Politics, Economics and other Stuff

Pater Galbraith News

The NYT reports:

Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its vast oil wealth.

Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region — rather than the central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.

Mr. Galbraith, widely viewed in Washington as a smart and bold foreign policy expert, has always described himself as an unpaid adviser to the Kurds, although he has spoken in general terms about having business interests in Kurdistan, as the north of Iraq is known.

So it came as a shock to many last month when a group of Norwegian investigative journalists at the newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv began publishing documents linking Mr. Galbraith to a specific Norwegian oil company with major contracts in Iraq.

Interviews by The New York Times with more than a dozen current and former government and business officials in Norway, France, Iraq, the United States and elsewhere, along with legal records and other documents, reveal in considerable detail that he received rights to an enormous stake in at least one of Kurdistan’s oil fields in the spring of 2004.

As it turns out, Mr. Galbraith received the rights after he helped negotiate a potentially lucrative contract that allowed the Norwegian oil company DNO to drill for oil in the promising Dohuk region of Kurdistan, the interviews and documents show.

He says his actions were proper because he was at the time a private citizen deeply involved in Kurdish causes, both in business and policy.

When drillers struck oil in a rich new field called Tawke in December 2005, no one but a handful of government and business officials and members of Mr. Galbraith’s inner circle knew that the constitutional provisions he had pushed through only months earlier could enrich him so handsomely.

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Some officials say that his financial ties could raise serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves. “The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

In effect, he said, the company “has a representative in the room, drafting.”

DNO’s chief executive, Helge Eide, confirmed that Mr. Galbraith helped negotiate the Tawke deal and advised the company during 2005. But Mr. Eide said that Mr. Galbraith acted solely as a political adviser and that the company never discussed the Constitution negotiations with him. “We certainly never did give any input, language or suggestions on the Constitution,” Mr. Eide said.

When the findings based on interviews by The Times and other research were presented to Mr. Galbraith last weekend, he responded in writing to The Times, confirming that he did work as a mediator between DNO and the Kurdish government until the oil contract was signed in the spring of 2004, and saying that he maintained an “ongoing business relationship” with the company throughout the constitutional negotiations in 2005 and later.

Mr. Galbraith says he held no official position in the United States or Iraq during this entire period and acted purely as a private citizen. He maintains that his largely undeclared dual role was entirely proper. He says that he was simply advocating positions that the Kurds had documented before his relationship with DNO even began.

“What is true is that I undertook business activities that were entirely consistent with my long-held policy views,” Mr. Galbraith said in his response. “I believe my work with DNO (and other companies) helped create the Kurdistan oil industry which helps provide Kurdistan an economic base for the autonomy its people almost unanimously desire.”

“So, while I may have had interests, I see no conflict,” Mr. Galbraith said.

Kurdish officials said that they were informed of Mr. Galbraith’s work for DNO and that they still considered him a friend and advocate. Mr. Galbraith said that during his work on the Constitution negotiations, the Kurds “did not pay me and they knew I was being paid by DNO.”

Mr. Istrabadi, who was also the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations from 2004 to 2007, said the case was especially troubling given the influence of Mr. Galbraith’s policy views. In his writings — some of them on the Op-Ed page of The Times and in the New York Review of Books — he is generally identified as a former ambassador or with some other generic description that gives no insight into his business interests in the area.

Mr. Galbraith, for many years on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has a long relationship with the Kurds. In 1988, he documented Saddam Hussein’s systematic campaign against the Kurds, including the use of gas. He served as United States ambassador to Croatia between 1993 and 1998. In September, he was fired as the No. 2 official with the United Nations mission in Afghanistan after he accused the head of the mission of concealing allegations of electoral fraud.

Views of Mr. Galbraith’s business ties are harsh within the central Baghdad government, which has long maintained, in stark opposition to Mr. Galbraith’s interpretation of the Constitution, that all the oil contracts signed by the Kurdish government were illegal.

Referring to the Constitution negotiations, Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani, vice chairman of the oil and gas committee in the Iraqi Parliament, said that Mr. Galbraith’s “interference was not justified, illegal and not right, particularly because he is involved in a company where his financial interests have been merged with the political interest.”

Citing what he said were confidentiality agreements, Mr. Galbraith refused to give details of his financial arrangement with the company, and the precise nature of his compensation remains unknown. But several officials, including Mr. Galbraith’s business partner in the deal, the Norwegian businessman Endre Rosjo, said that in addition to whatever consulting fees the company paid, he and Mr. Galbraith were together granted rights to 10 percent of the large Tawke field and possibly others.

An internal DNO document dated Dec. 3, 2006, which was first obtained by Dagens Naeringsliv, indicates that a company called Porcupine, registered in Delaware under Mr. Galbraith’s name, still held the rights to the 5 percent stake at that time, while a company associated with Mr. Rosjo held the other 5 percent.

Mr. Eide, the DNO executive, said that as far as the company knew, Mr. Galbraith’s work was proper.

“To our knowledge, Mr. Galbraith in 2004 was working as a businessman with no political assignments,” Mr. Eide said. “Given our network model and limited experience and knowledge from the region at that time, our evaluation concluded that we should use Mr. Galbraith to advise DNO in the first stage of the project.”

As revelations began appearing in recent weeks, Mr. Galbraith at first issued qualified denials stating that he had never been party to any arrangement in Iraq technically referred to in the oil industry as a production-sharing contract. But industry insiders say that the rights could have been couched in different terms — not an ownership stake, but a conditional right or option to become part of such an agreement at a future date.

Estimating the value of any stake in the Kurdish fields is difficult given the political uncertainties. But Are Martin Berntzen, an oil analyst at Oslo’s First Securities brokerage, said the Tawke field alone has proven reserves of about 230 million barrels, a figure likely to increase as new wells are drilled.

“Given no political risk, a 5 percent stake should be worth at least $115 million,” he said, though he emphasized that he knew nothing about Mr. Galbraith’s arrangement.

