The Law of the Land

Cameron Todd Willingham, of Texas, was the husband of Stacy Willingham and the loving father of three young girls. There is a reason why I did not include the word ‘loving’ in front of the word ‘husband’. This is because Willingham was anything but that; he regularly verbally abused and beat his wife, and in some of these instances, the police was called. While Todd Willingham was by no means a good husband or a good person, he truly did love his kids. However, his poor reputation would eventually cause community members to doubt this fast, and even worse, cost him his life.

The Christmas of 1991 was no merry one for the Willingham family. Two days prior, a massive fire broke out in the family’s home while Stacy at work. Todd Willingham awoke to the smell of smoke and the sight of flames, and he quickly fled the house in fear, leaving his three girls inside. He screamed for help, yelling that his babies were in there. After the fire department arrived, they pronounced the three girls dead and Willingham wept. Deep down, he knew that he was a coward for not going back inside to rescue his daughters from the flames, but he had truly feared for his life and did what nobody admits that they would do in this circumstance: he saved his own life.

Whether he was guilt ridden or trying to distract himself from his loss, Willingham’s behavior at the scene and in following days seemed very odd to the police.  He told them that he tried to look for them and could not find them, and the police and fire department found this suspicious considering that he had been barefoot yet had no burns on his feed. They also thought that he seemed almost unsympathetic, and this caused them to wonder whether the fire was actually arson. They launched an investigation by fire fighters who had plenty of experience fighting fires, but did not know all of the science behind how fires work, and ultimately concluded that the fire was arson. Cameron Todd Willingham was their only suspect.

Despite word from Stacy that Todd would not do something to hurt his kids, the state of Texas took him to court for murdering his three daughters. He was told that if he did not accept a plea deal, he would receive the death penalty if he was convicted; knowing that he was innocent, he still pleaded not guilty. With what prosecutors described as “20 counts of evidence of arson” and Willingham’s abuse of his wife, the State of Texas found him guilty and sentenced him to the death penalty.

Just months before his execution though, arson experts began to question the reliability of the arson investigation conducted by the fire department. After looking into the evidence themselves, they concluded that what was described as “evidence that Willingham poured lighter fluid on the floor” was actually ventilation patterns that occur during a flash-over. They also disproved the other nineteen pieces of “proof”, ultimately leaving no evidence that an arson occurred at all. In order words, there was no evidence that any type of crime that occurred. Days before Willingham’s execution, a leading arson expert signed an appeal proposal claiming that all evidence in the case was insufficient and that the accused was innocent. However, Texas, being tough on crime, still believed that witness testimonies that showed Todd was a wife beater meant that he was a bad dad, thus denying the appeal. On February 17th, 2004, Todd Willingham was executed by lethal injection.

He is not the only person to be falsely executed in the United States. A U.S. study of death row estimated that 4% of defendants sentenced to death are innocent. This may seem like a small number, but for being a margin of error, this is extremely significant and is one of the reasons capital punishment should not be used in the United States. There are many implications to capital punishment, including that it is inhumane and its median cost of $1.26 million per execution. However, to me, the loss of innocent lives is the biggest one.

Welcome back to the Law of The Land. In order to make my blog a little less dull, I have decided to change things up a bit this week. Rather than following my usual “strictly-law” theme, I thought I would take a slight detour and examine an infamous crime. In particular, I will be discussing the heinous case of Earl Bradley, which took place in my boyfriend’s hometown.

In case you have never heard his name before, Earl Bradley is a former pediatrician from Lewes, Delaware. Educated at Temple University, Bradley completed his residency in Philadelphia, PA and was later appointed the position of Chief of Pediatrics at Beebe Medical Center in Sussex County, DE. He later opened is own practice under the name of BayBees Pediatrics, where he maintained a great reputation as one of the area’s most respected pediatricians; parents believed that Bradley got along great with children, which is often why they would take him to his office.

However, there was a side of Earl Bradley that they did not know about. Throughout his career, there had been multiple accusations of child sexual abuse made against the pediatrician by parents and nurses. These accusations date all the way back to 1995 when he was completing his residency. In one instance, a mother entered the room to find him with his hand shoved down her two year old daughter’s diaper. She reported this to the police immediately, and the hospital performed a brief investigation before deciding that there was not “sufficient evidence” to validate the mother’s claim. With this,the case was dropped and his medical license was still in tact; shortly after, Earl packed up and fled to the rural beach town of Lewes.

