Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is going to be charged as a civilian, but should he be held as an "enemy combatant"? Also, how did social media and mainstream media's inaccurate reporting of breaking news affect this chase? Then, former and current students are accusing Occidental College for mishandling sexual assault cases, LAX is experiencing flight delays due to sequestration, and traffic halted in L.A. yesterday due to thousands of bikers in CicLAvia.
Boston bombing suspect has been charged
Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has been charged with conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction against persons and property resulting in death. He made his first court appearance from his room at Beth Israel Hospital where he is in stable but serious condition.
Tsarnaev was apprehended Friday after a manhunt that shut down the city of Boston for an entire day, and has been hospitalized and in serious condition since. Conscious, but unable to speak due to wounds to his neck, Tsarnaev is reported to be answering questions from investigators in writing. The Obama administration said Tsarnaev will not be charged as an enemy combatant.
Meanwhile, Boston has begun the mourning process for the victims of last Monday’s attacks, with memorials for the three dead, and a moment of silence planned for this afternoon at the time of the first bomb went off. Law enforcement officials say that evidence discovered since last Monday points to plans for future attacks.
Guest:
Mark Degon, reporter and editor for WBUR in Boston
What legal rights should Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have?
After a weekend spent hospitalized, sedated, and in serious condition, Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is awake and answering questions from investigators in writing. During his arrest on Friday, Tsarnaev was not read his Miranda rights – his 5th amendment right to remain silent and to have an attorney present during questioning, and a warning that whatever he says can be used against him in a court of law.
The reading of Miranda rights can be waived in the event that a suspect poses an imminent threat. Precedent for waiving Miranda rights in the past has been immediate danger – in one example, a rape suspect with an empty shoulder holster was asked where his gun was. Another example is “Which wire do I cut to disarm this bomb?” Miranda rights can be waived in order to gain critical intelligence – in cases involving terrorist plots, such as Tsarnaev’s, these distinctions can become more abstract.
What qualifies critical intelligence? Is Tsarnaev an immediate threat? Is waiving Tsarnaev’s Miranda rights setting a potentially dangerous precedent for waiving these rights in the future?
Guests:
John Eastman, Professor of Law & Community Service at Chapman University School of Law; he is the Founding Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute
Baher Azmy, legal director at Center for Constitutional Rights
Social media lynch mobs, and the downside of a supercharged news cycle
The manhunt for Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was a big week for social media but unfortunately much of the information being passed around was wrong.
Redditors listening in on police scanners quickly broadcast the names of innocent people as suspects. They even fingered an innocent missing Brown University student as a suspect. Much of Twitter confused Chechnya with the Czech Republic.
But even the mainstream media fell down on the job. CNN and AP incorrectly reported that a suspect had been arrested. The New York Post published a front page photo of the wrong suspect.
If breaking news can't be trusted to be accurate, should we even bother with it? When news is breaking quickly, is it better to be behind the mainstream conversation or in the stream and risk being wrong? What are the limits of crowdsourcing information via Reddit and Twitter? Aside from entertainment value or curiosity, does following breaking news step by step add any value to our lives?
Guest:
Alexis Madrigal, senior editor for The Atlantic magazine
How should Occidental College handle on-campus sexual assault?
A case brought against Occidental College by several current and former students alleges that the school failed to respond adequately to sexual assault on campus. The group of Occidental students and alumni includes some who say the college failed to protect against sexual assault – their attorney, Gloria Allred, argues Allred that 37 students were “raped, sexually assaulted, battered, harassed or retaliated against for speaking out against sexual violence."
Occidental is in the process of reviewing its policies on sexual assault, and recently updated its approach to sexual misconduct cases on campus. The school is not the first to deal with allegations of inappropriate responses to sexual assault – female students at UNC Greensboro and Vassar have notably spoken out about the mishandling of cases in recent years.
How should schools handle sexual misconduct cases? Who is responsible for carrying out prosecution, the university, or local law enforcement? How can colleges better protect their students from sexual assault? Should they be liable for crimes committed on campus?
Guests:
Gina Maisto Smith, Attorney with Pepper Hamilton; she was one of two independent attorneys brought on to consult the school in early April. She’s worked previously on cases at Amherst and UNC
Donna Potts, of the American Association of University Professors, and co-author of the AAUP’s official statement on appropriate campus sexual assault policy
Furloughs of air traffic controllers kick in at LAX
Furloughs of air traffic controllers at the Los Angeles International Airport began yesterday as part of the across-the-board government cuts known as "sequestration."