A possible indication of Mr. Galbraith’s estimate of the deal’s worth may be discerned in a London arbitration case in which Porcupine and a Yemeni investor who now apparently holds Mr. Rosjo’s former share are seeking more than $525 million from DNO, according to a filing reported on the legal news Web site Law.com. Oil analysts in Norway played down the likelihood of a reward as large as the claim.

According to DNO, the claim represents up to 10 percent of the value of the regional production contract, which the Norwegian oil firm now shares with a Turkish energy company after Kurdish authorities reviewed the previous deal and barred “certain third-party interests” from participating further. At a shareholders meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Eide refused to name Mr. Galbraith as a claimant in the case. He acknowledged, however, that DNO lost a procedural ruling in the case last May, and he said a final decision on damages was expected in early 2010.

In his response, Mr. Galbraith would say only that “my contractual relationship was with DNO and is the subject of pending arbitration.”

Cioffi and Tannin found not guilty on all counts

Bloomberg reports:

Prosecutors missed the mark so widely in the fraud trial of Bear Stearns Cos. hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin that a juror said after their acquittal she would invest with them if she had the money.

The panel of eight women and four men who spent the past month hearing testimony in the case took only nine hours to find them not guilty on all six counts. During interviews after the verdict today, several jurors said the government failed to prove the defendants defrauded investors who lost $1.6 billion in the two hedge funds run by the men -- both of which were mostly made up of subprime mortgage-backed securities.

The funds collapsed in 2007, as did Bear Stearns itself less than a year later. The defendants, according to juror Serphaine Stimpson, were made “scapegoats for Wall Street.”

Cioffi, 53, the portfolio manager for the two funds, and Tannin, 48, their chief operating officer, went on trial Oct. 13 in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, on charges of conspiracy, securities and wire fraud. Each faced as many as 20 years in prison if convicted. 

Back in the Summer of 2008 when Cioffi and Tannin got charged I read the indictment as 'pretty thin gruel'. On the other hand, what they did was, on a technical reading of the law of the type done by lawyers (but not useful for regulating business via the criminal justice system), potentially illegal.  So this is a case were getting a jury trial mattered. 

Drug Sentencing Policy

Via Sullivan:

Joe Fiorito argues against mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses:

[Eugene Oscapella, a founding member of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy] said, “If you’re a mom-and-pop producer of marijuana, mandatory minimums will scare you out of business.” Yeah, so? “Organized crime will step in; the government has moved the competition out of the way.” This is an unintended consequence of the worst kind: Banning a substance makes it wildly lucrative; punishing the small fry makes it easier for the bad guys to do business.

(Hat tip: Drug WarRant)

Not sure what the impact of drug sentencing is on the industrial organization of drug markets, but whatever they are, I assume they are large.  It would be nice to know more.  My preference is to have the state drive all long distance business out by both suppressing it and squeezing it with its own regulated and taxed supplies.    Drying out the market by supplying it will take out the illegal supply networks and they will wither away, and you can then raise prices a bit.  Classic predatory pricing. 

On not enforcing the law

More troublesome weirdness from the US criminal justice system, as Slate reports:

In 1983, New York's high court struck down as unconstitutional a 1960s-era provision that made it illegal to cruise—that is, to hit on someone in a public place. And yet in the 26 years since, on thousands of occasions, the New York Police Department has continued to enforce the defunct law, historically used to target gay people.

The defendant in the 1983 case was a gay man arrested for striking up a conversation with a plainclothes police officer and asking him back to his house for sex. The court threw out the anti-cruising law, reasoning that the state couldn't criminalize an act anticipatory to sodomy when sodomy itself was constitutionally protected. (Two years earlier, the same court had found the state's anti-sodomy law unconstitutional.)

Whatever one may think of cruising and whether it should be prohibited, the court's ruling should have killed off the statute. Instead, in the 26 years of this law's odd posthumous career, district attorneys brought 4,750 prosecutions and judges convicted 2,550 defendants. For violating an imaginary law, these defendants paid a decidedly non-imaginary $70,000 in bail and $190,000 in court fees and fines. In the last 10 years, NYPD officers also issued 9,693 citations, forcing citizens to pay $71,000 in fees. The criminal records of these victims have never been expunged and the fees and fines have not been refunded. ...

In March 2008, civil rights lawyers brought a class action in federal court on behalf of the thousands of people unconstitutionally arrested, cited, and prosecuted under the defunct anti-cruising law. In May, Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered the City of New York to send letters to the police, district attorneys, and trial judges to remind them that the anti-cruising law was void and should no longer be enforced. NYPD brass sent out a bulletin to officers stating that in each officer's personal copy of the penal code, the law should be "stricken by drawing a line through it in black ink." (After 26 years, the law was still on the books because the legislature had never repealed it.)

Apparently, the NYPD ran out of black ink. From the day that the bulletin went out until now, hundreds of additional summonses for cruising have been issued. Celeste Koeleveld, of the New York City Law Department, says that the NYPD has taken "many proactive steps to address the issuance of any summonses" under unconstitutional laws. But the most recent summons for violating the anti-cruising law was issued in September 2009—nearly a year and a half after the NYPD's bulletin went out. "It is truly shocking that after 26 years and multiple court orders, they just can't stop doing it," said McGregor Smyth, a lawyer at the Bronx Defenders who is counsel for the plaintiffs in the class action. The NYPD did not respond to several requests for comment.

The lack of a citation to the 1983 does raise a red flag on the reporting and I cannot find other sources online.  via Sullivan

'Inquiry fails to find single trafficker who forced anybody into prostitution'

It seems the UK has been running a large scale police operation to attack trafficking in women this year, and The Guardian writes up the results very forcefully -- quite astounding press coverage from a top tier newspaper.  Not sure what to make of this, but I it would be good to know more.  Part of the context is a new criminal bill before Parliament.  Two articles: 

The UK's biggest ever investigation of sex trafficking failed to find a single person who had forced anybody into prostitution in spite of hundreds of raids on sex workers in a six-month campaign by government departments, specialist agencies and every police force in the country.

