No Justice for Nicola Cotton

The mentally ill man who fatally shot New Orleans police officer Nicola Cotton in January 2008 with her own gun after she approached him for questioning cannot stand trial because he is "irrestorably incompetent," a judge has ruled.

Times-Picayune archiveIn January, 2008, Bernel Johnson, 44, is escorted from Orleans Parish lockup after being charged with first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of police officer Nicola Cotton.
Bernel P. Johnson, 47, on Sept. 2 was ordered into the custody of the state Department of Health and Hospitals under a civil commitment and will live at the forensic hospital in Jackson, La., indefinitely, his lawyer said.
"He can't get out," said defense attorney Jeffrey Smith, who was appointed to represent Johnson. "That doesn't mean that in five to six years or 10 years he can't come right back to court. It doesn't preclude him from being tried down the road."
Johnson, who has a history of paranoid schizophrenia and lashing out at relatives, remains charged with the first-degree murder of Cotton, 24, who was shot 15 times with her own service weapon the morning of Jan. 28, 2008, outside a strip of stores in the 2100 block of Earhart Boulevard.
"Nothing can happen in this case until the defendant regains his competency," said District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro. "We are on a hiatus."
Cotton's death drew attention to the city's lack of comprehensive mental health services.

New Orleans police officer Nicola Cotton, 24, was shot 15 times with her own service weapon.
Johnson has spent nearly two years at Jackson, being examined as to whether he can grasp the legal system well enough to participate in the defense of his capital murder case. Doctors found him competent for only about two months during that period.
Judge Julian Parker ruled Johnson cannot be restored to competency, having held a series of hearings to take testimony from psychologists who have examined Johnson.
While he has been described by his family as a promising student and artist who graduated from St. Augustine High School, Johnson was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 19, and has spent most of his life in and out of institutions.
Smith said that his client has excitedly told him about highways that he has taken across the ocean to Saudi Arabia.
Johnson will likely spend the rest of his days in a system that he has known for 26 years, a cycle of jails, mental hospitals, and homelessness. He was discharged from Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville not long before he was booked with a cop's murder, which he won't stand trial for anytime soon.
"I'm disappointed," said Henry Dean, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, who is an NOPD captain. "However, we work for the system and we support the system. The real thing is, no matter what happens today nothing will happen to bring Nicola back."
Dean said Cotton's death became a grisly reminder of a scarcity of mental health services in the city.

Times-Picayune archiveCrime scene technicians with the New Orleans Police Department bag officer Nicole Cotton's gunbelt, its holster empty, in front of the food store at Earhart and Simon Bolivar after she was disarmed and shot to death while confronting a man police described as a transient.
"We still don't have our Charity Hospital back," he said. "The mental facilities aren't there."
Smith agreed, comparing Johnson to another client awaiting trial for the murder of a stranger. Erik Traczyk, 39, a New Jersey man, was ordered to stand trial Jan. 18, having been "restored" to competency since his 2007 arrest in the murder of Nia Robertson, 28, at Pal's Lounge.
A bar filled with people watched Traczyk walk into Pal's, pull a knife and first stab a man before slashing Robertson's throat on his way out of the door. Minutes later, police arrested him carrying a blood-stained knife. Judge Karen Herman has found Traczyk incompetent to stand trial four times since November 2007, according to court minutes, but in October 2009 found him competent.
"If the state had a more progressive mental health system, half of these murders would never occur," Smith said. "We are way behind other states."
Several murder cases pending at the Tulane Avenue courthouse involve defendants diagnosed with mental illness. On Monday, police said that 18-year-old Lee Allen, a schizophrenic man with a history of violence, fatally stabbed his 19-year-old girlfriend Monday when she came to pick up their baby daughter. Since November 2009, Allen has racked up three domestic battery cases, including an incident when he dragged Hall by the hair down a city street.
Cotton, a 6th District officer who was eight weeks pregnant, approached Johnson trying to find out whether he was a rape suspect with a similar name -- Bernell Johnson and also 44 years old -- that police were looking for in that area.
Johnson pounced on her, police have said, and for seven minutes, the pair tussled on the pavement.
Cotton called for backup on her radio at some point during the struggle, but Johnson wrestled away her gun and emptied the .40-caliber Glock into the uniformed officer.
Johnson never got a chance to launch any kind of defense at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court. Instead, he has spent the past two years at Jackson, being treated for his illness and taught about how the legal system works -- what happens to defendants who are found incompetent to stand trial.
But Smith said prosecutors never had to turn over a videotape of Cotton's killing, which shows that the fatal clash was an unfortunate series of events.
"I guarantee it shows a police officer provoking a totally innocent man," said Smith, a 20-year veteran of criminal trials. "There was an issue of self-defense. He is sitting around minding his own business when all of a sudden a police officer is putting a gun into his ribs."
In court, Johnson's demeanor had become almost docile during the past 2 1/2 years. Instead of his angry outbursts about the court system, in June he quietly asked his attorney if "a lynch mob" was coming for him.
"He does have a treatable illness; I assume he can get much better than he is now," forensic psychiatrist Dr. Sarah DeLand testified in April 2008.