In Lewes, he was estimated to have seen more than 6,000 young patients over the next fifteen years. His practice was decorated with many child-oriented toys and activities, including a small Ferris Wheel outside. Outwardly, he was ‘the dream Pediatrician’. On the other hand, he had dark and deviant desires. Secretly, he would lure select patients into the basement with stuffed animals then abuse them brutally and sexually. He did this until he was caught in 2010, a revelation that filled many Sussex County parents with absolute horror as they learned the truth about Earl Bradley and his horrible practice.

Pediatrician Earl Bradley had exploited at least 103 (102 girls and 1 boy) children, some as young as three months old and as old as thirteen years old. Not only this, but the police found video evidence of his crimes in his house after obtaining a warrant. This evidence included 13 hours of footage of Bradley filming himself chasing and sexually abusing his victims. Many of the acts were extremely violent; in some, the victims were blue and about to black out as he forced them to perform oral sex on him and choked them. In others, he was shown terrorizing children that screamed in diapers.

After all of this, Bradley still tried to plead not guilty. He criticized the police department for not correctly specifying the location in their obtained warrant, and and even tried to appeal to his charges. Although he was to originally be indicted in Sussex County, there would have been too many adults connected to victims in the city on jury; with this, they moved his trial to New Castle, Delaware. His bench trial took only a day, and on June 23rd, 2011, he was indicted of 471 charges of molesting, raping, and exploiting child patients. He was sentenced to 14 life sentences, and he was to originally serve them in the Delaware State Prison. However, the Department of Corrections recognized his impact on the victims and local Delawareans, some of who were serving their time in the facility, and decided it was necessary to move him out of Delaware.

Earl Bradley is currently incarcerated at the Cheshire Correctional Institution in Connecticut, where he will spend the rest of his life unable to hurt another child.

For Christmas last year, my mother bought me an AncestryDNA kit. Since I have absolutely no  knowledge of my family’s ancestry, I thought it was a neat gift, and I was excited to see the results. I followed all of the instructions: I spit in the tube, labelled it with the sticker they gave me, and sent it off to their address in the mail. Every week or so, I would check the status update on their website, and it would always say that my sample was being extracted and analyzed. However, due to order backup or some other reason, I never got the results of my DNA test back.

While this may seem beside the point, what bothered me about the entire situation was that I did not get my results OR my DNA sample back. This left me to question whether their “sample status” feature was bogus and they never received my DNA or whether they were unknowingly doing something else with my data. However, I know that, reasonably, they just didn’t receive it. Nevertheless, since then I’ve wondered what AncestryDNA legally has permission to do with customers’ DNA and how the company preserves the privacy rights customers have in regards to their sample. With this said, I’ve compiled a list of important statements in Ancestry’s privacy statement, which people should really read themselves, that are relevant to what they do with your data.

Your DNA sample is securely stored. 

According to their “Privacy for Your AncestryDNA Test” statement, data samples collected by the company are stored in a secure, temperature-controlled facility with “24-hour monitoring”. While it is fantastic for Ancestry to preserve their customer’s privacy by securely storing their DNA samples prior to testing, I’m not entirely sure why they wouldn’t dispose of it after testing unless they are using your data for their own purposes. Likely, they just using it for research efforts– and before you can claim that you did not consent to this, most participants thoughtlessly check the box to provide “informed consent” while trying to access their results.

 You have the choice to delete your DNA test results. 

The good news is that you have the option to permanently delete your AncestryDNA test results from your account, and if you do so, your DNA matches “will no longer see your username in their list of matches”. The bad news is that this by no means suggests that Ancestry will delete your DNA test result from their own private databases. More bad news? You also cannot withdraw your results and information from any studies that are in progress, completed, or published. But just wait, there’s even more bad news! If the last two didn’t make you skeptical enough of Ancestry, just wait until you hear what they had to say about deleting your DNA sample (Hint: They said nothing). There is nowhere on the Ancestry website that says that a user can delete their DNA sample permanently from their profile or Ancestry’s database, only that you can delete DNA test results.

If your Data is somehow made public or made available through a security breach, it may be used to identify you, and may negatively impact your ability to obtain certain types of insurance coverage.

