Appeals court rules Sussex County man may show jury photos of his body in sex assault case

BUTLER -- A state appellate court will allow a Vernon man, who argues he is caught in a case of mistaken identity in a sex-assault case, to show a jury photos of his private parts - images he contends contradict the victim's description of her attacker.

In a decision released late this afternoon, the state Appellate Division overturned a Superior Court judge's ruling prohibiting explicit photos of Andrew Pena from being introduced as evidence in his upcoming trial in Superior Court in Morristown.

Pena's defense attorney, Alex Pagano, wanted the photos admitted into evidence at trial because he said they dispute the woman's description of her attacker's genitals.

On Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Salem Ahto ruled the photos were inadmissible and agreed with prosecutors who wanted the photos blocked. A defense representative took the photos of Pena in jail in September, they argued, and there is no way to recreate in jail the motivation and circumstances the assailant had during the attack two years ago.

The victim picked Pena out of a lineup, a fingerprint from her vehicle was a match to Pena and a footprint matched his shoe, authorities said. Pena also told police he was at the scene, prosecutors said.

A ruling by a two-judge appellate panel stated the photos go to the heart of a defendant's constitutional right to confront witnesses, and prosecution concerns involve "the weight of the evidence, not its admissibility," meaning it should be left up to a jury to decide the relevance of the photos.

"We knew the judge was wrong -- we wanted to protect our client's rights," Pagano said.

Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi said his office will not appeal the latest ruling.

"We're ready to go forward. I'm glad we resolved it now, rather than go through a whole trial and have it reversed later on," Bianchi said. "We're not afraid of the ruling. We'll confront the evidence."

Jury selection has been under way in the trial in Superior Court in Morristown, and is expected to be completed Monday, followed by opening arguments.

The assault occurred Jan. 28, 2007, at 3:15 a.m. when the woman waited inside a car parked near G&A Bagels off southbound Route 23 as her friends went inside, an arrest affidavit said. A man sweeping outside the store told the woman she couldn't park there and directed her to the back of the building, where the attack occurred, the affidavit said.

Brave female MP takes on Taliban in her native Afghanistan

Malalai Joya is dressed in a striped T-shirt and trousers with a scarf draped over her shoulders.

She also likes wearing jeans or, on more formal occasions, a smart suit.

But in her native Afghanistan she has no choice but to wear a burkha - for fear of being raped, killed or doused with acid by male extremists.

At 31, she is her country's youngest and most outspoken MP - as well as its bravest woman. She has survived five assassination attempts and numerous death threats for speaking out against state corruption and the evil policies of the Taliban. And now she relies on 12 bodyguards who move her to a new safe house every few days. Yet, despite the threats, Malalai has defied her enemies to write a book - Raising My Voice - exposing corruption.

She has even denounced President Hamid Karzai's own brother as a drug-pusher and reveals how ministers travel on fake passports and take backhanders from the nation's massive opium industry.

Malalai also tells how poverty means women sell babies for as little as £6.

But she also thinks British troops are fighting a losing battle - as fundamentalists sit in government and the Taliban can never be overthrown.

Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Mirror, Malalai reveals how she was even under serious threat when she married four years ago. She says: "All the guests - even the flowers - had to be searched because I have been threatened many times. Another time, a bomb placed on a bridge we were about to drive over exploded but it missed us. We were lucky.

"I don't fear death. One day they'll probably kill me - but they'll never silence the truth." Malalai was born in Afghanistan in 1978 - a year before the Soviet Invasion.

Her family had to flee when she was four, so they lived in Pakistan and Iran before returning when the nation was under Taliban rule. She says: "I was educated in refugee camps. I am of a generation that has only known war and repression. That's why I wanted to get into parliament.

"Education and health for women is not a gift like a bunch of flowers - it's a right."

Advertisement - article continues below »
Click here to find out more! Quantcast

In a landmark victory, Malalai was elected to one of the 249 seats in the Afghan national assembly as Afghanistan's youngest MP in 2005.

Her winning policies centred on education, health care and equal rights for won votes after women and she slamming the corrupt war lords who held power.

But she was thrown out in 2007 when she spoke out about corruption in government.

Technically she remains an MP, but cannot take her seat.

Speaking from a safe house on a trip to London, Malalai says: "Rape and violence are increasing against women. After the US-British invasion, the Taliban and fundamentalists only got worse.

"Now women are terrified to leave the house without a burkha on because they fear they will be raped or have acid poured on their face."

Malalai adds: "I have seen places where women were so poor they would sell their five-month-old babies for £6 each.

"We thought after 9/11 that the Taliban would be pushed out, but it just didn't happen.

"Now, teachers who educate girls are killed or have their noses and ears cut off."

Malalai says: "I don't want Britain to waste any more blood or money fighting a war in Afghanistan while terrorists sit within the government.

"The best way of helping is to leave - but to never forget Afghanistan."

New clues to Japanese interned in Siberia

MOSCOW--Previously unknown records uncovered in Russia could shed light on Japanese prisoners of war interned in Siberia and other parts of the former Soviet Union after World War II, officials say.

