 year sentence for 20 photographs he downloaded from the internet, or is alleged to have downloaded. And Arizona courts ruled the sentence is neither cruel nor unusual. I suggest it is cruel, it is unusual and it is insane.

People ought to be outraged but the moment someone whines: “What about the kids?” the public goes into a hypnotic stupor and chants “more prison time, more prison time.”

So police officer Lafrenier was facing the potential of 170 years in prison. But charges are dropped because the District Attorney says people can’t necessarily be held responsible for images found on their computer. Andrew Thomas says they can and tried to send Matt Bandy to prison for life.

But Bandy was no police officer. He wasn’t “one of the boys” and we know law enforcement looks out for one another. So how do you find a difference between the case of Lafrenier and the case of Matt Bandy? You need something to justify throwing the book at the kid and looking the other way for the cop. And the key is found in the phrase “actively used” the images.

What is meant by active use? The local press explains this means “categorized, saved to a compact disc or e-mailed to others.”

Does that necessarily make sense? Some does and some doesn’t. If someone e-mails an image to a friend then they know the image is there. But one’s computer can become part of a zombie network used by hackers to send out e-mails. So e-mails go out from your computer and you are not aware of it. Active use for sure but not your active use. Can the cops tell the difference?

What I assuming here is that they are saying is that the cop's computer had images and it but it doesn’t appear he moved them around. Therefore they conclude he didn’t know they were there. In Matt’s case the images went into the system and sat in a file that was on a CDRom. So that is considered “active use”.

I think they were clutching for a way to save the cop, crucify Matt and justify both. The distinction between the two cases (while both are in Arizona they had different prosecutors but I am sure the prosecutor knew of the Bandy case) is nebulous at best.

Now that this DA has conceded that images can end up on a computer without one’s knowledge can their be evidence of active use and the owner still be innocent?

The answer is yes. As already noted the individual running the zombie network can plant images in a file on your computer and then use your computer to send them to others. In fact if it were being used for such purposes you would assume that active use of the images is more of an indicator of innocence than of guilt.

Consider two cases. Computer A is part of a zombie network. Why is it part of a zombie network? So the controller of the network can use it! Computer B is not part of a network and thus not used actively. The images are not sent to anyone. At least when it comes to zombie networks it would seem that active use is more likely to be found with the innocent person than with the guilty person.

In Matt’s case the images were buried in a file that was buried in a file, in another file for several layers deep which was found on a CDRom. How could this happen, ask the the law crowd, without intent?

Very easily in fact. One can join groups which where the members send out images. Now often anyone can post to that group. The group might be images from mainstream films or it might be legal, adult erotica or anything in between. One person posts a message to that group which contains 20 images and five of them might be questionable. No one asked for the questionable images nor did they know they were coming.

You open your e-mail and find a message with 20 images. If you are a group member five or six other people might have sent multiple images as well, all legal. You might have 100 images. You are in rush and put all these images in a folder without necessarily viewing them first. They are now in the folder and you wish to later go through them and throw out anything you don’t want. You are still unaware of the content of the suspect images.

A few days later you realize your holding folder is getting full. You’ve been throwing these excess images into the folder for a couple of weeks. And the computer is running slow. So you decide to dump things to a CD for storage to free up computer space. Now you could have a few thousand images to inspect. But if you had trouble inspecting 100 images you are not likely to sit down and spend some hours going through thousands of files. So you drag all the files onto the CD and copy them. And then you throw out the original and leave the CD around for “later”.

You received the image but didn’t see it. You put it in one folder still without looking at it. You now stored that folder on a CD without going through that folder. But in moving it twice you “actively used” the image and would be guilty under the Lafrenier principle. Meanwhile a cop, for instance, could download the images, view them numerous times but never move them and his use is "inactive". He is considered innocent and you are considered guilty.

But this can also happen in ways where you didn’t make an effort to subscribe to a group. The zombie controller places images in storage inside a sub-sub file on your computer. You don’t know it is there. You move some files onto the disk to make room. Before you do that you don’t inspect every folder and ever sub folder within every folder. You just copy the whole lot over. And you may delete the originals keeping them on on disk. You are now an “active” user of the file you didn’t know existed and have never seen.

It is recommended that you back up the content of your computer regularly. That means you copy the contents of your disk onto disks and store them to replace things just in case the system crashes and destroys data you need. When you back up your system you back up all the files including the files you don’t know about. Once again you have become an “active” user of files which you didn’t know existed.

On the surface the distinction between the two cases sounds plausible. But with only a few seconds consideration you realize the differences are not substantive at all.

Perhaps what is really happening is old as time itself. The political class that rules always feels there is one set of rules for the plebes and another set for themselves. Prosecutors and cops are on the same side, that is why they so often cover up for each other. Law is for the common folk who need to be controlled not by the social elite who are the controllers.

This not rare. The average American is herded into social security. Congress exempted themselves from the system. A political candidate can spend millions of his own funds to win election. If you are a millionaire and want to fund his opponent you can’t do it. You are a plebe and he is one of the masters of the realm.

Since there is a great deal of discretionary power the DA in the Lafrenier case decided not to prosecute. It was a police officer. Andrew Thomas was ready to crucify Matt Bandy but he was just a kid. He wasn’t one of the rulers. This sounds far more likely to be the reason Officer Lafrenier was ignored and Matt Bandy was run through the wringer -- and is still being run through the wringer by Thomas’ close assistant, Rachel Alexander.

Bandy case was actually worse than first reported.

Here are some additional facts regarding the case of Matthew Bandy. These update the information I have posted to date and give you a fuller understanding of exactly what happened. The ABC report, on which my first remarks were based, was not good but left out some information. All the additional information adds to the conclusion that what happened to Matt was a perversion of justice.

The images which police alleged were child porn were supposedly uploaded from the Bandy computer and not downloaded as many people assume. That is the images were put on the computer and then sent out from there. This strengthens the defense claim that the images were placed on the computer by malware so that they could be later distributed in some fashion.

A teenage boy might download porn but it is less likely he would be in business of uploading it to various sites. A police officer with no formal certification in forensic examination of computers sat down at the family computers and started looking through things. He claimed to find the images but never showed the family any of them. And he claimed that he could see activity on regarding the photos on a specific date. Jeanne Bandy, Matt’s mother, said the date in question couldn’t be anyone in the family as they were away from home then. She says he appeared “flustered” by that and then concocted a claim that the dates could have been changed later.

An investigator for the police later said that the images had been uploaded to Yahoo by someone with the user name “mrbob1980hoopdu” which was not the user name of Matt. There was also evidence on the computer that the file had been put on the computer by the same user. Nor could police who was using the computer when the photos were uploaded. So far so good for Matt, or so they thought. Instead they learned he was charged with nine counts of class 2 felonies -- a crime level just below murder!

The judge would have had no discretion in sentencing here. He could not sentence to less than 10 years imprisonment for each image.