The failure has been disclosed by a Guardian investigation which also suggests that the scale of and nature of sex trafficking into the UK has been exaggerated by politicians and media.

Current and former ministers have claimed that thousands of women have been imported into the UK and forced to work as sex slaves, but most of these statements were either based on distortions of quoted sources or fabrications without any source at all.

While some prosecutions have been made, the Guardian investigation suggests the number of people who have been brought into the UK and forced against their will into prostitution is much smaller than claimed; and that the problem of trafficking is one of a cluster of factors which expose sex workers to coercion and exploitation. ...

When police in July last year announced the results of Operation Pentameter Two, Jacqui Smith, then home secretary, hailed it as "a great success". Its operational head, Tim Brain, said it had seriously disrupted organised crime networks responsible for human trafficking. "The figures show how successful we have been in achieving our goals," he said.

Those figures credited Pentameter with "arresting 528 criminals associated with one of the worst crimes threatening our society".  But an internal police analysis of Pentameter, obtained by the Guardian after a lengthy legal struggle, paints a very different picture.

The analysis, produced by the police Human Trafficking Centre in Sheffield and marked "restricted", suggests there was a striking shortage of sex traffickers to be found in spite of six months of effort by all 55 police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together with the UK Border Agency, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the Foreign Office, the Northern Ireland Office, the Scottish government, the Crown Prosecution Service and various NGOs in what was trumpeted as "the largest ever police crackdown on human trafficking".

The analysis reveals that 10 of the 55 police forces never found anyone to arrest. And 122 of the 528 arrests announced by police never happened: they were wrongly recorded either through honest bureaucratic error or apparent deceit by forces trying to chalk up arrests which they had not made. Among the 406 real arrests, more than half of those arrested (230) were women, and most were never implicated in trafficking at all.

Of the 406 real arrests, 153 had been released weeks before the police announced the success of the operation: 106 of them without any charge at all and 47 after being cautioned for minor offences. Most of the remaining 253 were not accused of trafficking: 73 were charged with immigration breaches; 76 were eventually convicted of non-trafficking offences involving drugs, driving or management of a brothel; others died, absconded or disappeared off police records.

Although police described the operation as "the culmination of months of planning and intelligence-gathering from all those stakeholders involved", the reality was that, during six months of national effort, they found only 96 people to arrest for trafficking, of whom 67 were charged.

Forty-seven of those never made it to court.

Only 22 people were finally prosecuted for trafficking, including two women who had originally been "rescued" as supposed victims. Seven of them were acquitted. The end result was that, after raiding 822 brothels, flats and massage parlours all over the UK, Pentameter finally convicted of trafficking a grand total of only 15 men and women.

Police claimed that Pentameter used the international definition of sex trafficking contained in the UN's Palermo protocol, which involves the use of coercion or deceit to transport an unwilling man or woman into prostitution. But, in reality, Pentameter used a very different definition, from the UK's 2003 Sexual Offences Act, which makes it an offence to transport a man or woman into prostitution even if this involves assisting a willing sex worker.

 Internal police documents reveal that 10 of Pentameter's 15 convictions were of men and women who were jailed on the basis that there was no evidence of their coercing the prostitutes they had worked with. There were just five men who were convicted of importing women and forcing them to work as prostitutes. These genuinely were traffickers, but none of them was detected by Pentameter, although its investigations are still continuing.

 Two of them — Zhen Xu and Fei Zhang — had been in custody since March 2007, a clear seven months before Pentameter started work in October 2007.

The other three,  Ali Arslan, Edward Facuna and Roman Pacan,  were arrested and charged as a result of an operation which began when a female victim went to police in April 2006, well over a year before Pentameter Two began, although the arrests were made while Pentameter was running.

It appears that in the UK criminal cases actually go to court.  In the US most accused plea bargain, since going to court is too risky, which means that the US court system doesn't reign in enforcement panics like this one in the UK.  This also appears to mean that lesser charges in the UK actually mean the main charge couldn't be proven, not that a plea was entered to a lesser charge in exchange for the main charge being dropped.  But that's me speculating...

Not the sort of press coverage I'd like to wake up to if I were involved. 

The Decline of Jury Trials

Sentencing Law & Policy reminds me that the jury trial is in decline in my new home state, as it is everywhere, see for instance George Fisher's Plea bargaining's triumph: a history of plea bargaining in America.  How well known is this to the general public?  People who pay attention obviously know. 

Here is part of the article in the News Virginian, but read the whole thing:

Jury trials remain a favorite of American film and literature but not of the criminal-justice system, where their use long has been in decline here and across the country. The trend has accelerated in recent decades as tougher sentencing laws leave more defendants unwilling to assert a right found in Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution and that is recognized by all states.

In the year that ended June 30, 2008, little more than 1 percent of felony convictions in Virginia courts were at the hands of jurors. Nearly 90 percent were the result of guilty pleas and the rest in trials before judges.

Guilty pleas help keep courts running efficiently, but as relatively fewer people perform one of the most serious of civic duties, experts believe public confidence in the criminal-justice system, if not justice itself, might suffer.

Josh Bowers, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, said, “We’re already at what would seem to be almost a bare minimum of jury trials for a criminal-justice system that recognizes a jury trial right.” It did not happen overnight.

Thirty years ago, Albert Alschuler, a law professor at the University of Chicago, complained in Time magazine that “here we have an elaborate jury trial system and only 10 percent of the accused get to use it.” “That’s like solving America’s transportation problems by giving 10 percent Cadillacs and making the rest go barefoot,” he said. Reached by telephone recently, Alschuler said “things are much worse” these days.

“Trials and, especially, sentencing proceedings have become ever more complicated, and legislatures have made many additions to the prosecutors’ ‘tool kit,’” he said. The jury trial rate has been cut in half across the country — even more so in Virginia — since Alschuler’s complaint of 1978....