Camp Salmen Nature Park Opening

Nearly 10 years after St. Tammany Parish negotiated the deal to purchase Camp Salmen to preserve the 106-acre site for public use, the former Boy Scouts bivouac will welcome its first visitors Saturday afternoon at a grand opening celebration.

The event will begin with guided walks on Camp Salmen Nature Park's interpretive trails at 1:30 and 2 p.m., followed by a presentation and flag-raising by Parish President Kevin Davis at 2:30 p.m. The 1944 Big Band will perform from 3 to 5 p.m.

The parish is encouraging visitors to bring ice chests and chairs for picnic-style seating at Camp Salmen, which is located on U.S. 190, less than a mile east of Northshore Boulevard. Temporary signs on U.S. 190 will lead visitors down a new road leading to the park, as the parish had not yet decided Tuesday on a name for the road, said Tom Beale, a parish spokesman.

Originally donated by Fritz Salmen of the Salmen Brick and Lumber Company to the Boy Scouts in 1924, the site served as the primary regional Boy Scouts camp in Southeast Louisiana until 1983, when the organization left St. Tammany Parish for a larger, more rural site in nearby Kiln, Miss. The parish worked with the Trust for Public Land to purchase the property in 2001 and secured federal grants to fully acquire the property in 2004.

The interpretive trails include paths and a raised boardwalk along Bayou Liberty that is expected to measure more than five miles by year's end. In addition, families can gather at the park's 5,000 square-foot, open-air pavilion -- the site of the former Scout dining hall.

The new Order of the Arrow Garden, which contains the nearly 200-year-old Camp Salmen Live Oak and is surrounded by new plantings and brick ruins, pays tribute to the ritual of honoring top Scouts at the end of each summer.

Officials hope in later years to further transform the site, building a welcome center at the park's entrance, an administrative building, additional pavilions and an amphitheater at the bayou's edge with a dock leading to the old Salmen Lodge, which is included in the National Register of Historic Places.

The plan is to convert the lodge, which likely served as the first trading post in the Bayou Liberty region and later as the camp director's residence, into a museum to teach school children about the history of the building and the area, officials have said. Teachers would be able to bring their students to the "outdoor classroom" that the park will provide, while another building would house a museum showcasing Scout culture.

Officials also want to restore the flag pole area and a monument to Fritz Salmen, who with his family donated all 106 acres that comprise the site. The parish purchased an additional 30 acres to build the new road leading into the park from U.S. 190.

Further, the parish plans to build a bike path through the park, with the idea of connecting it to the Tammany Trace in the future. The Trace now stops at Neslo Road, not far from the park.

For more information, call 985.898.5243 or visit Camp Salmen Nature Park's website at www.campsalmennaturepark.org.

 

 

3rd Fishkill in Plaquemines

Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser is demanding federal involvement when it comes to testing the waters in the parish hit by heavy oil. … “We’ve never seen so many species floating in so many different areas. I’m begging the E.P.A., or somebody… I’m begging them to do their job, get out there and lets test, and see what the hell is going on in the water“…



P.J. Hahn, the Director the Plaquemines Parish Coastal Zone Management Department says fish kills are normal during this time of the year. What’s not normal is how frequent swaths of dead fish are turning up, in areas once heavily oiled.