Intent on a win at any cost the Maricopa County Attorney’s office offered Matt a plea bargain. He would spend 5 to 15 years in prison and be a registered sex offender for the rest of his life. Meanwhile the defense attorney Ed Novak was trying to get a copy of the hard drive so it could be properly investigated -- something the DA was opposing. Then the DA came back with another offer: one year in prison and register as sex offender for life.

The prosecutors fought every effort to allow the family access to the computer. They ignored court orders to allow it and the family actually had to take the matter to the Arizona Supreme Court. Only after months of trying did the state relent and allow an independent investigation of the computer. That investigation found 200 viruses, that anti-virus software had been disabled, one virus renamed hundreds of files to make activity difficult to trace and that “executable” files started operating at the time the images were being transmitted, which indicates that the order of transmission was being carried out for someone controlling the computer remotely.

Also what was not mentioned in the ABC report is that not only did Matt pass a lie detector test twice but both his parents also voluntarily submitted to the test to show that neither one of them could have been responsible either. All three of them passed this test as well. Now with an independent forensics report to back up the family along with the lie detector results and psychiatric examinations of all three family members things weren’t looking good for the government case.

In desperation the prosecutors offered Matt a deal where he would plead guilty to showing a Playboy magazine to some mates at school.

Jeanne Bandy emailed a consultant on the case the following:

"We were totally ready to take our case to trial. We felt that no jury in the country would convict Matt. From the beginning however, we were told we could not risk going to trial, and jeopardize Matt's life and freedom. As it became apparent over the course of the last year, the prosecution didn't care, and disregarded any evidence we presented to them, i.e. polygraph test, psychological evaluations, computer forensic evidence, and expert testimony. From the time they broke into our home they singled out Matt and was convinced he was guilty regardless of the evidence presented to them, and when we ask why they were doing this they said , "Because we can." They were just out to increase their conviction rate, and if some innocent people (children) got in the way too bad.

"Over the last year our belief and faith in the judicial system has eroded. Fundamental beliefs such as innocent until proven guilty, the police are there to serve and protect, they would never lie to you, everyone has a right to a FAIR trial have become no more than fairy tales to us. It slowly dawned on us, what our lawyer and psychologists were telling us was true, we could not win this one in court."

But the family was concerned. Jurors in Maricopa County were a problem. The jury pool included a lot of elderly people, unemployed people and people with low levels of education. These were people who would not understand computers well or how remote access to the family computer was possible. If the went to trail and lost Matt would go to jail for life and a pardon was not possible. The lie detector results were inadmissible as well. The family felt they couldn’t risk rejecting the plea since the risks were so high. So Matt agreed to the admit guilt in showing the Playboy to his friends. That is what he was to be sentenced for.

But Prosecutor Daniel Strange brought up the dropped charges and tried to convince the judge that the state was offering “a generous plea” because “the defendant would have been facing a hundred years minimum in prison.” (Note that a man arrested on similar charges in Arizona was sentenced to 200 years in prison recently.) Strange wanted the court to put Matt on three years probation and require he register as a sex offender so the state could “monitor this young man’s development and make sure that in the future there are no such pictures, pornography, adult or child, in his possession.”

Now think back to my original post on this case. DA Andrew Thomas said he wanted to teach the boy a lesson for “playing around on pornographic sites”. He wants the boy taught a lesson so he doesn’t do it again. As I wrote then:

Do what again? Look at erotica! This is really what Thomas is saying. There is no indication that Matthew Bandy did anything but look at adult erotica and Thomas is saying that he wanted the boy to learn the lesson to never do that again.

What Thomas is doing is trying to find ways to prosecute people for looking at legal images! He is saying that if you look for legal erotica and unintentionally come across illegal erotica that he will prosecute you so that you learn not to look for legal images!

Now look at what the prosecutor in the case said before the judge. He wanted the boy on probation so the state could come in and monitor him and his computer to make sure he never looked at “pornography, adult or child”. I didn’t realize that in their comments to the judge they admitted that they wanted to prevent Matt, who was 18 at the time of the sentencing and thus a legal adult when it comes to erotica, from looking at legal erotica. They really were targeting all erotica even if it was legal and even if Matt were legally allowed to view it. That is precisely what they said to the judge.

The judge found Strange’s remark strange indeed. Here he was bringing up charges that the state had dropped. The judge said, “the reason why this agreement took place is because you couldn’t prove the things you just alleged now, or else we wouldn’t be here.” Strange denied that saying it was not true. The judge said, “Well, that was my memory.”

What is more astounding is that Strange wanted Matt to register as a sex offender -- something that is very dangerous. Yet the Probation Report submitted to the court in this case specifically said: “An assessment indicates that the defendant does not fit the criteria for sex offender status and therefore it will not be recommended as a condition of probation.” But they also did say he should be forced to “make a donation of $2,500.00 to the National Center for Prosecution of Child Abuse.” In addition he was to pay various fees in order to be monitored and spied upon by the government. He was to be forbidden from consuming any drink that contains alcohol and go to counseling (for what was not specified).

The initial result of this was that the boy was deemed a sex offender. And adviser to the Bandy family Jonathan Bernstein says: “Those terms quickly resulted in Matt being treated very harshly by a probation officer and literally afraid to leave the house for fear he would somehow violate the order, which precluded any contact with children. He couldn’t go to the grocery store, a movie theater or even to church except under certain very stringent and embarrassing conditions (e.g., he was told that his pastor would have to know not merely what he pled guilty to, but what he was indicted for!).”

This is the outrage. They forced Matt into a corner where he accepted a plea bargain and said he showed friends a Playboy. Yet the state was now trying to punish him as if he had been convicted of the very crime they could not prove. Thankfully the court removed that the sex offender requirement bring Matt’s life back to some semblance of normality.

Now there is something important here. Why did Matt finally win something of a victory? There is one reason. His father is a surgeon and had the financial resources to hire the best legal representation and to pay for investigators, polygraph tests, psychological assessments and the multiple appearances in court (remember they went to the Arizona Supreme Court in regards to parts of this case). I would hazard to guess but I suspect they spent well over $100,000 on the defense of Matt.

I am sure that other people trapped between overzealous prosecutors, bad laws, computers that can’t be easily controlled by the average user, and a justice system that automatically throws massive sentences at defendants in such cases, simply can’t afford to mount the kind of defense needed. The prosecutor has access to other people’s money. He spends tax funds and doesn’t care if he spends $100,000 or $300,000 or more. He wants to preserve his reputation and it’s not his money.

Matt’s father, Gregory Bandy says that what was done to his family “could have happened to anyone, and actually will continue to happen at random throughout society until common sense and new laws are both employed and enacted.”

Is there harassment going on?

We understand from some reliable sources that some members of the Arizona legislature feel as if they are being harassed and intimated by a representative of the Maricopa County Attorneys Office, an office that opposes an effort to reform the draconian state laws applying to "sex offenders" under the age of 18.

