Friday Roundup: Sex in Public

by Matt Kelley · 2008-11-14 05:56:00 UTC
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To start off this week's roundup, a few pieces of advice:

  • Before getting busy in public, you might want to check the laws on the country you're in. A British couple is spending three months behind bars in Dubai for having sex on the beach. If only they were at home, the police would have looked the other way.

  • If you're a hacker, don't take a job interview from the company you've been robbing. After a German hacker infiltrated Valve Software's servers and leaked the code of its popular Half-Life game, the company tried to lure him to the U.S. for arrest with a fake job interview. They got him to reveal his methods over the phone, and he sounded interested in the job, but in the end he didn't take the bait.

More criminal justice news from the week:

Maryland's state commission on the death penalty voted this week to end executions in the state. Meanwhile, Texas is set to execute Denard Manns tonight - the state's 17th execution of the year, and three more are scheduled to die next week. The Utah Supreme Court said it might have to reverse death sentences in the state because there aren't enough qualified lawyers to represent the defendants.

The Los Angeles Sheriff's crime lab said this week it had more than 5,000 untested cases, to rival the LAPD's 7,000-case backlog. Next, the two agencies will compete over whose equipment is more anitquated or whose staff is more poorly trained. The state of crime labs nationwide isn't getting any better, with federal funding cuts promising to worsen an already grim situation. The recent news that Detroit's crime lab made major errors in ballistics testing is starting to have its effect on individual cases - defense attorneys are challenging a murder conviction based on tests from the lab.

About 40 activists and dissidents were sent to prison in Myanmar this week for their role in the 2007 pro-democracy demonstrations. The group included Buddhist monks, student leaders, artists, HIV/AIDS activists and others, and sentences ranged from several months to 65 years.

A veteran crime reporter was killed outside his home in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a center of the country's wave of drug-related violence. The Committee to Protect Journalists called for an immediate investigation of the murder and an end to the targeting of drug and crime reporters in Mexico. More than 1,000 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez this year alone in drug related violence.

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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