“Now millions of dead fish that have turned up in the area, and a variety: catfish, redfish, speckled trout we saw, it’s just a number of varieties of fish,” said Hahn… the parish still questions whether they could be related to the oil spill.

The previous fish kills were reported in Bay Chaland and Bay Joe Wise and were predominantly menhaden, also called pogie.

The Bay Chaland fish kill was discovered on September and the Bay Joe Wise fish kill was discovered by officials Thursday, September 16.


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Hahn said Thursday that the fish (in Bay Joe Wise) covered at least one-fourth of a square mile, with oil visible among them. He said he wanted the area tested because it was affected by oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill, said a report from the Associated Press.

In addition to hundreds of thousands of dead fish floating west of the Mississippi River in Bayou Chaland, several days before, a large starfish kill was found in nearby Barataria Bay, and a dead baby whale was discovered near Venice a few days later.



On September 14th thousands of fish and a dead whale were found dead at the mouth of a shipping channel in Venice. Species include crabs, sting rays, eels, drum, speckled trout and red fish.

Billy Nungesser said there is no testing going on to determine if it’s from the oil spill, although the northern Gulf of Mexico has suffered from a persistent dead zone of low oxygen, blamed on nutrient rich runoff from the Mississippi River.

The picture is NOT so rosy in the Gulf

From the website of the National Resources Defense Council regarding
Reports of oiled shrimp and crabs getting caught in some areas continue to crop up. Last week, New Orleans WALB-TV in Mobile, AL, reported crabs caught in Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish were coated in oil after being brought into the dock for sale. According to WALB-TV, seafood dealer Kevin Heir of B&K Crabbing said they tried to notify state officials about the oiled crabs but no one ever came to test them. When he inquired why later, he was told a state supervisor had quashed it, he told WALB.

"We dumped them in ice water, picked the box up, dumped them on the table, and the smell like to knock us down," Heier said. "[We] emptied the box of crabs and the water that was coming off the crabs on the table was just like a sheen."

New reports and fisherman describe oil continuing to wash into the marshes and the beaches along the coast and bays of southern Louisiana. Last week an oiled baby sperm whale and a dolphin washed into the coast, according to fishermen and cleanup workers who saw them before they were hauled away by state authorities. What caused it? No one seems to have answers.

First we couldn't trust BP, then the EPA, then the Natiional Wildlife Agents, then the White House and now? NOW WE CAN'T EVEN TRUST OUR STATE OFFICIALS.

Save the Date - October 30, 2010

From the website Beyond Katrina


On Saturday, October 30, from Houma, Louisiana to Pensacola Florida, all along the waterways affected by the oil spill of April 20, 2010, people will gather together in a spirit of appreciation for their beautiful, damaged home and their own determination to thrive. On that day school students, church groups, birdwatchers and fishermen, artists and musicians, families and friends will get together to talk about how the oil spill has affected their lives, and who and what has given them strength. They will sing, reflect, play music, read poems, eat good food, drum or whatever feels right. Each group will create a simple picture out of ordinary materials—a bird, a shrimp, a human figure or anything else that represents the vitality of life in the Gulf—and take a photograph of themselves with their image. Groups that create a picture fifty feet long or larger will be considered for inclusion in a special, limited number of aerial photos to be taken that day by the award winning New Orleans photographer, Matthew D. White. The photographs will be combined and every group will receive a presentation of the images on digital disc.

Radical Joy For Hard Times, the organization sponsoring the event, is calling for Gulf Coast citizens, groups and organizations to support the effort by either organizing or participating in an event. Groups can sign up for an event via the website at http://www.radicaljoyforhardtimes.org. It is not necessary for groups to have their plans finalized at the time of sign up as the information can be self updated at any time.

Radical Joy for Hard Times, http://www.radicaljoyforhardtimes.org is a non-profit 501c3 organization whose mission is to find and make beauty in wounded places. On June 19, for their Global Earth Exchange, people on all the seven continents of the Earth went to clear-cut forests, polluted rivers, damaged beaches, the sites of coal and gas mining, and other places to gather, tell their stories, and make simple acts of beauty. The Gulf Coast Rising Project is the latest venture in the organization’s effort to introduce a new, more intimate environmentalism for all citizens of the Earth.