These laws received a great deal of attention when the story broke of the prosecution of a 16 year old student who faced a sentence of 90 years in jail. The Matt Bandy case got lots of people upset. Many never realized how a few photos could send a person to prison for life.

Apparently there is a great deal of concern over this legislation from a certain official in Maricopa County who is apparently worried that the reforms will cut the rug out of from under some cases built on flimsy evidence and that it will make it harder for him maintain the high conviction rate he uses in his regular PR efforts.

Excessive sentencing works to the benefit of the prosecutor. If someone is facing 150 years in prison and the county attorney offers them 5 years in jail, probation for 5 years and registering as a sex offender for life even the innocent are very likely to plead guilty. High conviction rates often mean high false conviction rates especially if the person is terrified by the outlandish penalites he or she may face if found guilty.

In the Matt Bandy case prosecutors from the offices of Andrew Thomas charged the teen with offenses that would have put him in prison for life. To a 16-year-old child that is terribly frightening. But that prospect facing him the next offer from Thomas' office looked good. Matt had to plead guilty to the horrible crime of showing a Playboy magazine to three school friends. He would be on probation, not go to prison, but the prosecutors insisted he had to register as sex offender! Faced with such extreme choices he had no choice but to accept the offer. The judge eventually threw out the sex offender status.

Extreme sentencing encourages innocent people to plead guilty. It does not serve justice! In Texas Christopher Ochoa confessed to murder but he didn't kill anyone. Police convinced him that they were likely to get a conviction because he was Hispanic. If he confessed they wouldn't ask for the death penalty in his case. Faced with prison for life or the prospect of being found guilty and executed he confessed to a crime he did not commit. He was later fully exonerated.

The entire sentencing structure in the United States has become more and more authoritarian. And while conservatives applaud tougher laws every time they are introduced they don't see the incentives involved in such laws. These laws give prosecutors immense power over all defendants, guilty and innocent alike. (Of course prosecutors like to pretend they prosecute the only the guilty but only morons believe prosecutors.) Through the use of plea bargains they can basically coerce innocent people into coping a guilty plea in order to have the guarantee of avoiding a much worse fate. "Tough" prosecutors then brag about a high conviction rate without telling people that it is achieved at the expense of incarcerating innocent people.

It is no wonder that the prospect of even some modest changes in this law has a certain county attorney in Arizona unhappy. Phoenix media take note -- don't you think you should be investigating whether this is actually happening or not. I'd love to pursue this myself but I'm not living in the US and that limits my ability to investigate further. But I know that a lot of Arizonans read this blog so I hope they alert media friends to the story and we find out what is going on.

And some final advice to Mr. Thomas and crew. I know this case embarrassed you. Face it, you made a mistake. But don't be stupid. The media and the public has the attention span of a flea. And just as the matter was dying out Rachel Alexander went and resurrected it. Most people look at this case and see major problems and that doesn't benefit you one bit. I would think the last thing you'd want is for people to keep hearing about the case. The more you do regarding this the worse you look. Now what Alexander wrote may play well with some Far Right websites but that little world is not the universe and those people were already on your side so there is zero gain. The Left is already against you so you can ignore them politically. But the vast middle is where careers are made or broken. And this case does not play well with them so the more you keep it going the more you lose. Let Matt Bandy get on with his life and you get on with your quest for power. That way each of you can pursue the most important thing to you.

Now that advice ought to disappoint some of my readers so I will explain. All in all if Thomas pursues this case in the media it will harm him and his efforts will make law reform more likely. I know that. And I know that would mean a lower likelihood that similar cases will happen again. But I can't stop thinking about what this case must be doing to Matt. And I want it to stop for him. The laws need to be changed and I hope my friends in Arizona work to do that. But I don't want to see Matt made into a martyr for a cause involuntarily. On the other hand I'm not even sure Thomas is smart enough to take he advice seriously.

Language, anger and a half-apology.

This is a bit of an apology. Not a full out apology, perhaps not really an apology at all. Perhaps it is an explanation. Though I tend to think it is a bit of both.

In some of the previous posts I’ve used some very strong language. I used language I wouldn’t use if I were writing for a newspaper or a magazine.

Why is this? One major reason is that a blog is not simply another journalistic outlet. It can be that but it is also a personal statement. Some are only personal expressions. Others, like this one, do inform and also make personal statements or evaluations. The average person reading this can figure out which is which quite easily. If they can't that is their problem.

A blog is more conversational than most journalism, which is why I try to reply to comments left here. In a conversation you understand the person with whom you are speaking, in part, because of the tone of their voice and the loudness of it. You know when they are joking or angry or passionate or depressed. Such tone is often missing in written language or very difficult to express.

One way of expressing the tone is to use harsher language. For instance I referred to Rachel Alexander as an “evil bitch”. I am totally convinced she is evil. What she did to poor Matt Bandy is unspeakable. This sort of slander is meant to be vicious and can destroy this kid’s life. And it seems to me this is being done for political ambition -- that of her boss and ideological comrade, Andrew Thomas, and her own.

And I used “bitch” because it is a term to refer to a malicious, unpleasant person, especially, though not exclusively, a woman. Saying that someone is malicious may be descriptive but it loses all the tone that is implied when you say they are bitch. So the word very accurately describes what I think of rancid Rachel. It expresses the maliciousness in what she did and it expresses the emotion I was feeling when I wrote it (and still feel when I think of her).

What she did is reprehensible. Already some of stupid blogs of the Religious Right are picking up her distortions and distorting them even more. One site has openly called Matt Bandy “a child pornographer”. Have these people no shame? Why is it that the people who are the most amoral are those who scream morality constantly?

Accusations like this are destructive in ways that most people can’t imagine. Consider the utter lack of decency and the kind of moral character required to spread such accusations purely for political or personal gain. Small facts that would amount to nothing are exaggerated and distorted intentionally to create the illusion of substance and then Matt Bandy’s life is destroyed.

This kid was so traumatized by these accusations and the two years of legal inquisition imposed by Thomas and crew he dropped out of school. Now he finally starts back at school and Alexander launches this attack on him. And then brainless, thoughtless, heartless ideologues take her accusations and exaggerate them even further. Such things are malicious beyond expression.

And to do this to a teenager, a kid, is just unforgivable. It is true child abuse of the worst kind. It is the worst kind because it is done under the sanctity of the law thus perverting law and justice at the same time. It is immorality done in the name of morality. The child rapist is vile but does not rape law and justice as well but is instead made answerable to both. The child abuser is deemed immoral and thus unable to subvert moral law. But when the child abuse is done in the name of morality, justice, and law then not only is the child the victim but so too is morality, justice and law. And when it done by people who purport to be moral, who claim they seek justice and who have the power to uphold the law, not only is the child abused but so too are all people. So too is justice, law and morality abused. Or worse, destroyed.