Flight delays are widely expected. The Federal Aviation Administration says the wait at LAX, the country's third busiest airport, will average about 10 minutes, but could balloon up to over an hour.
The reduction in air traffic controllers' hours is just one of many cost-saving measures the FAA is enacting. The agency is also going to close control towers at 149 smaller airports, including at Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, General William J. Fox Airfield in Lancaster and Whiteman Airport in Pacoima.
Guest:
Mike Foote, President of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association LAX chapter
CicLAvia swarms LA’s streets
Yesterday, tens of thousands of Angelinos abandoned their cars, pumped up the tires of their bikes, and rode en mass the fifteen miles from Chinatown to Venice Beach as part of CicLAvia, which was inspired by Ciclovia, Bogota, Colombia’s cycling festival which doubles as a peaceful protest against the oppressive traffic of the city.
The city blocked the streets so bike traffic would rule the day, and riders gathered near Venice Beach to celebrate a day without gasoline motors.
Did you participate in CicLAvia? Were you caught in traffic related to the celebration of cycling? Do you think this could be a long-lasting tradition for Los Angeles?
Interview Highlights:
On what he thought was most impressive about the day:
"I think the sheer turnout was incredible, I don't think in my wildest dreams think there would there would be a sea of people non-stop for fifteen miles between downtown and venice which is what I exeperienced first hand. That incredible outpouring of support and the excitement that people really have for this idea is really the highlight for me."
On what he learned from Sunday's CicLAvia:
"I think what we learned is that CicLAvia is growing even more quickly than we even could have ever hoped in our wildest dreams. The turnout increased substantially from last October in a much greater fashion and much more quickly so that the one issue we're dealing with is our own success. We're attracting hundreds of thousands of people and we need to actually acomated them, and so when we're making our plans for the future we're going to be thinking about that and thinking about even larger crowds and how we can accommodate them in a way that's just as fun."
On how many people turned out:
"We have been thinking about it, we have on our board a traffic engineer who was doing some calculations and one of the difficult things is you can do a shot of the route at any one point and count it at that time but there are actually five or six hours of usage and so you have to estimate over, that so we're putting it at around 180,000."
On what's planned for the future:
"The basic premise for CicLAvia is that we are going to have a new and different route for each month of the year with a different neighborhood. So April will be the month that connects downtown to Venice, and June will be the month that allows us to go on Wilshire Boulevard from Grand Avenue in downtown to Fairfax. October will be coming back to out "Heart of LA" route the rout that goes through Downtown LA and connects it with China Town Exposition Park Echo Park and Boyle heights."
"From the neighborhoods perspective CicLAvia would like to be able to tell them, this is gonna happen once a year, you should plan for it, every year so take that into consideration. So that's one aspect, and from the positive side we want to make sure that every part of Los Angeles gets to see how CicLAvia can transform it. I was talking to the people representing Olympic Park and Mid City Culver City Palms, Mar Vista and all of them were saying to me how thankful they were that CicLAvia was coming through their neighborhoods, and helping introduce their neighborhoods to all these other Angelenos who perhaps did not know about them."
On if there is a more effective way of handling the crowds:
"Where the route go very crowded was on Venice boulevard where it became a divided highway. So between Crenshaw and Venice it as an 8 mile divided highway, we were asked to only use half of the of the divided highway, we were on the northbound side sharing that hald and the southbound side still had car traffic on it.
"In addition to only having half the street, there was Expo Line construction and a whole bunch of other different utilities construction going on, so at some points we only had one lane, so there were there a lot of things that have to do with the particular route on this particular day that won't be happening again. If we do this route again next year I want to take all of Venice, I don't want to just have half of it. There are actually so many more people out there on their bikes and and on foot, then there even are in their cars we can tip sthe scale and say that this event can have more precedent over the car traffic."
On how to educate and inform people about proper cycling:
"What is important to note is that we are changing the cultutre of Los Angeles as we speak. We're introducing hundreds of thousands of people to the idea of how to use this city without their car. You know it took us a century how to use the car in this city, so now we're introducing a whole new way of thinking about this city, and yes there's going to be a learning curve, and yes one of the things everybody is going to need to do is deal with education at all these levels.
"What we're doing is we're starting the conversation, and from this I think we'll see policy changes, changes in resources prioritization and allocation, and things are going to start changing on lots of different levels, we're excited that we're changing the conversation and we think that we've actually gotten to a tipping point with LA, where we're tipping away from thinking of us as a single passenger automobile city, to thinking this is a great city without cars, how can we make it work?"
Guest:
Aaron Paley, executive director of CicLavia