Records on about 700,000 Japanese combatants and civilians who were interned in the Soviet Union were found at a Russian state military archives building.

Japanese government officials are negotiating with their Russian counterparts on sharing the new information.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, details provided by Russia until now include personal information on about 470,000 repatriated Japanese as well as rosters for about 41,000 who died while working as forced laborers, often in freezing conditions.

The newly discovered records consist of separate index cards for each internee. The cards detail the person's name, date of birth, record of transport between prisoner camps and death.

Moscow confirmed last year that 757 cardboard boxes, each containing about 1,000 cards, had been found in storage.

Japanese welfare ministry officials have estimated that 561,000 Japanese were interned in Siberia, of whom 53,000 died.

Ministry officials hope the new records will shed light on when the internees died and where they were buried.

A sample study was conducted on about 300 individuals whose names were not recorded in previous documents provided by Russia.

Russian officials were asked to find information on those individuals in the newly found records. Details on about 20 individuals were discovered.

The number of internees covered by the records is about 140,000 more than the number previously estimated by the health ministry.

However, there is a possibility that duplicate cards for the same individual are included in the records, leading ministry officials to stress the need for a thorough inspection of the new information.

The new records could put to rest debates on the number of Japanese interned in Siberia. Russian and American experts have long disputed the figure.

The internees were mainly soldiers and civilians based in northeastern China and the northern part of the Korean Peninsula during the closing stages of the war.

They were taken to Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union, where they were forced to work in railway construction.(IHT/Asahi: July 25,2009)

Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.

As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.

While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.

The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.

They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?

The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home. Just last month, a service robot developed by Willow Garage in Silicon Valley proved it could navigate the real world.

A report from the conference, which took place in private on Feb. 25, is to be issued later this year. Some attendees discussed the meeting for the first time with other scientists this month and in interviews.

The conference was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in choosing Asilomar for the discussions, the group purposefully evoked a landmark event in the history of science. In 1975, the world’s leading biologists also met at Asilomar to discuss the new ability to reshape life by swapping genetic material among organisms. Concerned about possible biohazards and ethical questions, scientists had halted certain experiments. The conference led to guidelines for recombinant DNA research, enabling experimentation to continue.

The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association.

Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.

The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.

This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Other technologists, notably Raymond Kurzweil, have extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation.

“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”

The Kurzweil version of technological utopia has captured imaginations in Silicon Valley. This summer an organization called the Singularity University began offering courses to prepare a “cadre” to shape the advances and help society cope with the ramifications.

“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines,” Dr. Horvitz said.

The A.A.A.I. report will try to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” It will also grapple, Dr. Horvitz said, with socioeconomic, legal and ethical issues, as well as probable changes in human-computer relationships. How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?

Dr. Horvitz said the panel was looking for ways to guide research so that technology improved society rather than moved it toward a technological catastrophe. Some research might, for instance, be conducted in a high-security laboratory.

The meeting on artificial intelligence could be pivotal to the future of the field. Paul Berg, who was the organizer of the 1975 Asilomar meeting and received a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980, said it was important for scientific communities to engage the public before alarm and opposition becomes unshakable.

“If you wait too long and the sides become entrenched like with G.M.O.,” he said, referring to genetically modified foods, “then it is very difficult. It’s too complex, and people talk right past each other.”

Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”

Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”

Ken Conley/Willow Garage

TAKE STEPS TO AVOID IDENTITY THEFT CREDIT CARDHOLDERS ARE URGED

CONSUMERS are being urged to close down any credit card accounts they are no longer using to improve their credit rating, and help avoid becoming a victim of identity theft.

More than 16 million borrowers have an average of 2.3 credit cards they no longer use, according to research from comparison site uswitch.com.

Of those with unused credit cards, almost one in 10 consumers have as many as four unused credit cards, 7 per cent have between five and six.

Almost 10 million consumers try to recession-proof themselves by not using their cards, and a further 1.8 million cut them up altogether to avoid temptation.

Louise Bond, personal finance expert at uswitch.com said: “In times of such financial turbulence, it is not surprising people don’t want to let go of what they consider to be a financial lifeline.” However, this practice could have a negative impact on credit scores as providers examine the amount of credit available alongside the ability to repay debt on time. Fraud is also a consideration.

Bond said: “Dormant accounts are easy pickings for a fraudster as, in many cases, they could well be registered to an old address and it could take several months, if not years, to identify the abuse.

“While we’re not telling consumers to rush out and close down every account they don’t use, if you do have as many as six a little spring clean wouldn’t go amiss.”

Retaliation threat

SEOUL - NORTH Korea's defence minister promised to retaliation against tough new UN sanctions put in place following its missile and nuclear tests, state media reported on Sunday.

Kim Yong-Chun warned that 'a touch-and-go situation' was caused by what he called reckless sanctions and US-South Korean military provocations, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.