It was not my intention to offend readers. If rancid Rachel is insulted too bad. If Bozo Thomas is offended, too bad. “Evil bitch” didn’t even come close to expressing the fury and anger I feel about what these cruel, bureaucrats have done. I simply can not find the words that express my contempt for them. No such words exist. I just wished we live in a world moral enough and decent enough so that immoral, vile, vicious creatures like Rachel Alexander and Andrew Thomas never inflicted their venom on anyone. I hope the people of Maricopa County wake up and chuck these evil, conniving ideologues out of office.

And if they ever do create those public stockades that Andrew Thomas has called for, so that criminals are put to shame in the town square, I hope they reserve some space in there for Thomas and rancid Rachel.

And finally, regarding the language used, I think I should warn you. I will rarely use such words lightly. But when my anger is roused by the victimization of innocent people I will use such language. When cruelty is disguised as virtue I will use such words. When the innocent are mentally or physically tortured, I will use such words. When viciousness is disguised as morality, I will use such words. As long as immoral, petty, small-minded, inferior creatures have power over their betters, I will use such words. And for that I won’t apologize.

Fanatical prosecutor charges boy with terrorism.

Probably one of the worst politicians around, and this is saying a lot, is the vile Andrew Thomas, the county attorney for Maricopa County, in Arizona. That’s Phoenix for those you who don’t know.

Thomas is a rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth religious lunatic who is undermining the county judicial system with his zealous prosecutions of anyone and everyone he can get his hands on. He is a child abuser in a very literal sense of the word as he was the one who sent his office after 16 year old Matt Bandy and tried to send this boy off to prison for life because the family computer had been used, via the internet, to store some porn for someone else, unbeknownst to the Bandy family.

When this cretin couldn’t get that charge he went after the boy for showing a Playboy magazine to some friends. This typical teenage action, according to the Theocratic Thomas, required Matt to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. (Yes, folks, that is how the sex offender laws are being used by bad politicians.) The judge in the case saw the absurdity of it and prodded the defense attorney to contest that requirement. When he did the judge threw the registration out as being unwarranted by the facts of the case. But facts don’t play well when the Holy Inquisition is in town.

And Thomas is the Torquemada of Phoenix, a fanatic who believes he is doing the will of God and who has surrounded himself with similar lunatics, such as Rachel Alexander. The county justice system is facing more prosecutions than it can handle due to Thomas. He refuses to plea out cases where a plea is reasonable. In addition Thomas is flooding the prisons with people who probably shouldn’t be there. He is costing the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars per year extra in due ot his fanatical Crusade mentality. And he loves nothing better than going after teens.

Now some teens are little monsters. Others are criminals. No one doubts that a teenager can be a criminal and ought to be held responsible for those crimes. But Torquemada Thomas sees them as sinners who have to broken on the rack, made to confess their sins and implore eternal forgiveness. And this happens by charging them, not with the criminal charge appropriate to what they have done. but to charges well beyond anything even contemplated.

This is how the fanatic seeks power. Overcharging a defendant makes it more likely that a suspect will plead guilty to a lesser charge even if they are innocent of all charges. That is what he did to Matt Bandy. If the boy pled guilty to showing Playboy to some friends (the only time in US history a teen has been charged with this crime) then he could escape prison for life but become a “registered sex offender” instead. If the judge had not intervened this injustice would have continued. That is how Torquemada Thomas acts.

Now take the case of a 14-year-old boy from the Powell Junior High School of Mesa. Now we don’t know what the boy wanted to do since we only have comments from Torquemada’s office and they lie. Apparently the commandment “Thou shalt not lie” doesn’t appear in the Bible Thomas waves about. We do know some basic facts.

Allegedly the boy approached a girl who was walking home from school. He had a knife. She ran away and called the police. The police wait a full day, too many donuts to move quickly, to look for the boy. Instead they decide to go to the school the next day to arrest him. He doesn’t come to class. Now this is serious. He refused to attend the local government “education” center are required by law. So the police raided the boy’s home.

They found “evidence” which included a gun, some ammo, chains and rope. These are being referred to in the media as "restraining devices".

There may be enough here to claim assault depending on how the boy approached the girl when carrying a knife. It is hard to say since fanatics like Thomas make grand claims based on little or no evidence. Police claim the boy confessed to wanting to kill the girl -- again based on police tactics with kids in the past it is hard to say whether this is true or not as well.

But if we grant them the shadow of the doubt then we can argue the boy assaulted the girl with a knife with intent to kill her. Serious charges indeed. And from what has been claimed the most serious charges that one could make out of this case unless you are the Holy Inquisition that is. Thomas has charged the boy with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, kidnapping and supposedly “carrying weapons on a school campus.” The later charge is not indicated based on media reports that I’ve read but let’s assume the assault happened on a sidewalk that belonged to the school and grant even this charge to Torquemada. Maybe he’s stretching a bit maybe not. But then he gets downright fanciful. He has also filed charges of “terrorism” against the boy!

Good thing they didn’t find a Playboy in the boy’s room!

Every government agency and politician is always seeking to expand their power, their jurisdiction, their financing, etc. So it is no wonder that they use real problems as a way to line their own pockets in one form or another. Real terrorists attack the United States and all sorts of laws against terrorism get passed. But already we have see that those laws are rarely used against real terrorists. Instead they are used by assholes like Thomas to prosecute people who are not terrorists. The concept of "terrorism" is constantly stretched out of proportion to include more and more offenses since it granst bad politicians more power when this happens. The same thing is done with every legitimate crime. Child molestation has been so distorted out of shape that teens have been charged with molesting themselves. Teens having consensual sex with one another are charged with molesting each other. Measures meant to deal with a real problem are used in entirely inappropriate ways.

But be careful. Don't speak out. Don't protest too loudly. If you do then the really vile and vicious will say you are soft on " " (fill in the blank with any appropriate accusation as the case may be. Complain that anti-terrorism laws are being used against people inappropriately and you'll be "soft on terrorism". Publicize how the laws established to protect children are being used inappropriately and you'll be "soft on child molestation". Funny, evne though these laws are constantly used to trample on the rights of innocent people, no one seems to think that the scum like Thomas are "soft on dictatorships".

If you want some context to the lunacy of Andrew Thomas and the fanatics he has brought into his office just go to “Labels” below and click on his name. That will give you an idea of how evil this man actually is. I hope our many Maricopa readers will work to get this man out of office.

The Grand Inquisitor and his Bitch

I am starting to suspect that Rachel Alexander is just a big suck-up. Maybe she is as ambitious as her boss, the Grand Inquisitor, Andrew Thomas.

Ludwig von Mises once noted that in bureaucracy the way to advance is to suck up to the “old men” at the top. That’s how he put it. Basically in politics the only performance that counts is making happy the people who can promote you. That usually means sucking up to them big time.