According to the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission, in the year that ended June 30, 2008, juries were responsible for just 1.3 percent of 27,195 felony convictions in Virginia — the lowest percentage yet recorded by the commission. Nationally, of the more than 1 million felony convictions in 2004, 95 percent were resolved by guilty pleas, with the remaining 5 percent in judge or jury trials, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Bowers, Alschuler and others believe that tough sentencing laws passed by Congress and the states in the 1980s and 1990s in response to rising crime — and predictions of rising crime — are a factor contributing to the national decline in jury trials....

Virginia is one of only a handful of states where juries sentence in addition to determining guilt. Also, since 1994, juries here have been told about a defendant’s prior criminal record when deciding on a sentence. Unlike judges, juries are not informed of the sentencing guidelines and must sentence within the minimum and maximum terms that remain in the state code.

So in cases where the state law calls for a minimum sentence of five years, five years is the best a defendant can hope to get from a jury.  If the defendant pleads guilty, however, a judge complying with the guideline can suspend four years of the five-year term.  Also, because the judge, defendant and the prosecution must all agree to waive a jury trial, by threatening to demand a jury, prosecutors are in a better position to negotiate, or force guilty pleas.

In the first full fiscal year after the 1995 truth-in-sentencing reforms, jury convictions in Virginia were cut in half — from 4 percent of all felonies to 2 percent. The number has risen and fallen since, to the most recent level of 1.3 percent. And since 1995, jury sentences tend to be far stiffer than those from judges.

In a 2004 study of jury sentencing in Virginia and two other states, two professors at the Vanderbilt University School of Law confidentially surveyed judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys. They found that jury sentencing is supported overwhelmingly by Virginia prosecutors — and among some defense attorneys — because they believe it deters jury trials....

John Douglass, a former federal prosecutor and dean of the University of Richmond School of Law, said, “It’s ironic — jury sentencing in Virginia is suppressing the right to jury trial.” “The notion that your opportunity for a jury trial should come at the cost of a significantly higher sentence is troubling,” he said. “It seems odd that a jury can be used as a threat, rather than a right, or an opportunity.”...

Bowers said the trend toward fewer juries was going on before tougher modern sentencing and the use of guidelines.  Long ago, he said, when there were far fewer procedural protections for defendants, there were far more jury trials. “It wasn’t uncommon for a court to hear 20 felony jury trials in a day in the 18th-century court.”...

The full jury trial of today, however, is expensive and time-consuming.  Douglass said heavy caseloads make it difficult to try many cases.  “So prosecutors and defense counsel are looking for an alternative, and it leads to plea bargaining,” he said.

Being innocent doesn't make a jury trial more likely:

"the innocent person is in all likelihood going to have a stronger defense and the prosecution is going to have a weaker case, and a wise prosecutor will calibrate plea bargains to account for the weakness of the case,” Bowers said.

With a weak case, a prosecutor might make a more generous offer to win a conviction. “So even the innocent defendant may end up taking a plea because it’s the rational thing to do,” Bowers said.

“The innocent person may decide to stand on principle and turn down a plea, but when that happens, the plea might just get a little sweeter and the person may end up pleading anyway,” he said.

As a result, Bowers said, “you have this perversity where the very cases that we would want to test in the crucible of trial may be the very cases that more frequently end up plea-bargaining out.”

Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael N. Herring agrees that for a defendant, “juries are obviously risky and very, very unpredictable. Every good lawyer I know has lost many cases he or she [thought they] couldn’t lose.”

On the other hand, Herring said, in some egregious cases, “if you have nothing to lose as a defendant,

Herring you are facing charges that carried a [stiff] minimum term at sentencing, then you have an absolute incentive to try your case by jury.”

Figures kept by the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission support Herring’s observation. In the most recent year for which figures are available, juries were responsible for just 0.5 percent of all drug and property crime convictions.

However, for crimes against people — murder, assault, rape, etc. — where the minimum punishments are stiffest, the jury conviction rate was 10 times higher, at 5 percent (though 5 percent is the lowest ever measured by the commission for crimes against people).

Well that worked out well...gun culture in action

via Matt Steinglass:

Gun-toting soccer mom is shot dead

Meleanie Hain, the pistol-carrying Lebanon mom who received national attention for taking a loaded gun to her daughter’s soccer game, was shot to death Wednesday night with her husband in an apparent murder-suicide, police said.

Hain, 31, and her husband, Scott, 33, were pronounced dead by Lebanon County Coroner Dr. Jeffrey Yocum shortly after 8:30 p.m. at their home at Second Avenue and East Grant Street, police said.

The couple’s three children were home at the time and were not injured, and are staying with relatives and friends, police said....

Neighbor Mark Long said Meleanie baby-sat his 3-year-old son and that she and Scott had been having marital problems for the last week. ...

Meleanie Hain was thrust into the national spotlight when she took a gun, in plain view and holstered on her hip, to a soccer game Sept. 11, 2008, at Optimist Park in Lebanon.

Her permit to carry a gun was revoked by Lebanon County Sheriff Michael DeLeo on Sept. 20, 2008. DeLeo said Hain showed poor judgment in wearing her gun to the game.

Hain’s permit was reinstated by Lebanon County Judge Robert Eby on Oct. 14, 2008, but the judge asked her to conceal it when she goes to soccer games. Hain said she would continue to carry it openly under the Second Amendment.

Hain then filed a lawsuit against DeLeo for $1 million in U.S. Middle District Court seeking reimbursement of attorneys’ fees and costs, emotional distress and lost wages.

"She has been stigmatized unfairly," her attorney, Matthew Weisberg said at the time.

JIM ZENGERLE, The Lebanon Daily NewsIsabella Hain, 5, gives her mother, Meleanie Hain, a hug before heading onto the soccer field on Sept. 23 at Optimist Park in Lebanon. Meleanie Hain's insistance on wearing her loaded Glock 26 to the game has other parents up in arms.

Update #1: from an interview with Hain:

Why did you carry a gun to the soccer game?
A: Like it or not, I do not have to validate myself to the public for my actions, ... I have come to the conclusion that this is an impossible task. It may sound arrogant, but ... the Constitution has guaranteed me a right, and there is nothing more to say about it. People who say, 'You do not need a gun at a soccer field,' ... I wonder if they could tell me when I will need it? That way I could just avoid that time and place.

