Archive for the ‘Human Rights’ Category

People take the law for granted, until it fails. We assume that the man who steals our car or breaks into our house will be prosecuted and punished. What happens when that assumption is no longer valid? When the law fails to protect the citizens and punish the lawbreakers?
The small town of Skidmore, Missouri found out on July 10, 1981, when Ken Rex McElroy was shot to death as he sat in his pickup on the main street of town. McElroy had waged a twenty-year reign of terror over all of northwest Missouri, getting away with almost every crime in the book: rape, arson, kidnapping, burglary, theft, assault, you name it. The law seemed powerless to stop him; witnesses changed their stories; judges recused themselves from his cases; prosecutors dismissed indictments; the town marshal resigned.

I told the story of McElroy’s reign of terror, his shooting, and the ensuing silence by the numerous witnesses to the murder in the book In Broad Daylight, which was published by HarperCollins in 1989, and which won an Edgar Award for Best True Crime and was made into a movie starring Brian Denehey. I revisited the story in a twenty-five year anniversary edition of the book published by St. Martins Press in December 2006. This edition contains startling new information on the killing and the identity of the killers.

It is not surprising that after all this time the witnesses to the killing still have not talked about what they saw that hot July morning. You might hear them say something like “McElroy needed killing,” and what they mean is that the town believed it had no choice but to take the law into its own hands. In their view, the town had returned to the lawlessness of the frontier days, when individuals undertook their own protection at the end of a barrel. Indeed, McElroy was stalking, with a weapon, several witnesses who were scheduled to testify against him in a bond revocation hearing the next week.

You can argue whether what happened that day was morally right or wrong. On Larry King Live, King opined that taking a life outside the law was never the right thing to do. Others argue that it should have happened long before it did.

Behind the discussion is a very basic principle of civilized society, a contract between the government and its citizens: you give up the right to enforce the law and punish lawbreakers in exchange for the government’s promise to do it for you. Put your weapons away and the government—in the form of the criminal justice system—will protect you.

In general, when one party fails to a contract fails to live up to his obligations the other party is released from his promise. If the government cannot protect me, I am entitled to protect myself. If the law t cannot protect the town, the town is entitled to protect itself, to “take the law into its own hands,” as the saying goes. It’s a scary notion in many ways, and it certainly sets a dangerous precedent, in effect allowing individual citizens to decide when they are entitled to engage in “self help.”

My friend Clare has always been interested in law and justice, but growing up in a poor area of the country where opportunities were limited, she dropped out of the education system at a young age and started a reasonable yet largely unrewarding job. For years she dreamt of going to college to study for a criminal justice degree but time, family commitments and money prevented her from realising her ambitions. But only last year Clare enrolled on an online criminal justice degree and hasn’t looked back since.

I’m surprised at the pace of her learning. I’d never considered a distance learning degree could be that practical, but thanks to the popularity of using the web as a quite useful teaching tool it seems a range of studies can be delivered through online education.

Although Clare is – or rather was – completely new to studying or working in the criminal justice sector, many other students already have a career in the criminal justice profession; they are either building on their existing skills and knowledge to develop their role, or looking to progress into a new job, or even both.

What Clare is discovering and what is generally considered to be one of the greatest benefits of online study, is that it is as vocational as you need it to be, especially considering that teachers will usually have recent experience of, or still be working in, the criminal justice sector.

Clare’ experience of course is limited, but even after 3 months she’s finding the criminal justice degree that she’s studying for online to be well worth the effort of fitting in a degree course around her work and family commitments.

Because online colleges that offer criminal justice BA degrees online understand that their students will come from a variety of backgrounds, courses are especially geared to consider a wide range of often quite specific needs.

Clare’s attitude with technology is fairly pragmatic. If she doesn’t find it useful then she won’t use it. According to her, a simple understanding of the web is enough to take advantage of the incredibly easy to use online systems for studying her criminal justice degree online.

Since 1944, the G.I. Bill has helped veterans afford their first home with a veteran mortgage and refinance that home if needed with VA mortgage refinance programs. For over fifty years, the G.I. Bill has provided those that served our nation in peace time and war time a chance for the American dream through veteran mortgage home ownership programs.

Active duty personnel and veterans can get easily get approved for a veteran mortgage or a VA mortgage refinance loan that is financially backed by the U.S. Government. The actual VA refi is made by a bank or private lender that has been approved by the VA to handle VA first mortgage loans or a VA refi.

Thanks to the original G.I Bill signed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1944 and changes approved George Bush in 2008, VA refi options are better than ever. Interest rates are low and a VA mortgage refinance has helped many veterans lower their monthly payments. Lower monthly payments mean more cash to spend, this helps the economy in general. Veterans are also reaping the benefit of saving thousands of dollars over the life of their loan.

Our nation understands that no one is more deserving of the chance to own their own home than a veteran. The G.I. Bill has helped many veterans and their families enjoy the benefits of home ownership and new VA mortgage refinance options have made that home even easier to maintain.

A neighbor, schoolteacher, daycare worker, or plumber is one of the grouping that you commonly deal with everyday and usually, they appear to be also like you who are hardworking and dedicated to the family. But good looks should not be an indication of being a pleasant mortal inside. You crapper never verify by the appearance alone if that mortal that you’re effort in touch with most of the time is that mortal whose name appears on the list of those with Public Criminal Records.

Nowadays, the availability of Public Criminal Records has prefabricated searching for collar records an easier task to do since they are already found online. However, you have to be mindful of the fact that not everyone with an collar achievement is a criminal. Others were just suspected and were later found not guilty of any evildoing at all.

It is important that we encounter time to do Criminal Records Search. You have to take note that an collar achievement tells you something you should be aware of. Although it is true that there are whatever who committed minor lapses and did learn a lesson from such incident, it will still be innocuous if you’d go through these records.

Public Arrest Records are now available online. Therefore, you may now conduct a search for a possible collar achievement of someone easily since these online collar records are easy to encounter because of the fact that they are open to the public. Apart from checking them online, these records are also available at an arresting agency be it local or in one with the wider range.

Searching crapper be done by you alone or with the help of online service providers; that depends on your purpose in conducting the search. You crapper do it yourself if you won’t have to dig deeper on the gathered results. On the other hand, you crapper entrust the task to whatever online service providers who specialized on this matter. They provide the right service since they have access to several databases at once and are able to gather records about a particular person.