We have seen Rachel’s bimbo-esque distortion of the Bandy case. She played fast and loose with the truth. I guess that is part of the “biblical” morality she lauds so publicly.

The far Right MichNews.com site loves Rachel. And like so many intellectual conservatives, or what passes for them these days, they know what traits of Rachel’s to promote. “If you are obsessed with blondeness, and sure that it’s the blonder the better, of course you’ll prefer Ann Coulter [I’m only quoting this guy so don’t blame me. Grab an air sickness bag and keep reading.] Otherwise, it’s Rachel Alexander, hands down (or up).”

This pro-Rachel site of Right-wing lunatics tells us that Rachel is an “attorney who lives and works in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan areas (sic, areas?), a former Republican Babe winner and Founder and Co-editor of www.intellectualconservative.com.” This “Republican Babe” thing seems big with the Right. How seriously do you take a movement obsessed with who is, or isn’t a “Babe.” And, considering that they think Ann Coulter qualifies, one must question their tastes as well.

I mean Ann Coulter! The woman looks like the offspring of an anorexic racoon and a giraffe. She is a stick-figure woman with a neck that is far too long for her body and eyeliner so thick she looks like a racoon on speed. Rachel, no doubt, deserves the award, she certainly deserves the company.

Apparently to be a “Republican Babe” you have to be malicious, dishonest and vicious. Coulter certainly is. And the “reply” that Rachel Alexander wrote at Fox fits the bill.

Now, back to how conservatives see Ms. Alexander. MichNews says that Rachel is “way above Ms. Coulter on the long list of those qualified for the Supremes.” What! My god, conservatives don’t have much in the way of qualifications anymore. Basically this editorial said she is a “Republican Babe”and a lawyer and not elitist. Therefore, she’s qualified for the Supreme Court. But, considering what kind of people they think are qualified for the presidency, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

They also claim her “web site appeals especially to intellectual conservatives and libertarians.” They ought to correct that. It most certainly has nothing to appeal to libertarians. And, these days, “intellectual conservatives” are a rare species. Rachel’s rebuttal showed what passes as intellectual in the conservative movement these days.

And, we discover another link between Rachel and fundamentalist extremists. Focus on the Family, one of the worst of the Far Right Theopublican groups, thinks highly enough of her that they bring her on the show to discuss politics. In these circles, what that means is not intellectual rigor or independence of thought. It means slavish obedience to the moralistic agenda of the Religious Right. Consider that Alexander has been a lawyer for four years and has zero academic experience, never been a judge, and is a bureaucrat. Yet, Focus on the Family has her come on to talk about Constitutional theory. Even when she studied law her specialty was consumer law, not constitutional law. But, these groups don't care if the person actually knows the field. They just want them to say the right things. If they do, they will be crowned with having the "expertise," even though they obviously do not.

If you say the right things, no matter what is between your ears (or in spite of it), you are acceptable. Rachel is acceptable. And anyone acceptable to Focus on the Family ought not call herself “fairly libertarian.” MichNews mention her credentials as a writer, all of which focuses on the fact that her “columns” appeared on a slew of Far Right web sites, most of which are minor sites with little credibility such as MichNews, Rantweb, Rightgrrl, Enter Stage Right and Conservative Truth.

Now, back to the sucking up. Rachel’s column defending her boss was a major suck up job. But it was not her first. She has used her “writing skills” before to suck up big time to Andrew Thomas -- yes the same Andrew Thomas who has her as his deputy. I quote:

“Andrew Peyton Thomas, the district attorney for Maricopa County, Arizona, and a graduate of Harvard Law School, has put together a well-written, intriguing expose on the state of free speech at his alma mater, providing an insider’s perspective of the top law professors in the country. Oddly enough, the friction over free speech is not between the political 'left' and the 'right,' because there are practically no conservatives in the administration or on the law faculty, and the majority of students offered admission are also of the leftist persuasion. The battle over free speech is between the 'left' and the 'far left.' (p. 170)”

Ross Perot once commented about the “sucking sound” he thought was coming from Mexico, supposedly “stealing jobs’ from America. He got the general direction right but it was from Phoenix, and it was Rachel sucking up to Andrew Thomas. By the way the book her boss wrote, that she so praises, was published by Encounter Books, a right-wing publishing house.

Rachel also posted her praises of the book at Amazon.com, to encourage people to buy the book. And while she tosses around her position in Thomas’ office with great regularity elsewhere, for some odd reason, she neglected to mention it in any of her reviews. She wouldn’t want to inform people of her conflict of interests. So, her piece at Fox isn't the first time she's played PR rep for the man who gave her a cushy government job.

In another column she writes: “Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio are the only law enforcement officials in the country arresting and prosecuting illegal immigrants under anti-human smuggling (coyote) statute.” Please note that what Thomas did was prosecute an illegal immigrant for smuggling himself! If that isn’t twisting the law, I don’t know what is. This is like charging someone with "molestation" for masturbating or claiming you are kidnapper because you took yourself across state lines. But, the logic seems on par with Rachel’s thinking.

Another column praises her boss yet again, and runs a picture of him a few inches from her own picture. She’s on top! He’s on the bottom. She refers to him as “Maricopa County’s tough on crime prosecutor Andrew Thomas.” (Suck, suck, suck.)

In yet another column she sings the praises of Andrew Thomas. In fact it looks as if she merely reposted a publicity release that Thomas sent out. In yet another post, she merely repeats the publicity releases sent out by Thomas’ office again.

At another Right-wing web site she wrote: “The federal government may not be doing much when it comes to illegal immigration, but Arizona’s Maricopa Country Attorney [Andrew Thomas, her boss] and Sheriff are.” The bio line on this column refers to her web site as “wildly popular.” A bio line is usually suggested by the writer or posted with their approval. So at least she spends some time praising herself -- I was starting to think all she does is praise Andrew Thomas. I mean the way she keeps writing about him you’d think she was sleeping with him. Of course she wouldn’t since that is not biblical. BTW: at a right-wing conference Alexander admitted that her website gets very little traffic and said that the "wildly popular" claims she makes is a way to giver herself unearned credibility. She claims the media will accept her claims and give her more publicity that way.

The “World O’Crap” blog implies they were receiving comments from Rachel, but she was hiding her identity. “Here’s an interesting fact for you: the email address used by our new friend ‘Scottie Dinkle’ seems to belong to Rachel Alexander, the author of that handbook on Getting Custody to Avoid Paying Cild Support. (At least, it’s the email address Rachel used to organize “a debate on illegal immigration between conservatives and libertarians: in June of this year.)” I don’t know what that is all about, but it sounds deceptive. But, they did point to this interesting piece of information.