Homicide by Sex and how New Haven and Hamburg were the same in 2008

Female-on-female homicides in 2006:     150

Male-on-male homicides in 2006:         4,710

A ratio of 31.4.

Women kill 490 men and 150 women, a ratio of 3.26.  Men kill 4,710 men and 1,735 women, a ratio of 2.71.  5,289 men die in single victim homicides, 1,909 women die this way, a ratio of 2.77.  

(FBI data for the US, single victim homicide only)

Germany does not break out homicide perpetrators by sex, but it does break out sex of homicide victims.  The US ratio of 2.77 -- i.e. 73.5% male victims -- doesn't show up here: of 656 homicides in Germany in 2008, about 55% have male victims.  12 sexual assault related homicides in 2008 -- which strikes me as a low number.    (BKA data)

Update #1: looking at the German homicide statistics is sobering for somebody used to US homicide statistics with their tripe digit figures for large US cities.  Berlin lead Germany in homicides, with 42 in 2008.  Hamburg had 22 and Duisburg had 10.  All other cities are in the single digits.  Frankfurt a.M. had 3 homicides. In contrast NY City had more than 500 homicides and New Haven 22 homicides in 2008. 

Incarceration Risk

Looking through the high school dropout literature to understand what is going on in California, I came across this impressive statistic for the probability of ever going to prison by age 30-34  by race and education.  From Bruce Western, I should find a better cite though.  This is 1999 data, most likely worse by now.  The key figure is that 60% of black male high school dropouts have been in prison by age 30-34. 40% of black males don' t graduate from high school. The incidence this has for the next generation is also impressive. [Update: a podcast of a talk by Bruce Western on this topic, with slides.]

 

I'm confused and befuddled by the Polanski case

I don't get it.  I can see that this would be fodder for high brow tabloid coverage, but why is there any underlying controversy?  One could argue that in general some much sexual activity is now handled too aggressively by the US criminal justice system, but this is an old case, not consensual sex and involves flight from the justice system.  In some ways this reminds me of the OJ Simpson case: yes, he did it, but the constituency supporting the perpetrator doesn't like or trust the US justice system.  But people supporting Polanski don't seem to articulate that view, at least not that I've seen that argument made. 

My own theory on why Polanski got nabbed now by the Swiss is that there was a side deal in the context of a general high level laying out of who wants what from whom between the US and Swiss justice systems during negotiations over the UBS tax evasion abetting matter. 

Also, how is rape not an extraditable offense between the US and France, or something that could not be tried in France?  If Polanski had killed instead of raped Samantha Geimer would he be in the same legal position? 

The Daily Mail summarizes the process, accurately as far as I can tell, thus:

The director was initially charged with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor.

These charges were dismissed under the terms of a plea bargain [okay, not actually a plea bargain, since no sentence was agreed, instead this was a plea agreement on the charge], and he admitted a lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

An LA court ordered Polanski to report to a state prison for a ninety-day psychiatric evaluation. He eventually reported to Chino State Prison for the evaluation period, and was released after 42 days.

There was a widely held expectation that Polanski would get probation at the subsequent sentencing hearing, but after an alleged conversation with LA Deputy District Attorney David Wells, the judge 'suggested to Polanski's attorneys that he would send the director to prison and order him deported'.

With the threat of imprisonment hanging over him, Polanski fled the United States. He first went to London on February 1, 1978, where he maintained home.

A day later he traveled on to his native France, avoiding the risk of extradition to the US by Britain. Consistent with its extradition treaty with the United States, France can refuse to extradite its own citizens.

So the key issue is what does 'France can refuse to extradite its own citizen' mean in this context?  What is the process and what are the standards by which the French judicial system decides these matters?  And given this process and these standards, why did Polanski not get extradited in the past 30 years?  Conversely, when do US authorities give up on extradition requests and try to have foreign justice systems try crimes in the US?  Does this ever happen?  I only know of German authorities trying US citizens under US criminal law but German criminal procedure (in some sort of mixed procedure, with US prosecutors) for death penalty eligible crimes committed by US military personnel on US bases in Germany, who then can avoid extradition since...well not quite clear, since I think the US will promise not to seek the death penalty if extradition occurs. 

Finally, what is the French law for the facts of Polanski's plea on sexual intercourse with a 13 year old? Ah, the age of consent in France is 15, with sexual intercourse with persons under 15 punishable with up to 5 years imprisonment.  Additionally, there was a movement in France in the late 1970s to abolish the age of consent.  Indeed, in 1977, the year of Polanski's flight to France, quite a few famous French intellectuals signed a petition to this effect.   All the 'usual suspects' (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, André Glucksmann, Roland Barthes, Guy Hocquenghem) and a few more like Kouchner or Lang.  Part of the old style gay liberation movement and the aftermath of the 1960s culture wars.   Luckily, gay liberation has moved on to marriage equality and raising one's own kids and not molesting other people's kids, which is progress.  Not that this trajectory is unique to gays...see Polanski's life.  So I can see that the French state may not have felt like extraditing Polanski until this issue played out.  And then the French justice system got locked into its position. But that still doesn't explain how Polanski could hang out is Switzerland. 

On the other hand, Polanski's support in France and Poland seems quite narrowly based and is fading.  So this may mostly be about history now. 

Update #1: What Scorsese and All the Rest Know About Roman Polanski That Maybe You Don't.

Update #2: The Guardian reports France is considering forcing some sex offenders to undergo chemical castration.  Not 1977 anymore in France either.  

Update #3: Jody comments:

It seems like Polanski got away with it back in the 1970s (a) because France wasn't inclined to do anything that the US wanted it to do, especially around the extradition question; (b) because it was the 1970s, and Angelica Huston was probably not the only person who wanted to believe "hey, she looked like she could be old enough" was a valid defense; and (c) because blaming the rape victim is still pretty typical, especially when the assailant is a Famous Movie Director. I've noticed that no real media outlets in the States are doing anything but condemning the petition and the outrage. They're all saying, "this guy raped a 13-year old. It's about time." I don't think this was a federal-level agreement between the US and Switzerland. It's my impression that the LA D.A. has been trying to get Polanski for about a year now, ever since he had the audacity to ask for the case to be dismissed without actually coming back himself.

