D Block Criminology 12 - Today we will start with our last quiz in the course (Property and White Collar crime) and then we'll finish the Zetas video from yesterday. There is a very good article in Foreign Policy magazine that explains the impact of the Mexican cartels on the USA... From the magazine
This past February Chicago declared Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán its first "Public Enemy No. 1" since Al Capone. "While Chicago is 1,500 miles from Mexico, the Sinaloa drug cartel is so deeply embedded in the city that local and federal law enforcement are forced to operate as if they are on the border," Jack Riley, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago office, told CNN.
The infiltration of the Windy City shows the extent to which Mexican drug syndicates have made inroads in the United States -- the Associated Press and others have reported that cartel cells are operating in Atlanta, Ga., Louisville, Ky., Columbus, Ohio, and rural North Carolina. In fact, according to an excellent National Post infographic based on data from a U.S. Justice Department report and other sources, it's much easier to list states that don't have a drug trade tied to Mexican gangs. There are only twelve that haven't reported the presence of one of four Mexican cartels since 2008: Alabama, Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, WestVirginia, and Wisconsin. The Mexican drug trade is everywhere else.
Detected cartel operations range from traditional drug-running to using a horse ranch as a front for laundering drug money, as one group did in Oklahoma. The Sinaloa cartel, which has emerged as Mexico's dominant syndicate, has carved out new territory in the United States by controlling 80 percent of its meth trade (Mexican cartels have come to dominate the U.S. market by aggressively bumping up the purity of their meth while dropping the price per gram). All told, Mexican cartels reside in 1,200 American communities as of 2011, up from 230 in 2008, according to the Associated Press.
Another great article for the magazine states...
Drugs are just the tip of the iceberg. In the popular U.S. television series Breaking Bad, about a high school teacher turned methamphetamine kingpin, there was an instructive exchange. When the show's antihero, Walter White, was asked whether he "was in the meth business or the money business," he replied, "I'm in the empire business."
The same can be said of the DTOs, which are independent and competing entities -- not an association like OPEC. The sale of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and meth remains extremely profitable. The U.S. Justice Department has put the cartels' U.S. drug trade at $39 billion annually. But the DTOs have diversified their business considerably, both to increase their profits and to exclude rivals from new sources of revenue. For example, they are dealing increasingly in pirated intellectual property, like counterfeit software, CDs, and DVDs. The most destructive new "product," however, is people. The cartels have built a multibillion-dollar business in human trafficking, including the shipment of both illegal immigrants and sex workers.
What the DTOs are really selling is logistics, much like Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Wal-Mart was one of the first retailers to run its own fleet of trucks, providing tailored shipping at a lower cost that in turn gave the company an edge over its competitors. Similarly, Amazon may have started as a bookseller, but its dominance, as Fast Companyput it, is "now less about what it sells than how it sells," providing a distribution hub for all sorts of products. Drug-trafficking organizations are using the same philosophy to cut costs, better control distribution, and develop new sources of revenue.The one element of the U.S.-Mexico relationship that has received no shortage of attention is the border, yet the technology and money dedicated to enhancing security there have not been enough to thwart creative DTOs. The Sinaloa cartel, for example, has an extensive network of expertly constructed tunnels under the border, some featuring air-conditioning. (The workers who build the tunnels are frequently executed after the work is completed.) At the other extreme, traffickers have used catapults to launch deliveries from Mexico into the United States.
Logistics, then, are the DTOs' main source of revenue, and illegal drugs are but one of the products they offer. As the cartels' revenue streams become increasingly diversified, the drug trade will become less and less important. In fact, the prospect of the DTOs' selling their services to terrorists, say by transporting weapons of mass destruction across the U.S.-Mexico border, has begun to frighten analysts both inside and outside government.
And from the Daily Beast:
The songs (Narcocorrido) sound like a cross between mariachi and polka and come from the norteño folk tradition. The first of these ballads go as far back as the 1930s, and the lyrics, while they’ve always dealt with drug traffickers and murderers, have, since the Mexican drug wars began in 2006, become exponentially swaggering in their brazen glorification of violence.Americans listen to gangster rap and love to watch mob flicks. We relish crime depicted well and expect a level of authenticity in the portrayal. It’s nothing out of the ordinary to hire mafia members as movie consultants. We might even prefer musicians with street cred. It seems that as consumers we demand the real thing, not some impostor.So from Breaking Bad a Narcocorrido about Heisenberg (Walter White)
I guess it's kind of like a Mexican version of
Although the cost in lives was great, the First World War helped transform Canada into a modern industrial nation with international standing. So, in order to assess and explain the Political, Economic, Social and Cultural changes to Canada, from the outset to the end of the First World War, I`d like you to answer the following question:
What effect did Canada’s participation in the First World War have on Canadian society and its status as a nation?Think about:
Role of women
National unity
Independence from Britain
Technology
Changing ideas about war
Economy (Canada becomes industrial)
FMI on Versailles:
BBC History: The Ending of World War One
UK History Site Treaty of Versailles
First World War dot com Treaty of Versailles
You Tube video on Treaty of Versailles
BBC World War One Treaty of Versailles
B Block Law 12 - Today we will begin our look at criminal law defenses focusing on alibi (disputing the Actus Reus) and automatism (disputing the Mens Rea) and I'll give you a handout that has some really good notes to help you with defenses. We'll review the Kenneth Parks homicidal somnambulism case (sleepwalking murder R. v. Parks, 1992). In the 2013 movie "Side Effects" Emily Taylor, despite being reunited with her husband from prison, becomes severely depressed with emotional episodes and suicide attempts. Her psychiatrist, Jonathan Banks, after conferring with her previous doctor, eventually prescribes an experimental new medication called Ablixa. The plot thickens when the side effects of the drug lead to Emily killing her husband in a "sleepwalking" state.
After we look at automatism as a defense, we'll also look at the "excusable conduct" defenses of self-defence, necessity, duress, ignorance of the law, entrapment, legal duty and provocation.
Finally we'll watch an episode of Law and Order from Season 10 called "Untitled"; from tv.com..."A wealthy woman, who is a patron of the arts, is found dead in her apartment and the ensuing investigation leads to a suspect whose violence was spurred by a painting similar to the crime scene". The defense of "extreme emotional disturbance", used in the episode, in reality does not absolve a defendant of responsibility for a crime. It merely reduces the charge from murder to manslaughter in the first degree (punishable in the state of New York by 8 1/3 to 25 years in prison, or less at the judge's discretion) - a partial defence much like provocation.
A Block Introduction to Law 9/10 - Today we will watch an episode of Law & Order from season 10 called "Killerz". From IMDb... "A child's body is found at a construction site. Evidence shows that two girls, ages 10 and 13, may have witnessed portions of the crime. However, as the investigation gets deeper, the possibility grows that these young kids may have actually been responsible for the murder themselves". This episode is based on the murder of James Bulger, a three year old boy in the United Kingdom who was murdered by two ten year old boys and parts of the episode were also taken from the case of Mary Flora Bell, an 11-year old who strangled two toddler boys to death and mutilated their bodies. After we'll talk about the Youth Criminal Justice Act, or YCJA, which is the federal law that governs Canada's youth justice system. We'll see how this Act (law) in Canada would have affected the case in the Law and Order episode.
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