The Phoenix New Times ran an article on the bizarre antics of Thomas Andrews on January 13, 2005. It seems that when Andrews took office he immediately started demoting people who had experience and credentials in their field, and brought in novices who were ideologues. And it mentions that Thomas “appointed Tom McDermott, Brad Smith, Tim LaSota and Rachel Alexander as special assistant/deputy county attorneys. The quartet has little experience in the practice of law, with Alexander having held a bar license for the longest time -- four and a half years.”

I just want to pause for a second to point out the date of this article: January 13, 2005. Now, go to the Rachel Alexander article praising her boss for his book which attacks Harvard Law School for not being Right-wing. It is dated May 16, 2005. So, keep in mind that when she wrote this review, she had just been appointed to a cushy, well-paid job for which her qualifications were very meager. Reviewing a book written by your employer might be considered a conflict of interest. So how does Rachel handle it in the Enter Stage Right column? Well, when they list her credentials they simply neglect to mention she was working for the man. More of that biblical morality, no doubt.

According to Phoenix New Times Thomas is “best known for inflammatory screeds on such topics as child care, abortion, and other societal issues. He’s certainly a kindred philosophical spirit with new special assistant Rachel Alexander...”

What kind of man is Thomas, outside the viciousness and ineptitude he showed in the Bandy case? Well, pretty extreme. No wonder Rachel loves him. And Thomas takes care of his friends. He did give his old law firm $326,000 in county business. I’m sure he takes care of Rachel as well. After all, with just four years in the legal profession she ends up with a well paid job as his assistant.

In a previous book Thomas called for “publicly incarcerating drug dealers and other criminals, displaying them before their neighbours in large, open-air holding pens with their names and crimes prominently displayed, a modified stockade program could provide specific deterrence at marginal cost and general deterrence for the community.” This sounds like the sort of tactics the Red Guard used under Mao. Has the lunatic Right go so far into totalitarianism that they are now suggesting we follow the example of the Red Guard?

Who would get this treatment? Mothers who hold jobs? Possibly since, according to our friends at Reason magazine, Thomas “castigated career-minded parents who put their children in day-care. Thomas called them ‘more respectable, less violent versions of Susan Smith,’ the North Carolina woman who drowned her two sons in lake because they were interfering with her post-divorce love life.” Elsewhere Thomas said child care “mentally impaired” children.

Rachel is not content with smearing Matt Bandy and sucking up to Andrew Thomas. She also has to attack Wendy McElroy for writing her column. And again she distorts the facts. She refers to Wendy as “a former writer for my web site.” This sounds as if perhaps she and Wendy had a falling out since Wendy used to write for her. Maybe Wendy was being dishonest because she had this falling ou,t and was trying to embarrass the office for which rancid Rachel works.

But, the truth again is not quite the way Rachel puts it. Wendy is a columnist for Fox News and, in my opinion, one of the few really decent columnists they have. In addition, she is a top notch person in general. But, Wendy never wrote for Rachel’s web site. She wrote her normal column, which Rachel’s site reproduced. It was reproduced with permission and Wendy is very generous with giving permission to reprint her material. But, she didn’t write it for Rachel. Nor was she employed in any way by, or for that web site. It is a tad bit deceptive to call Wendy “a former writer for my web site.” But, it is par for the course for Rachel.

Alexander says that Wendy drank “the kool-aid of 20/20 and other media spin regarding the prosecution of Matt Bandy.” The reference is to the poison laced kool-aid given out by Rev. Jim Jones to his brainwashed cult members. And, then right below her comments about Wendy she makes the most extreme accusation yet about Matt Bandy. “Bandy admitted to frequenting a Yahoo child porn group...”

What an evil bitch. I use the word bitch to mean everything it usually means in this context and then some. Note how she changed her accusation once it was off Fox News. At Fox she claimed he visited “an online group known for sharing pornographic images of children.” Here she says he went to a child porn group.

In the first instance she is saying he went to a group where some people are known to have traded images. In the second accusation she is saying he went to a group that was set up expressly to exchange those images. This is a major change in her accusation. And, it is a lie. Matt admitted he went to a Yahoo group that had pictures of adult women in the nude and which was set up for that purpose. It was not a child porn group, but a group that some people supposedly used to exchange child porn with one another. Someone uploaded a kiddie porn image to the group, or to someone on the group, which is why Yahoo reported it. And they claimed it came from Matt’s computer.

Alexander now turns a Yahoo group for Playboy-like images into a “child porn group.” What a contemptible thing for her to do. How does she sleep at night? (And no jokes about “under Andy Thomas” either.) The more I read about Rachel Alexander the more I am convinced she is dishonest and vicious. So, when her pals on the extreme Right compare her to Ann Coulter -- well, they ain’t that far off. Coulter usually slanders only adults. Rachel publicly slanders teens. You decide which is worse.

Prosecutor wants to jail nurse for accident.

Margaret Vitale was the victim of an accident and because of it she may end up in prison and loose her job as a registered nurse. The 57-year-old woman was approached by her son John who was fearful for his mother. He thought she need more protection than she had. So he gave her a gun.

Margaret was not exactly thrilled with the idea of owning a firearm. And then she discovered that she didn’t have the strength to chamber a round. At this point she decided to give up the gun. Again John urged her to reconsider. He suggested that she return that firearm and try a revolver he had instead.

So last June Margaret, and daughter Tina, went to see John. He showed her the revolver in question. He unloaded the weapon in front of her. Making sure the pistol for fully empty he showed Margaret this firearm was much easier to handle. She tried the revolver and found that she was capable of pulling the trigger.

She set the empty revolver down for a minute and went to speak to Tina. While she and Tina were talking John picked up the revolver and reloaded it. He then decided Margaret should have the holster as well. He placed the gun back down on the table, where Margaret had left it one minute earlier.

Margaret and Tina re-enter the room and Margaret picks up the revolver she thought was empty. She tries the trigger one more time and the weapon discharges. The bullet goes through a cabinet and nicked Tina in the leg. It was an accident but not a serious one. And it was a misunderstanding. John didn’t think to tell his mother that he had reloaded the gun because he was coming right back to holster it.

Tina was not seriously hurt. And it was Margaret who was adamant that 911 be called and the accident reported. When the police arrived Margaret told them what happened. No one disagreed on the facts. John, Tina and Margaret all said that the accident happened because Margaret did not know, that in the very time she was away from the revolver, John had reloaded it. Margaret and Tina both believed the revolver was empty. Tina has no hard feelings about the accident. She and her mother live together. She supports her mother and doesn't want her prosecuted and she's the victim!

But Margaret lives in Maricopa County, Arizona, home of rabid Right-wing authoritarians like Joe Arpaio and Country Attorney Andrew Thomas. We’ve discussed Thomas and his tactics before. Thomas is on the fringe of the fringe when it comes to his extremist positions. He is not a law and order conservative. He is a big government totalitarian and there is a difference.

Thomas wants to put as many people in prison as possible even if they don’t belong there. So his office routinely over charges suspects to force them to accept plea bargains that are unacceptable. This is what his office did to Matt Bandy when they tried to send the teenager to prison for life for some dirty pictures.

