Florida Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog

According to a study released recently, Houston police officers have used Tasers more on black suspects than any other group of individuals.

A Houston city audit found that police officers used Tasers more often on black suspects than on other suspects. Of 1,417 Taser deployments by officers between December 2004 and June 2007, nearly 67 percent were used on black suspects, according to an audit conducted for the city by a team of criminology, statistics and mathematics experts. About 25 percent of Houston's population is black.

Houston police said their use of Tasers was not tied to race, but to a person's behavior. "It's not a racial issue. A Taser device is no different from a radar gun. It's race neutral," Executive Assistant Police Chief Charles McClelland said after the Houston City Council meeting during which the report was released. The study found that black officers were less likely than white or Hispanic officers to use Tasers on a black suspect.

About 11,500 law enforcement agencies across the country use Tasers, according to the National Institute of Justice.

According to his lawyer, a convicted sex offender facing execution for raping and strangling a Clemson University student feels so guilty for his crimes that life in prison would be harder on him. This argument was made in a South Carolina court recently.

Jerry Buck Inman, 37, faces the death penalty for the murder of a Clemson University student.

Buck Inman pleaded guilty last month to murdering 20-year-old engineering student Tiffany Marie Souers in May 2006 in her apartment about three miles from the South Carolina college's campus.

A judge will decide whether Inman is executed or sentenced to life in prison.

"He is filled with guilt and shame," Inman's attorney Jim Bannister said. "That eats him from the inside out on a daily basis. ... It leads him to the conclusion that he is an animal and that he deserves to die."

But Bannister argued during the first day of the sentencing hearing that his client should not be executed. He said Inman "came into this world impaired to start with," living in a home where his father molested him and his mother suffered from mental illness.

"What is it about a man's background that could put him in a position to be capable of such a horrendous and unthinkable crime?" Bannister asked Circuit Court Judge Edward Miller, who will decide Inman's fate.

Inman spent 18 years in prison for rapes he committed as a teenager in North Carolina and Florida and is a registered sex offender in both states. He had been free for about nine months before his arrest in Souers' death.

So, what do you think? Does this argument work for you? Is prison that horrendous that this murderer would actually suffer a worse fate if forced to live a life in prison?

Manuel Castillo expected to drive his truck filled with onions through Alabama back home to California without incident. Unfortunately, he was stopped by a trooper and given a $500 ticket for something he didn't think he was doing: speaking English poorly.

Castillo was aware of a federal law that requires him to be able to converse in English with an officer but he thought his language skills were good enough to avoid a ticket.

Still, Castillo said he plans to pay the maximum fine of $500 rather than return to Alabama to fight the ticket.

"It just doesn't seem fair to be ticketed if I wasn't doing anything dangerous on the road," he said.

Federal law requires that anyone with a commercial driver’s license speak English well enough to talk with police. Authorities last year issued 25,230 tickets nationwide for violations. Now the federal government is trying to tighten the English requirement, saying the change is needed for safety reasons.

Most states let truckers and bus drivers take at least part of their license tests in languages other than English. But the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has proposed rules requiring anyone applying for a commercial driver’s license to speak English during their road test and vehicle inspection. The agency wants to change its rules to eliminate the use of interpreters, and congressional approval isn't required.

I spoke on this issue on CNN Headline News and I couldn't wait for the appearance to passionately criticize this law. While I understand its purpose, I argued that it's un-American and unconstitutional. I don't feel comfortable permitting some trooper in Alabama to judge whether a person of Hispanic dissent is able to communicate sufficiently. There have been numerous times in my life where I couldn't understand what someone from the deep South was saying due to their thick accent. Additionally, I don't believe that any person is in the best frame of mind after being pulled over. I can only imagine how this trucker must have been consumed with fear, especially because he was stopped for no reason.