Oilspill Bird Data

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists   has compiled an expanded report of the birds rescued and collected during the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

This report, which will be provided regularly moving forward, outlines a species-by-species breakdown and maps of where the birds were collected.

 

The initial report released by the Fish and Wildlife Service today showed that as of Sept. 14, 2010, a total of 3,634 dead birds and 1,042 live birds have been found in areas affected by the Deepwater Horizon spill. These numbers are subject to verification and cannot be considered final. Of the dead birds, the largest numbers are laughing gulls, followed by brown pelicans and northern gannets.

 

These numbers will be updated as the team of biologists continues the verification process which can take several weeks. Until the response to this environmental disaster is complete and birds are no longer being captured alive or collected dead, any numbers regarding birds must be considered preliminary.

 

About 1.5 percent of the current total represents birds collected live that later died. As data continues to come in, the Service will report on the number of live birds that have died.

 

In the meantime, the unverified preliminary numbers will continue to be updated daily to provide a glimpse into the spill impacts on birds that depend on the northern Gulf Coast.

 

The verified information will be updated every week. Verified species-by-species data, along with maps showing where birds were captured or collected, are posted on the Service's oil spill web page (www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill) and the Restore the Gulf web site (www.restorethegulf.gov).

 

To view Weekly Bird Impact Data and Consolidated Wildlife Reports, visit http://www.fws.gov/home/dhoilspill/collectionreports.html

 

Ken took too big of a bite

Mr. Feinberg seems to have bit off more than he could chew in the BP case.

Here's an article about his performance in Orange Beach, Alabama.....pretty p.o.'d people there.

Why? Because Ken - who seems to think that by just saying something will happen will make it happen - is learning the truth about dealing with a behemoth of a corporation that has the ability to control the US Government, including the EPA, Fish and Wildlife, Coast Guard and a host of others.

Mister Ken was the "pay czar" for the victims of Nine-Eleven, which must have been easier to deal with than the current situations involving a mega corporation who has raped the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Louisiana and is currently trying to sneak out of town.

Here's a link to an audio from WWL radio interviewing Mr. Fineburg on the mess that is the BP compensation fund.

More to come as it becomes available.

Death Comes To Louisiana - a BP Protest Song by MOTU @ The 2010 Barrier ...

End of an Era

An article at this link ( http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1436) details the activities of mating the Space Shuttle’s orbiter to the External Tank (ET) and Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs). At the end of the story are some excellent pictures. Below are the author’s closing remarks

STS 133 is the 39th and last scheduled flight of Discovery .

It's a melancholy moment for the Discovery shuttle team. Everyone is excited to be processing the orbiter for launch. But at the same instant, excitement is mixed with great sadness. Because barring a miraculous extension this is the last launch for Discovery.

The shuttle program is being terminated for lack of money from the Federal Government in Washington, DC - not because of safety concerns. Top shuttle managers have told me that the shuttle has never been safer to fly than now during its 30 year history of operations.

In the midst of the Great Recession, about 8000 shuttle workers at KSC will be laid off and about another 10,000 to 20,000 jobs are expected to evaporate in the local economy in the communities surrounding the Kennedy Space Center. 900 layoffs are set to occur at KSC on Oct. 1. Thousands more layoffs will occur across the US at the Johnson Space Center, Michoud Assembly Facility, ATK and elsewhere as the shuttle program is prematurely shutdown at the height of its operational capabilities.

Much of this technological know-how will be dispersed or lost. America's manufacturing capacity will be further dismantled. And America will have no capability to launch people into space on American rockets for many years to come. NASA will have no choice but to pay Russia more than $50 million per seat to launch American astronauts aboard Soyuz rockets to the ISS.

James Carville: “We Have Been Greatly Wronged”

James Carville: “We Have Been Greatly Wronged”

Oil is STILL coming ashore.....day 145

"Everyone thinks this is over, but it's not - not if we can still get soakings like this."

Quote for an article in the sports section of the times picayune Headline "New Wave of Oil Comes Ashore West of the Mississippi". Read more here