Superior Court Judge John Buttrick has said that Thomas is “instructing his prosecutors to refuse to offer many plea deals which would have been presented by the prior administration. Coupled with the overcharging, this is causing a significant increase in the trial rate.” That, says Judge Buttrick, “strains the system.” In addition Thomas is particularly “charging defendants with capital murder at an extraordinarily high rate, a rate the current system cannot possible handle.”

Andrew Thomas wants to execute as many people as possible. But then this thug pretending to be a prosecutor wanted to put prisoners on public display in cages on the public square. This man is out of the Inquisition. These tactics are meant to play to the base of the extreme Right. Thomas wants to tell the “hang ‘em all and let God sort them out” crowd that he put lots of bad guys in prison.

Instead his policies don’t put bad guys in prison. He puts innocent people in prison for reasons we’ve outlined before.

And that is what he is doing to Margaret Vitale. She is charged with “Disorderly Conduct as a Dangerous Class 6 felony”. She can go to prison for that. Now you have to understand that Margaret is a license nurse and to retain her license, and her occupation, she can’t be convicted of a felony. Any felony conviction would strip her of her employment and put her at risk of prison time for an accident.

So Thomas over charges again thus pushing up legal costs and ripping tax payers again. Hey, conservatives, remember his campaign to incarcerate anyone he can is driving up your tax rates and it isn’t making you any safer. Maricopa County is less safe, on average, than the US as a whole.

Margaret didn’t commit a crime. She had an accident and it wasn’t even her fault. Prosecutors want another notch on the bedpost so they have offered her a “plea” which, once again, is far more than the case warrants. She pleads guilty to a felony and serves some jail time. She will lose her nursing license, go to prison and cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in court and prison costs. All because Andrew Thomas is on a crusade. On top of the massive costs Hang ‘em High Thomas is imposing on the taxpayers he will reduce nursing services, already over extended, by one more nurse. All so he can prove he’s a macho conservative ready to incarcerate innocent and guilty alike. The man needs to be recalled.

Maricopa County wake up. You have a snake in your midst and like most snakes he needs to be gotten rid of. Worse, yet he’s a fraud, conservatives. He is one reason your tax rates are going up. Overcharging people, especially innocent people like Margaret Vitale and Matt Bandy, does not make you safer. And prosecuting a woman with felony charges for an accidental discharge of a weapon, especially under these circumstances, also feeds the anti-gun hysteria of the victim disarmanent crowd. Again, Thomas is no friend of conservatives.

By diverting police resources, court resources, prosecutorial resources, and prison resources to cases where they SHOULD NOT be involved he is making it more difficult to incarcerate the really dangerous criminals that roam the streets. Andrew Thomas is not protecting you. He is making you less safe and driving up your taxes in the process. Thomas thinks that is what he should do, I think he’s inept. Save money, make Maricopa safer, get rid of this two-bit moron as quickly as you can (and all his little henchmen that work for him as well).

Update and Obscenity Alert: I have lost my cool entirely so beware that this update will include very rude words for the asshole who is prosecuting innocent people in Maricopa County. I have already reported that a Judge has said that Andrew Thomas (remember that name voters and spread it around) is sending the local justice system into a meltdown. The man is squandering millions and millions of dollars. He is intentionally overcharging people in order to force plea bargains on people -- even if they are innocent.

This prick tried to send a teenage to prison for life. Now this jerk is trying to destroy the life of a 57-year-old woman. Now I read that he has a new policy on plea agreements that will send an additional 2,600 people to prison every year. The official capacity of the jails is 31,000. They already hold 36,000. And he is going to boost the overflow by another 7 percent. So perhaps the man is just stupid -- he looks pretty stupid. But he says he recognizes “that this change in policy will place an extra burden on the criminal-justice system.” So he knows he is bankrupting the system. He knows how many millions he is spending. This one one policy change alone will cost an addition $50 million per year A public defender from Pima County said of Thomas: “I think he’s stupid. Any time you set a hard-and-fast policy it creates problems.” Thomas doesn’t care if causes problems. Thomas is on a mission from God, so he thinks. The public defender says that these policies “are silly in the long run and seldom effective.”

Of course they aren’t effective. Thomas is spending time going after people who might not be the best candidates for prison. This bumbling buffoon, if you saw his interview with ABC you will know he is incoherent and can’t string a sentence together or even sound rational, had the audacity to claim that his policies are because of his commitment “to protect law-abiding citizens from criminals.” Thomas is a liar. A bald-faced, fanatical, liar. Matt Bandy was not a dangerous criminal. He wasted vast sums of money trying to railroad that boy into prison for life! His office refused to turn over evidence that backed up the Bandy defense until forced to do by the courts and even then it took more than one attempt to get the proof out of him. He was obstructing justice.

He is now working to send Margeret Vitale to prison and strip of her of the right to work as a nurse. And she did not break the law. She is innocent of a crime, she had an accident, and it wasn’t even her fault. But the assholes that Thomas has working for him (and he has filled his office with vicious religious fanatics) won’t even look at the facts. Margeret is no criminal. But she is a victim of the inept, vile, authoritarianism of this monster that wormed his way into public office.

How dare this moron claim that he is defending the public from criminals. The jails are over crowded now and he tried to send a teenaged boy there for life -- life in prison for a young boy. Great idea Asshole! Maybe he’ll get raped, they do that to young kids in prison don’t they? You don’t give a damn, do you Thomas? All this man wants is notches and he doesn’t give a damn about justice. Now he wants to send an elderly woman to prison for an accident.

If Thomas had his way there would be two less slots in jail available for real criminals (and I consider Andrew Thomas a criminal). His staff will spend time prosecuting innocent people like Matt and Margeret and that means they don’t have the time to go after the real criminals. He will waste the time of the courts on what he hopes are easy cases that he can add to the stats but when he does the courts aren’t available for the real criminals. Through the justice system Andrew Thomas is throwing roadblocks in the way of catching real criminals and he is doing so in the name of fighting crime. No wonder the public defender said he’s stupid. He is stupid! Worse he is malicious.

This ought to outrage conservatives as much as it does libertarians and liberals. Thomas is squandering tens of millions of your tax money. He is prosecuting innocent people instead of using those resources to get real criminals. The voter of Maricopa County need to get rid of this man. A recall is a good idea. His office needs to be fumigated of the head cockroach and the little ban of fanatics that worship him (hey, Rachel). And if fumigation doesn’t work there is an old political tradition that could use reviving. It had something to do with a pole, some tar and feathers.

You could be next! What was done to Matthew Bandy can happen to you.

The article we wrote about Matthew Bandy has spread far and wide on the internet. It generates a large number of hits per day and I have found it being debated on numerous web sites. Most people seem to believe Bandy but a few die-hards are pro police on this matter. So I am starting to look into the issues a bit more deeply.

