Criminal Law Review

The best way to safeguard yourself and the lives of the members of your family is to conduct a background check on anyone you deal with everyday whether at home, office, or anywhere else. You should not feel reluctant or getting intimidated of doing so; the security of your family must be on top of your priorities. The most effective method to realize this is to perform a criminal records search. The people have the legal right to do so as these official reports are under the public domain.

People will never know unless they investigate if someone you come in contact with each day had an arrest record. If you are doubtful on the credibility of a certain person, then you must diligently discover whether that person had criminal activities in the past. Such a move would definitely bring peace and comfort in your everyday life. These official public documents can be retrieved either offline or online depending on what’s available for you.

Offline retrieval of these public files would mean making a formal request at the local, county, state or any government enforcing agencies. While online searching means utilizing the Internet to quickly research on the legal files of the people. It’s actually all up to you whether you go through the physical files at the designated offices or just make some few clicks on your computer to conduct the criminal records check. What’s more significant is that there are viable options available for you in the effort of checking the past of someone.

Government agencies usually have standards set to be adhered by those who are after of such legitimate public reports. Authorities are often meticulous in deciding whether or not to give the public an outright access to the documents, it all depends on the validity of the grounds to get hold of such public criminal records. The same manner happens when trying to access the online databases of these enforcing agencies. Only the authorized individuals are given the permission to do so.

The alternative process to obtain these public criminal records is to avail from the online commercial service providers. The search results brought about by these providers are professionally researched to supply every important detail to anyone interested. If you are too busy with your job and find no time to conduct the search yourself, the suitable option for you is to hire some private companies to gather relevant data about someone. All you have to do is pay and wait for the search results.

The most popular method these days is the subscription-based version because you can do it yourself anytime at your home. The whole process only takes some few minutes of your time and it saves a lot of your money. What’s most important is that you are completely secured from the possible dangers that may come your way. The online method of performing a criminal background check is much more efficient than any other processes.

As each year goes by, there are more and more drug crime arrests in Mississippi. As the “Crossroads of the South”, Mississippi is ideally geographically situated to facilitate interstate transport of all manner of illegal drugs, and the intricate and largely unpatrolled system of highways and thoroughfares make it relatively easy to smuggle drugs into and out of the state. According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, there are three primary drugs responsible for most of the drug crimes in Mississippi: marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine.

• Marijuana in Mississippi: As with the United States as a whole, marijuana is the most commonly abused drug in Mississippi. It grows abundantly in the rural areas of the state, and is trafficked through on the way out of Mexico and Texas, or down from Canada to points east and west.
• Cocaine in Mississippi: Cocaine is the primary drug threat in Mississippi. Although marijuana abuse continues to be more widespread, cocaine, primarily in its rock or “crack” form, constitutes a more dangerous threat primarily because it is more associated with violent crime and higher frequency of addiction.
• Methamphetamine in Mississippi: Methamphetamine, also known as speed or tweek, is considered the second most dangerous drug in Mississippi, and is rapidly approaching the top spot. It is not only a threat to the abusers, but also to those that produce it due to the various chemical processes involved in manufacturing.
• Other drug crimes in Mississippi involve less common substances such as heroin, ODDs (Other Dangerous Drugs such as LSD, ecstasy, steroids), and over the counter medications such as OxyContin and Methadone.

Legislators, in an attempt to stem the tide of drug use, have enacted a number of stringent drug possession laws in Mississippi. These laws, while well intentioned, often overlook the vast number of people caught in situations beyond their control, or who are mere victims of circumstance, and drug arrests in Mississippi continue to grow for a number of reasons:

• The ability of Mississippi to deal with more and more drug possession arrests and drug crime arrests would be daunting even in the best of times.
• Further complicating the situation is the lack of adequate drug treatment programs: of the estimated 166,000 Mississippians that need drug treatment, there state has only 774 beds in residential and secondary therapeutic services and only 83 inpatient beds.
• Making matters even more difficult is the fact that treatment for drug possession in Mississippi has risen 15-20% over the last 5 years, and will likely continue to increase during the current economic climate.

The drug crime situation in Mississippi is dire, but certainly not hopeless. Drug arrest attorneys across Mississippi continue to fight for the rights of their clients. There is most certainly a war on drugs, and like every war, there are casualties on both sides.

Would you believe that 45 states and the federal government have passed laws against hate? A hate crime is generally defined as an act of violence, harassment or oppression against a member of a certain class or group. Hate crimes as well as legislation enacted to compensate its victims gained national attention after the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at Laramie, Wyoming.

Being a civil rights lawyer with fifteen years experience under my belt, I never imagined I would become the victim of a hate crime, at least not by the federal watchdog agency funded to protect my civil rights. Yet that is the scenario which began to unfold when I was denied access to the federally-funded Computer Lab at the community college where I was both a student and Legal Research and Writing instructor. In the previous fifteen years, no student had filed a complaint against me, nor had I been disciplined by the State Bar of California. Through a breach of patient-physician confidentiality, women at the college learned I had been diagnosed with a chemical imbalance-related illness and said they were afraid to be in the same room with me.

This set in motion a smear campaign against me which included, bogus evaluations, defamatory letters being put in my personnel file without my knowledge and threats from the Dean of Instruction that if I didn’t resign, sexual harassment charges would be filed against me. When I refused to resign, I was fired without the mandatory federal hearing.

The attorney at U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights assigned to investigate my complaint under the Americans With Disabilities Act did not fare much better than the girls in the Computer Lab. While trying to explain the nature of my illness to her boss, I looked up and saw her mimicking me. Then, instead of making a phone call to the college’s federal grievance coordinator, she made a 150 mile trip to the college and smeared me with a ten page letter which mischaracterized the facts, applied the wrong legal standard and reeked of more hatred.

Why would a federal judge rule students and teachers were not entitled to a fair hearing when the Code of Federal Regulations clearly states they do? That issue was soon made insignificant when he let the government steal my incriminating court papers from three separate locations in the courthouse to keep them out of the hands of the media. When I attempted to correct the record for appeal by filing a complaint of judicial misconduct and a federal racketeering lawsuit against him, I was informed by the State Bar that I was being disbarred. The witness against me was none other that Office of Civil Rights regional attorney.

During this time, California Governor Pete Wilson shut the State Bar down for nearly a year, calling it the “ultimate political animal.” Although one main concern about the Bar the Governor had was its bias against solo practitioners like myself, I saw something more sinister - a continuation of the college and federal agency’s ignorance and animosity about an invisible illness suffered by millions of Americans
Although I have never claimed to be a super-star trial lawyer, I was pretty proud of the research I did in preparing my 77 page complaint against the lawyers at Office of Civil Rights. But like the other two I had filed against these and other federal lawyers, the State Bar lawyers had a predisposition against anyone not deeply rooted in their secret brotherhood, even if they were the intended beneficiary of the congressional enactment giving rise to the legal dispute.

The Attorney General of the Providence of Ontario recently issued a report which discussed the adverse effects of hate crimes. In addition to causing harm to the targeted groups and society at large, they can cause devastating and lifelong harm to victims. Among these are psychological and affective disturbances and repression of identity and self-esteem.

Although statistics show hate crimes against gays and the homeless are on the rise, Americans with disabilities have always been an easy target for hate-mongers. Just between you and me, it’s the people who don’t think they’re crazy that I worry about.