I understand that the reporting is that the extradition is due to efforts by the LA D.A.  I do suspect additional involvement by Justice Department and potentially Treasury officials as well, in the context of negotiating the UBS matter.  Just speculation, but federal officials hold many more cards than the LA D.A. when dealing with the Swiss. 

Prision Population

via the WSJ:

The  ranking, put out by the King’s College London International Centre for Prison Studies, found that in the U.S. 756 out of every 100,000 is incarcerated.

According to the study:

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, 756 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Russia (629), Rwanda (604), St Kitts & Nevis (588), Cuba (c.531), U.S. Virgin Is. (512), British Virgin Is. (488), Palau (478), Belarus (468), Belize (455), Bahamas (422), Georgia (415), American Samoa (410), Grenada (408) and Anguilla (401).

We placed a call to Douglas Berman, the Ohio State law professor who runs the very fine Sentencing Law and Policy blog, to ask for help on making sense of the numbers.

Berman sees the statistics as, in a word, ironic. “The chest-pounding about freedom and liberty that so many of our leaders do, both on the left and the right seems inconsistent with this statistical anomaly,” he says. “We live in a country conceived on the notion of liberty, but we lead the world in locking people up.”

Germany is at 89 per 100,000 or 11.8% of the US rate.  Canada at 116 per 100,000 or 15.4% of the US rate. 

Sex Offender Age Profile

via 3QD and Sullivan, Classical Liberal has a rant on US sex offender laws.  Something I don't tend to blog about because it is too disturbing. 

One more abstract way of looking at the data:

Look at this chart.  Individuals who are legally defined as sex offenders. When you look at the ages of the offenders you see that 14-year-olds are apparently the most sexually dangerous group in America. The rate declines from there, but throughout adolescence the law is far more likely to deem kids as offenders. You may imagine the dirty old man down the street. But with age people are less likely to “offend”. One reason is that they are more mature. But another reason is clear. Once you reach a certain age, having sex with people your own age is normally not considered a crime. The explosion of “youthful sex offenders” is not the result of our kids becoming perverts. It is the result of the law criminalizing what is a normal part of growing up.

This is not slapping down some 15 year old guys, the sanctions are much more serious and enduring. 

Goes on the list of necessary reforms that won't happen anytime soon. 

Residency Fraud in Public School Enrollment

Back in the New Haven suburbs the NHR reports -- one issue untouched in the reporting is how much of this occurs and the extent to which these rules are enforced in a discretionary manner:

Police have arrested a New Haven man and an Orange woman who allegedly conspired to illegally send two children to Amity Regional High School, and officials are hoping to recoup nearly $76,000 in tuition.

Superintendent of Schools John Brady said this is the first time in his educational career he has had to refer a residency matter to police, but because the students received an education illegally for six years, he had no choice.

“It’s a theft of service,” Brady said. “One can empathize with families seeking the best quality of education. We have an obligation to ensure taxpayer money is being spent on educating students who live in our towns.”

Brady said he hopes a judge will require the suspects to pay back taxpayers of Orange, Woodbridge and Bethany who collectively fund the Amity school system.

Police Sgt. Frank Cappiello said Wednesday police arrested Lura Godenciuc, 51, of 569 George St., New Haven, and Mary Antonyshyn, 75, of 944 Rainbow Trail, Orange, on larceny charges.

Police said the investigation began in June when Brady received information concerning two possible residence violations and notified police. An investigation conducted by police and school personnel confirmed that two students, who are brothers, had been attending Amity Regional High School in Woodbridge, and Godenciuc allegedly had falsely reported to school officials that the brothers lived in Orange.

One of the students graduated in June after attending all four years, while the other student attended the past two years, police said. Police and school officials declined to state the relationship between Godenciuc and Antonyshyn. Brady said an anonymous phone call sparked the investigation.

Police and school officials said they determined educating the two students over six years cost the district $75,990.

Harvard Fundraising

TaxProf blog writes:

In today's Harvard Crimson, Caspersen Taxes May Be Suspect:

Harvard Law School’s biggest donor, who died last week in an apparent suicide, may have owed up to $100 million in back taxes and fines, the New York Times reported this week.

Finn M.W. Caspersen, who gave over $30 million to the Law School and tens of millions more to other philanthropic enterprises, may have been implicated in a sweeping federal investigation of offshore bank accounts, said the Times’ anonymous source. ...

According to the Times’ source, federal authorities have placed liens on the personal trusts of Caspersen’s four sons, all of whom also attended the Law School.

The TaxProf Email Discussion Group today debated whether the IRS could clawback any of the $30 million gift to Harvard Law School under the transferee liability rules of § 6901.  Mary O'Keeffe (Union College) noted that much of the $30 million may be in the form of a pledge, and Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) directed the group to a 1993 article, Pledges to Nonprofit Organizations: Are They Enforceable and Must They Be Enforced?, which concludes:

When it comes to enforcing pledges, charities have demonstrated a timidity not characteristic of their solicitation practices. Charities seem to fear the loss of subscribers if it became practice to sue to enforce the subscriptions. Indeed, a review of the reported cases shows that the great majority of such actions were brought only after the death of the subscriber, when the charity was willing to dispute with the heirs over the assets.

Yale News Update

The recent Yale murder seems to be resolving quickly, but it has had me occassionally checking the local New Haven news.  There is more Yale crime news, for instance gun totting Yale psychiatry residents:

A Yale School of Medicine psychiatry resident appears in court Thursday after he allegedly threatened to shoot up a State Street bar — and after cops confiscated an “arsenal” of assault weapons and ammunition from his Mechanic Street home.

The cops arrested Robert Remington, 31, on weapons and breach of peace charges after getting a call from a bartender at Dolci Piano Lounge on State Street just after 10:12 p.m. Sunday night. ...

