No legal shield for Los Angeles Sheriff, Lee Baca in jail racial violence case. The house passes controversial cyber security bill, White House veto threat looming. New protections for job seekers with criminal records. Touchdown! College football on verge of getting four-team playoff. Listen to this playlist and call me in the morning. Plus, the latest news.
No legal shield for Los Angeles Sheriff Lee Baca in jail racial violence case
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling could see Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca sued for racial gang violence in jails he oversees. This is the latest turn of events in a case brought by former inmate Dion Starr. He claims he was stabbed 23 times by Latino gang members while in custody at Men’s Central Jail in 2006 while a guard watched.
Sheriff Baca and a number of deputies are named in Starr's suit. County lawyers appealed against Sheriff Baca's naming in the case, arguing that he could not be held personally liable for the incident. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court today decided not to hear the case, letting an earlier U.S 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision stand. That ninth circuit stated that the Los Angeles County Sheriff can be sued for "deliberate indifference" to Dion Starr's rights for failure to take action to stop such attacks.
U.S. District Judge George Wu previously threw out the case in 2008, saying there was not enough evidence to link Sheriff Baca to the 2006 incident.
Should heads of agencies be held liable for the actions of their staff? What other mechanisms could be put in place to deal with inmate complaints where gang violence is suspected? Does naming the head of an organization detract from the process of justice in such cases as these?
GUESTS
Steve Whitmore, Spokesman for Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca
John Eastman, Professor of Law, Chapman University School of Law
Sonia Mercado, Civil Rights Attorney representing Dion Starr in the case against Sheriff Lee Baca
The house passes controversial cyber security bill, White House veto threat looming
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, has passed the House of Representatives and is heading for the Senate where it faces an uphill battle. The bill has internet privacy rights advocates, civil liberties and libertarian groups lining up against it. It would allow the government and the private sector to share information back and forth in an effort to stop a cyber attack, bring down child pornographers and for general cyber security.
Detractors say the bill is so broad and so vague that it essentially allows the government unprecedented access to the private information of every American internet user and trumps all existing privacy rights laws. In the words of Colorado Democrat Jared Polis, a former web entrepreneur, the bill “goes against every principal this country was founded on.” Business groups are applauding the bill’s passage however, and urging the Senate to move it along to the president’s desk.
The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), the trade group that represents big tech companies like Apple, Dell and Intel, says CISPA provides measures to protect consumers and businesses from cyber attack without sacrificing flexibility and innovation.
WEIGH IN
What exactly will the legislation do? And which is it? An important tool for the government and high-tech companies to protect the nation from cyber-terrorists and other criminals? Or, an unprecedented attack on privacy rights and civil liberties? Everyone agrees we need comprehensive legislation on cyber-security, but is CISPA the best bill for the job? Does it have any chance in the Senate where other cyber-security bills have languished for years?
GUESTS
Declan McCullagh, Chief Political Correspondent, CNET News; writes the "Politech" blog at Politechbot dot com (Oldest tech and politics on the web, launched in 1994!)
Danielle Coffey, Vice President for Government Affairs, Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA). The leading association representing manufactures and suppliers of high-tech global communications networks.
Rainey Reitman, Activism Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
New protections for job seekers with criminal records
It's estimated 65 million Americans with criminal records face barriers when looking for work. Some of those barriers are within the law, but new federal guidelines want to prevent unreasonable screening out of job seekers.
Last week, the agency charged with preventing discrimination in the workplace issued a long, new list of rules to deal with Americans who have old arrest records or with prior criminal convictions totally unrelated to their line of work. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) says blanket policies against criminal records violate the law.
Advocates for job seekers say such blanket rules lead to racial discrimination, as certain ethnicities have a disproportionate number of criminal records. "The EEOC has recognized that employer reliance on proxies for race – such as having a criminal record – is ‘an important civil rights issue,’” according to the National Employment Law Project.
That advocacy group researched “help wanted” ads on Craigslist and found myriad examples that violate federal guidelines. Major employers have ads that call for “no arrests of conviction” or “no felony arrests or convictions of any kind for life.” According to the EEOC, screening out applicants based on arrests alone can almost never be justified.
Gerald Maatman Jr., a lawyer at Seyfarth Shaw who represents employers, told the Wall Street Journal, “For employers that need to hire right away, it may not be very practicable.... [I]s the government creating impediments to hiring the best people or hiring in an efficient and effective way?”
WEIGH IN
Has a criminal record affected your job search? If you’re an employer, do you know the rules when dealing with criminal background checks? Does a criminal record correlate to bad behavior on the job, or not?
GUESTS
Maurice Emsellem, Policy Co-Director, California Office, National Employment Law Project
Joe LaRocca, Senior Asset Protection Advisor, National Retail Federation
Touchdown! College football on verge of getting four-team playoff
College football fans, the time to rejoice might be near. After days of Bowl Championship Series meetings last week, it was announced that a college football playoff system might finally be in the offing.
If approved, the playoff would pit four top teams against each other as soon as 2014. Fans have wanted this for so long, that hearing Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott say, “We’ve agreed to use the ‘p’ word,” is almost enough to inspire football spiking in the streets. There are many details that must still be worked out. In the coming weeks, commissioners from the 11 BCS conferences will present various proposals.
Options include holding semi-finals at campus sites and neutral sites. A championship game would be held at a neutral site, either one that bids in advance or an existing bowl. For now, conference commissioners have agreed to set aside the issue of how teams would be picked for the playoff. But BCS leaders hope to agree on a format by July 4.
How likely is that? How will the money to televise the playoff and other BCS games be divvied up? And how exactly will those four supposedly top teams get chosen?
GUEST
Chris Dufresne, Los Angeles Times Sports Writer covering college football and basketball
Listen to this playlist and call me in the morning
Sony’s Walkman and Apple’s iPod are the two most famous gadgets that put a person’s record collection in their pocket, allowing us to walk around with our own personal life soundtrack.
Author Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel “High Fidelity” and its movie adaptation elevated the practice of creating personalized playlists to high art as the story’s protagonist – a record store owner and music expert – created playlists of specific songs for particular life experiences. Now, a new book by a trio of neuroscientists and psychologists, “Your Playlist Can Change Your Life,” has taken the concept a step farther.
The book is subtitled “10 Proven Ways Your Favorite Music Can Revolutionize Your Health, Memory, Organization, Alertness and More,” and the authors’ research led them to believe that music can be used as a prescription to address and affect physical and mental states of being. In the book, the researchers contend that you can change brain physiology and blood chemistry with music and they provide exercises and sample playlists for things like to revving you up for an important meeting (Van Halen?) or calming you down after a stressful day (Vivaldi?), as well as techniques for creating your own playlists to increase your quality of life.
How do you use music to alter your mood? What songs get you going… or bring you back down?
GUEST
Joseph Cardillo Ph. D., co-author of Your Playlist Can Change Your Life: 10 Proven Ways Your Favorite Music Can Revolutionize Your Health, Memory, Organization, Alertness and More; professor of holistic psychology and mind-body medicine.
Your Playlist Can Change Your Life book excerpt