Wednesday, May 4th 2005

7:50

Your tax dollars at work, for criminals.

This article got my blood boiling this morning. The internet is a dangerous place for our children - with pedophiles and others just waiting to attack them or lure them in. But the ACLU is helping convicted criminals get internet access. What ever happened to the victims and their rights? Yes, it's true - sometimes innocent people get convicted and I think what Barry Scheck is doing with his DNA project is very helpful to stop that sort of thing and to remedy what's already been done. But there's maybe 1 innocent for every 10 CRIMINALS in the system. So it's right to give the CRIMINALS access to the internet so they can continue their crimes and harrassment of victims?

Keith Maydak's jail cells are roomier than most. Must be all that cyberspace. State and federal prisons don't let inmates use Internet computers behind bars -- and the Allegheny County Jail doesn't either. Yet Maydak has answered a reporter's e-mails from the Pittsburgh jail, and later an Ohio lockup, while he awaits sentencing for violating probation on a 900-number phone scam that cost AT&T $550,000 dollars. Thousands of other inmates access the Internet indirectly using inmate telephone and mail privileges and a network of family, friends or activists. Once on the Web, they enlist celebrities like Susan Sarandon to plead their case, pillory the prosecutors who imprisoned them, or simply find pen pals. Maydak, 34, told The Associated Press he uses a network of toll-free phone numbers and friends to access the Internet for him. He was inspired as a teen by the 1983 movie "War Games" in which nuclear war almost results when a teenager hacks into a military computer. And that's precisely why state and federal prisons keep inmates away from the Internet, said Joe Weedon, a spokesman for the American Correctional Association in Lanham, Marylan. "There were a few jurisdictions that allowed it on a limited basis, but they ran into problems with offenders contacting their victims or inmates running scams of some sort." Federal appellate courts have yet to hear a major case on inmates rights to access the Internet but victims' advocates promise to fight them. "Your rights are very limited when you go to prison and certainly the right to communicate with people on the Internet is one of them," said Michael Rushford, of the Sacramento, California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. Arizona inmates successfully challenged a state law that prohibited helping inmates access the Internet. The law was passed after a murder victim's family complained about the killer's Internet pen pal ad. But a federal district judge struck down the law in 2003, saying it was one thing to stop inmates from using the Internet in jail -- but quite another to hinder their access to it through intermediaries. The American Civil Liberties Union sued in that case on behalf of the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which publishes Web sites for about 500 U.S. death row inmates, and pen pal solicitations for about 700 more, said co-founder Tracy Lamourie. "They're sentenced to death, they're not sentenced to silence," Lamourie said. "Even if just one was (innocent), how can we silence someone who's going to be killed in our name?" Lamourie's group maintained a Web site for Juan Melendez, 53, who spent 18 years on Florida's death row before he was found to be wrongfully convicted three years ago. Lamourie and her partner pay for envelopes, stationery and postage out of pocket or with donations that trickle in. The server space for the Web pages is donated by a European death penalty opponent. "I try to understand how alarming it would be for a victim's family to see the smiling face of an inmate who has caused some great harm to a family on the World Wide Web looking for women to write to him," said Donna Hamm of Middle Ground Prison Reform Inc. "But it's difficult to imagine how that infringes on a free world person's right to put something on the Internet." Read the rest.