“Remington began yelling that he ‘loved violence’ and that he wanted ‘to kill everyone.’ He stated that he was the ‘Savior of Death’ and that he was a part of a ‘revolution.’ At that time [the bartender] called the police because they were afraid that Remington was going to possibly shoot them.”

The cops arrived and arrested Remington. They found a gun in his fanny pack as well as receipts for Aug. 29 purchases in Gunsport, Colorado, of a Sako .338 lm sniper rifle and muzzle break. ...

Among the items listed as found in his home:

• Mossberg 590 12 gauge shotgun with 13 rounds
• Armalite 762mm AR-10
• Barrett M95 50 cal
• Benelli M3 Super 90 12 gauge shotgun
• Springfield Armory M1A
• Sako TRG-42
• Stag 15 5.56 mm
• Stage 15 22 cal
• Electro Shield Stun Gun
• Case of 12 Gauge Remington game loads
• Case of 12 Guage Remington gun clug target loads
• Flambeau ammo box with TTI Armry special munitions, 14 boxes of 10 rounds per box
• Hodgdon bottles of rifle poweder
• 3 magazines containing 40 cal rounds
• Lots of containers of other shotgun shells, 40 cal Smith and Wesson rounds, Hornady 223 ammo, 308 Hornday 308 rounds, 50 cal projectiles.

The city animal shelter’s Tammy Hewston also showed up to temporarily remove Remington’s German Shepherd (described by an upstairs neighbor in the police report as “unfriendly”).

Does feed into certain notions of who goes into psychiatry. Also a Ron Paul supporter. An update:

Remington works with veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder at the West Haven Veteran Affairs hospital. His positions with the hospital and the Medical School have not been compromised, Williams said, and officials at both institutions have been “supportive” of the resident.

But Remington is not allowed to see hospital patients until the trial is completed. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs did not return a request for comment Wednesday.

Remington may have been modeling his patients. 

'A national finance chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in alleged fraud'

from the FT -- not sure what to make of this:

A prominent Democratic fundraiser who served as a national finance chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has been accused in an alleged $74m scheme to defraud Citigroup, federal prosecutors said on Monday.

Hassan Nemazee was accused of using false documents to secure a loan of $74m from Citi. He was on his way to Rome on Sunday when he was interviewed by federal investigators at Newark Liberty International Airport. On Monday, prosecutors said, he repaid the loan.

Mr Nemazee is chairman and chief executive of Nemazee Capital, which describes itself as an investor in businesses including healthcare, media, oil, insurance and investment banking.

President Bill Clinton picked Mr Nemazee to be US ambassador to Argentina but the 1999 nomination fell through after questions were raised about his business dealings.

Mr Nemazee served as New York finance chairman for Senator John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, before joining Mrs Clinton’s presidential effort. He also later raised funds for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Mr Nemazee, 59, faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted of the bank fraud charges. Mr Nemazee’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, said: “We are reviewing the allegations.”

Citi said it was co-operating with the authorities.

Mr Nemazee first contacted Citibank in December 2006 to borrow up to $25m and in November last year modified the arrangement to raise the amount he could borrow to $80m, according to the criminal complaint filed in a Manhattan federal court.

Prosecutors allege that Mr Nemazee submitted documents to Citibank that indicated he held hundreds of millions of dollars in various financial accounts.

“Those documents were fraudulent and forged,” and the accounts “either never existed or had previously existed, but had been closed years before”, the criminal complaint claims.

Mr Nemazee also allegedly used fake addresses and phone numbers to mislead Citibank.

“In the event anyone at Citibank made an effort to confirm the existence of the assets reflected on the fraudulent documents submitted by Nemazee, they would in fact be contacting a telephone number assigned to Nemazee himself, and not any financial institution,” Preet Bharara, US attorney for the southern district of New York, said in a statement.

The NYT article is clearer:

Mr. Nemazee was ordered jailed overnight by a federal magistrate judge, while arrangements were being made for his release on Wednesday on a $25 million bond. As part of the conditions of his release, Mr. Nemazee will be subject to house arrest and electronic monitoring, the judge, Ronald L. Ellis, said.

The fraud is pretty standard:

Mr. Nemazee also gave Citibank phone numbers and addresses of various financial institutions that would purportedly vouch for his financial strength, but the numbers were controlled by him, the complaint said.

It said that if officials at Citibank tried to confirm the assets’ existence, “they would in fact be contacting a telephone number assigned to Nemazee himself, and not any financial institution.”

Faked DNA Evidence

The NYT reports.  Something I expect to hear more about in the future.  Surprising this hasn't been more on the radar screen until now. 

Breakfast Fish

And yes, the Red Sox found some underpaid security guards to fire for steroids. Surprise. Fish was very fresh. 

One more twist in the Madoff Saga...

Just when the Madoff saga had calmed down I run across a report that flabbergasts me again.  ProPublica (via Clusterstock) reports that Madoff Client Jeffry Picower Netted $5 Billion—Likely More Than Madoff Himself:

It now appears that the biggest winner in Madoff's scheme may not have been Madoff at all, but a secretive businessman named Jeffry Picower. 

Between December 1995 and December 2008, Picower and his family withdrew from their various Madoff accounts $5.1 billion more than they invested with the self-confessed swindler, according to a lawsuit filed by the trustee who is trying to recover money for those Madoff defrauded.  [View the complaint.] ...

The complaint states that the Picowers were beneficiaries of the Ponzi scheme for more than 20 years. The withdrawals listed between 1995 and 2008 reveal a pattern of large quarterly disbursements, transferred to Picower-controlled accounts by check or sometimes wire, that peak in 2003. Three years later something happens that causes the amount to drop precipitously. It recovers slightly the following year, but the highest-flying days are over for good.   ...