Here are a few points to consider. At no point did the prosecutor describe the images. We don’t know what they contained. Some individuals have thought that since there were only nine images there that they were not of sufficient quantity to have been planted there by a commercial distributor of such images looking for a safe place to hide them. But then we don’t know if the distributor is using a hundred different computers where each stores a few images. Diffusion of inventory means that unless something happens there is no obvious anomalies that the computer’s owner is likely to notice.

It could well be that they sell the photos to a client and then send a message to their hosts computers, each of which send the few images they store to the client. If it detected then only one storage computer is compromised and they can continue to work with the others. And with hundreds of computers infected then police resources are wasted investigating victims of this sort of activity and not perpetrators.

But I have sent my story to an expert on computer security and asked him to appraise it and, if he consents, will post his comments here. But I have done some looking into this issue.

Here is an article from CastleCops on “child porn planting spyware” from 2005. They report that one companies forensics service grew by 70% in one year because of “viruses and spyware which can download pornography and other inappropriate material without users being aware of it.” Such things can change your bookmarks, steal information from your system, or download images onto your hard drive. They claim that 90% of Windows computer “harbour an average of 28 malicious programs” and that an audit of 1.5 million computers found “more than 41 million instances of spyware, Trojans and other malicious programs.”

The article notes that more and more private business is realizing that inappropriate images on a computer may not be the work of an employee at all but because the computer was infected. In other words the private sector is catching on but the police are still light-years behind the times. The tell of a school computer that was found with many such images. And no one was sure who to blame. It could be staff, teachers or students. In the end it turned out to be none of them.

The Criminal Intelligence Service Canada reports that organized criminals “are forming more and larger botnets, or networks of computers with broadband Internet connections that are compromised by malware and are thus “software robots or zombies. ”These remotely-controlled attack networks undertake a variety of crimes: sending spam or phishing e-mails, hosting spoofed web sites for pharming scams, and distributing viruses or trojan horse software to facilitate on-line extortion or compromise more home computers for larger botnets.”

And not even Apple Macs are immune anymore.

Spamhouse has listed the 10 worst spammers around. And what is interesting is that several are involved with using botnets to send out porn spam and child porn spam. They give you names, and in some cases the photos of the culprits. Six of them are in Russia or the Ukraine, one in Hong Kong, one in Israel and two in the US.

Now if there was a child porn spam operation using a botnet going around then it is entirely possible that Matthew Bandy’s computer was hijacked for that purpose. The zombie computers would be told to send the images along with a solicitation to purchase them to the spam list. There would not necessarily be a large number of images required for this. In fact the only images that “subscribers” might ever receive would be those in the spam.

Consider this possibility. A Russian gangster runs a scam with computers. Using malware he hijacks control of thousands of computers. On those computers he stores a few images. He then contacts those computers with a list of names to receive e-mails containing those images. No one computer is given too many names as that triggers spam blocks. Bandy’s computer could have been one of them. It may have sent out the images to 100 names and then stopped sending the message until told to do so again with other names.

Recipients get this e-mail with 9 illicit photos and a solicitation to subscribe by credit card. Most people throw it away fearful that having these images would make them vulnerable to police investigation (and they would be correct). Some of the people would report it. But investigations don’t lead to the original source but to individuals who didn’t know they were involved in the process of spamming.

The few people who subscribe find money being taken out of their account, maybe repeatedly and in sums higher than they agreed upon. They may cancel their card but they won’t go to the police. They can’t without incriminating themselves. The Russian gangster is able to pull in money, delivers no product at all, and used a network of zombie computers to send out his solicitations. The funds vanish quickly. Accounts used for this purpose get closed. Names turn out to be bogus. And the operation continues under a different name with a different account. In Russia violence and bribery are a very powerful force (just ask Putin) and the gangster now control the country.

One expert on the subject, James Coombs, says that anyone convicted of child pornography solely on the presence of items on their computer hard drive should be released from jail immediately. He says: “There is simply no way for law enforcement to know the difference between innocent and guilty persons based on hard drive data circumstantial evidence."

One botnet operator can control hundred of thousands of computers without the knowledge of the owners. Jeanson Ancheta was just 20 years old but in his first year of operating a botnet he pulled in over $60,000. The U.S. Attorneys office said: “Ancheta admitted... directing more than 400,000 infected computers that were part of his botnet armies to other computer servers he controlled where adware he had modified would surreptitiously download onto the zombies.” Included in Ancheta’s army of zombies were computers owned by the US military.

Others have been able to do the same thing for their own personal use. Adrian Ringland would hang out in chat rooms and text teenage girls while pretending to be a boy of a similar age. He would then trick them into downloading some malware, “which surrendered their PCs to his control. He subsequently swiped personal information from compromised PCs. Ringland then attempted to intimidate the youngsters into sending revealing pictures by exercising his control over their PCs to perform functions such as opening and closing disc drive. Using threats that he'd send this embarrassing material to girls' parents or friends, Ringland blackmailed his victims into sending more and more explicit pictures of themselves.”

He was caught. But this also seems to indicate another way in which Matthew Bandy could have been used. There may be no criminal gang selling or pretending to sell child porn. There could be one individual who managed to get control of the Bandy computer and used it to store the nine images he actually owned. Now and then the actual owner might view the images and then put them back into storage removing them from his system. It could be one individual wanting to find a safe place to store illegal images where he would not be directly implicated.

I don’t pretend to be an expert but it seems to me that there are many legitimate reasons why Matthew Bandy may have had no knowledge of the nine images found on his computer. Most of us who use computers are not knowledgeable enough to prevent having our system hijacked and turned into a zombie. And few of us would notice if this happened.

That your hard drive can so easily be hijacked, and that millions have been, seems to indicate that the laws on possession of illicit images turn innocent people into criminals without their knowledge. Instead of concentrating on possession, which is what law enforcement is doing -- because it is easier -- their emphasis ought to be on production. The criminals who produce the material ought to be the targets here. Possession on a hard drive indicates very little. Yet in many places, especially the United States where many Constitutional protections have been eroded, possession is flimsy evidence on which to hang a conviction especially when so many U.S. states send people to prison for such long terms. Remember Matthew Bandy was being charged with nine counts each worth a 10 years consecutive sentence. Had he been convicted he could be held in prison until he was 106 years old.

There is also something worrisome unless you are someone who has total trust in the government. It is relatively easy to target individuals who are troublesome to you, plant images on their computer without their knowledge, then arrest them and send them to prison based on the contents of their hard drive. And it need not be just the government doing this as part of some campaign against dissidents. Anyone who might have access to your computer for more than a minute or two could do the same thing. One anonymous phone call later and you could find yourself facing life in prison.

UPDATE: A computer security expert has confirmed for us the reasonableness of Matt Bandy's defense. You can read his report to us here.