By Glynnesha Taylor ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday passed legislation drastically reducing the sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine — a longtime disparity critics saw as unfairly targeting African Americans. Previously, under the 1986 law, a person selling crack got the same sentence as someone selling 100 times the amount of powdered…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said Wednesday that his agents were assisting the Department of Defense in a controversial leak investigation into the ream of documents that were leaked on the Afghanistan war. Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he also acknowledged a Justice Department probe into the…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com It’s judgment day for ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Federal jurors in his public corruption case are expected to get jury instructions on Wednesday and then begin deliberating. Deliberations are likely to take several days and go into next week. In closing arguments, his attorney Sam Adam Jr. portrayed the ex-governor as…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — There appears to be more scandal in the air relating to allegations of FBI agents cheating on an open book test. The Associated Press is reporting that the Justice Department is investigating whether hundreds of FBI agents cheated on a test on the bureau’s policies about conducting surveillance and…
By Glynnesha Taylor ticklethewire.com WASHINGTON — In 2009, the number of U.S. law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty reached a 50-year low. That downward trend is gone. The National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund (NLEOMF) in Washington is reporting a 43 percent increase of officers killed in the line of duty during the…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com ACLU offices around the country plan to file Freedom of Information Requests with the FBI to find out what type of information the agency is gathering on ethnic groups to battle terrorism, the Boston Globe reported. The request comes in the wake of the FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide issued…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com Closing arguments in the public corruption trial of Ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich were supposed to finish up on Monday, but those plans were derailed when Blago’s attorney got into a big tiff with the judge, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. The judge threatened to hold Blago’s attorney Sam Adam Jr in contempt…
By Allan Lengel ticklethewire.com The cancerous violence of the Mexican drug cartels seems to be spreading into Central America where the drug networks are burrowing in, the Washington Post reports. And the presence of the cartels threatens to destabalize the countries that already face daunting crime figures, the Post reported. The Mexican cartels “are spreading…