'We will mercilessly and resolutely counter the enemy's 'sanctions' with retaliation, its 'all-out war' with all-out war,' Kim, minister of the People's Armed Forces, said in a report carried by the agency.

The communist state, however, regularly issues aggressive statements and rhetoric against its neighbours and the US.

Mr Kim, speaking at a public meeting in Pyongyang to mark the anniversary of the 1950-1953 Korean War, added: 'We will deal unimaginably deadly blows at the US imperialists and the South Korean puppets if they ignite a war.' He did not, however, elaborate further.

North Korea on Sunday separately denounced an annual upcoming US-South Korean military exercise as preparing to invade the communist country.

The Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG) drill, scheduled for August 17-27, 'lays bare the black-hearted aim lurking behind 'peace keeping' and 'dialogue'", KCNA said in a separate dispatch.

Tensions have intensified following the communist state's missile and nuclear tests in recent weeks, resulting in a new flurry of UN sanctions amid a renewed standoff with the US.

Pyongyang quit the six-party talks aimed at ending its nuclear weapons programme after the UN Security Council censured it for a long-range rocket launch in April. In May it also staged its second nuclear test.

The Council has since imposed tougher sanctions, including an expanded arms embargo and beefed up inspections of air, sea and land shipments going to and from North Korea. A travel ban has also been imposed on Pyongyang officials suspected of being involved in the country's nuclear and missile programmes. -- AFP

Woman stripped in public in Patna, probe ordered

PATNA: Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has ordered state police chief DN Gautam to inquire into the alleged assault and stripping of a woman by
Activists

Officials said the chief minister ordered Gautam to undertake the probe on Thursday night although the police headquarters had already asked Inspector General (Patna zone) Sunil Kumar to look into the incident.

A group of men had allegedly abused, assaulted and then stripped a woman in her 20s in full public view at a busy road in the state capital on Thursday evening.

A police team was reportedly present at the site and watched the attack on the woman for nearly an hour before taking the culprits to the police station.

Additional Director General of Police (Headquarters) Neelmani said Assistant Sub-inspector Shiv Nath Singh, who was in charge of patrolling the area, has been suspended for not helping the woman in time.

The woman was identified as resident of Jesidih, a town in the neighbouring state Jharkhand. Rakesh Kumar, a resident of Punaichak here, had lured her to Patna with a promise of providing a job to her.

Soon after she came here, Rakesh forced her to have sex with his friends. She ran away from the hotel where she had been staying with him for the last few days. However, Rakesh and his friends caught up with her and attacked her.

Police have arrested Rakesh, who is said to be involved in the flesh trade.

"Police have lodged a case against Rakesh and others on the basis of the statement of the woman," an official said.
The state women's commission has asked Patna Senior Superintendent of Police R. Mallar Vizhi to submit a report on the incident.

Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad condemned the incident and said that it shows that no government existed in the state.

Little league death threats

DEATH threats in letters to two Hobart families have shocked a junior football league.
Police have launched a hunt for the letters' authors, who have repeatedly threatened to kill two boys playing for an under-10 club in the Southern Tasmania Junior Football League.

The boys' families have been forced to change their daily lives, fearing for their safety.

The team has changed training venues and adapted match-day rituals to improve protection.

The boys remain unaware of the threats.

The concerned parents contacted the Sunday Tasmanian in the hope that making the threats public would assist investigations.

The coach of the under-10 team, John (not his real name) has received 24 letters, each typed using a computer and addressed to his family home.

All of the letters were shown to the Sunday Tasmanian.

"We're just sickened by these people," John said.

"We want them to be caught and receive the justice they deserve.

"This is under-age football for goodness sake -- it's about having fun and learning the game.

"This kind of harassment is disgusting and unacceptable."

Initially, the letters demanded that the two boys, who are among the successful team's best players, play for a different team.

"We will leave you alone if you give us -- -- and -- -- because we think this will damage your team and make ours a better one ... if this is not done, they could end up getting hurt and then no one will be able to have them."

When the demands were not met, physical threats followed.

"We are going to gang up on them at training. One boy will bash -- -- in the face and break both legs and arms of -- --. If we can't have them nobody will, including you or their parents."

Within weeks, sickening death threats began.

"We have been watching -- -- this week and just waiting until it's the right time to kill him. You don't seem too worried, if you think this is a joke, well think again, because it's not. You should start to take this seriously because it will happen."

Each weekend the parents find themselves looking around suspiciously from the sidelines as their boys play, fearing the worst.

"We're constantly watching, sizing everybody up. We can't trust anyone," a mother of one of the boys said.

Both families admit that they have adjusted their lives in a bid to protect the boys.

"I now meet him at the bus stop because I don't want him to be unaccompanied between the bus stop and home," a mother of one of the boys said.

"I'm angry that these sick people have forced us to do this."

A father of one of the boys told the Sunday Tasmanian that he had considered pulling his son from the team in an effort to protect him.

"But I just know it would crush him if he couldn't play though," he said.

"He loves the game. He wants to be an AFL player. How could we do that to him?"

Glenorchy CIB said several people of interest had been identified.