Picower, 67, began his career as an accountant and lawyer in New York but seems to have made much of his fortune as an investor in the medical industry. He has avoided media interviews and, with a few notable exceptions, succeeded in keeping a low profile. If the Picowers were recognized at all, prior to their Madoff notoriety, it was through praise for their philanthropy. Yet even here, their ties to Madoff loomed large. The growth of their largest foundation was attributed to their Madoff investments. Madoff himself served as a trustee on another Picower foundation.  

The court-appointed trustee makes a powerful, albeit still largely circumstantial, case in court filings that Picower knew Madoff's fund was illegitimate. Although Madoff ostensibly produced eerily consistent 10-12 percent annual returns for his clients, the returns he provided Picower were other worldly:

• In 14 instances between 1996 and 2007, a group of Picower trading accounts experienced annual returns of more than 100 percent. On 25 occasions, the annual return exceeded 50 percent. During this same period, the biggest annual gain in either the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500 was 31 percent, for the S&P in 1997. The S&P 500's annual average for that period was slightly under 9 percent.
• The annual rate of return for two of Picower's regular trading accounts in the four years between 1996 and 1999 ranged from about 120 percent to more than 550 percent annually.
• In 1999, one account earned 950 percent.

According to the Madoff trustee's court filings, "the account reflected little trading activity and relatively few holdings," yet Picower took hundreds of millions out of it. At the time of Madoff's arrest, the account had a reported negative net cash balance of more than $6 billion.

At the beginning of each quarter, the Picowers received sums that grew from an annual total of $330 million in 1996 to $1 billion in 2003. These withdrawals were divided into odd numbers spread over various accounts. Added together, they usually equaled large even sums. For example, on January 2, 2003, Picower withdrew $1,378,852 from his account Jln Partnership. Yet when withdrawals across all accounts were totaled for that day, they amounted to precisely $250 million.

Picower's quarterly withdrawals reached their zenith in 2003 and then decreased by half the next year, eventually dropping to their lowest point in 2006. For some reason, the quarterly withdrawals totaled an uneven $16,975,422 in 2006, only to rebound to exactly $40 million in 2007.

Picower's extraordinary gains do not appear to have been achieved at random. The trustee's complaint details how Picower, often acting through a subordinate, ordered up "returns" which Madoff's office then delivered. In some cases, Picower is alleged to have requested backdated returns for trades or sales of securities.

• On April 18, 2006, Picower wired $125 million to Madoff to open a new account. Madoff's office began "purchasing" securities in the account, but "it backdated the vast majority of these purported transactions to January 2006" when the stock market was at its lowest for the period, according to the complaint. Twelve days later, the net equity value of the account was $164 million, a gain of $39 million – or more than 30 percent – in less than two weeks.
• The complaint details conversations between Picower associate April Freilich and Madoff's office beginning around May 14, 2007, when Freilich stated that the Picower Foundation needed gains during January and February of 2006, a year earlier.
• On May 18, Freilich specified that the foundation needed "$20 mil in gains" and "want[ed] 18% for year[] 08 appreciation" for January and February of that year. Five days later, Freilich changed the amount to $12.3 million. Subsequent statements reflected gains of $12.6 million.
• On December 22, 2005, Picower or Freilich allegedly faxed a letter to Madoff dated December 1, directing him to sell specific holdings. The statement for that month reflects that the sales were finalized on December 2, a process that typically takes three days. The clues that the letter was back-dated: A fax with the tell-tale December 22 date and an attached portfolio appraisal dated December 16 that included the positions that were supposedly "sold."
• On or around December 29, 2005, Freilich allegedly faxed a letter to Madoff asking for $50 million in gains across certain accounts. Subsequent statements generated by Madoff for the accounts show stock sales, presumably to satisfy the request, that were supposedly recorded around December 8 and 9, 2005, approximately three weeks prior to Freilich's letter. ....

The Picowers gave to a host of worthy causes from the Children's Aid Society to the New York City Ballet, but Jeffry Picower's passion centered on health issues, particularly funding for medical research. On December 1, 2005, the couple made a rare public appearance at a ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to dedicate a new center to study the brain, the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. The Picowers' gift of $50 million, spread over five years, was the single largest in the school's history. In a video of the ceremony, Nobel Prize winning Japanese scientist Susumu Tonegawa told the crowd that without the Picowers there would be no institute. The Picowers stood by silently as Tonegawa unveiled a portrait of the couple to conclude the ceremony. ...

Picower's legal and regulatory history was outlined in an article by Forbes Magazine. The 2002 article, which didn't mention Picower's activities with Madoff, said Picower was "worth at least $300 million." That same year, the trustee reports, Picower's quarterly withdrawals from Madoff totaled $895 million. 

This is the stuff conspiracy theories are made of...

Update #1: the Picower house in Palm Beach.  Pretty scary neighborhood if you look around (click through to the 'bird's eye' view). Also his house in Fairfield, CT (or his neighbor's larger house, hard to tell...).   

Update #2: the thing that surprises me is that none of the prime suspects has disappeared yet.  With that much cunning, money and time to prepare I would have expected a few more disappearances. 

Abortion and Crime

Theodore Joyce has a review paper out saying that Levitt and Donohue's result that abortion reduces crime, ten years on, doesn't look robust.  (via Matt Kahn)

Homicide in NYC

The NYT has a front page article about summertime murders in NYC.  They manage not to discuss race or class, but from the attached graphic I see that 90% of homicide perpetrators and 88% of homicide victims were black or hispanic in NYC from 2003 to 2008.  I'd not realized how safe Queens is.  Sadly, there is no income or occupational data. 

Over the River in France

Impressive protests in Strasbourg.  (updating Spring and Obama come to Germany)  Well, we'll see how well the joint German-French planning works. It will also be interesting to see how the criminal justice system deals with this.  So far the reports were that protest turn out was low and mostly unmotivated (which these photos may reflect), at least on the German side. Probably not the sort of images that will hurt Sarkozy or Merkel electorally. 

Local Crime

We've had quite a bit of local crime...one bank robbery this week, the classic walk in the bank and give the teller a note method, several minor burglaries from garages and sheds, and now, my wife tells me from talking to a town employee, quite a bit of street sign stealing for scarp metal.