Although Ancestry claims they do their best to secure your data, no security measures are entirely infallible. Security breaches happen. It just so happens that if a security breach happens with Ancestry, your ability to obtain insurance could be negatively impacted. Luckily, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) protects people from genetic discrimination in health insurance. However, it is not applicable to life insurance, which is considered a big deal to some.

Finally, there’s my favorite fine print statement:

It may be used by law enforcement agencies to identify you if they have additional DNA data to compare to your Data or if you have Data linked to a family member’s name.

This one, to me, is the scariest. It means that law enforcement agents can use your Ancestry DNA sample to link you to a crime, and even worse, it can use a family member’s data to link you to a crime. This is pretty significant as it makes it possible for you to be falsely incarcerated for a crime your family member might have committed due to “undeniable DNA evidence”.

All of these conditions are in their privacy statement. However, they must be searched for, are not transparent, and ultimately cause confusion in customers in regards to their data. Yet, somehow, “your trust is our top priority” according to Ancestry. Maybe it was a good thing that they never received my sample after all.

Although Americans are familiar with popular and well-enforced laws such as the obvious “no murder” and “no theft” laws, the Library of Congress suggested that estimating the number of federal laws in effect today is nearly impossible, and this doesn’t even include state and local laws. Thus, there is more that is considered illegal than one might think, and a lot of the time these things are not obvious– especially when they involve the food we eat. With this in mind, here are some of the most absurd city and state enforced food laws.

1. Pickles must bounce.

In Connecticut, pickles must bounce in order to legally be considered a pickle. While this may seem odd, there is actually a reason behind this legislation. In 1948, pickle packers Sidney Sparer and Moses Dexter were arrested and fined 500 dollars for selling pickles that were deemed “unfit for human consumption“, or under a ‘safe’ pH level. According to Frederick Holcomb from the Connecticut Food and Drug Administration, you can determine a good pickle through lab tests and whether or not in bounces after a drop from a height of one foot. Although this law still appears in state statutes, it’s unclear whether this law is still enforced today.

2. Butter must be delicious and such.

In Wisconsin, there are a ton of laws regarding butter. The most notable is that all butter produced within the state must be of the “highest quality” in order to protect the state’s reputation as the “Dairyland” of America. The remaining butter laws seem to be in place in order to support the state’s dairy industry, such as banning Kerrygold Irish butter  and outlawing margarine being served in restaurants. These crimes used to be punishable by a fine or even jail time; however, they tend to be more loosely enforced today.

3. Chicken must be eaten with your fingers.

The last and possibly most absurd law is a local one. In Gainesville, Georgia, it is illegal to eat fried chicken with any type of eating utensils. Instead, it must be eaten with your hands. A 91 year old tourist discovered this the hard way after she was arrested for doing so with a fork; luckily, this was only a news-worthy prank. This piece of legislation, like the others, is not enforced today (perhaps a trend among odd laws); it was enacted in 1961 as a publicity stunt as the city believed that this would help establish them as the poultry capital of the world.

While all of these food laws are quite strange and rather unenforced (for obvious reasons), knowing that these types of laws exist is incredibly important as it allows us to be more conscious of what we are doing and whether or not it is illegal. For all we know, we could breaking some type of law by reading this.

The digital technical revolution has molded our society in many ways, from the way we travel, communicate, and even the way that we deter crime. In 1965, public security cameras became more common in stores, restaurants, and crowded locations, and later on in 1969, the first video home security system was introduced. Today, there are approximately thirty million private security cameras installed in the United States alone, and one thing is clear: Security cameras are in. In fact, they can even be purchased on Amazon for as little as $25.

However, in a world of video surveillance, it is important that we consider our own privacy as well as the privacy of others. In order to effectively do this, it is imperative to clarify what is legal or illegal in regards to placing security cameras inside of homes and in other spaces.

1. For the most part, it is legal to place security cameras anywhere outside.

According to video surveillance laws, this is usually considered “fair game”, which is why many businesses or homeowners place cameras all around the outside of the building. Ideally, this aids as a deterrent for crimes such as burglary, robbery, and theft. However, some restrictions do apply even outdoors. For instance, cameras can not be pointed into someone else’s home or private spaces as it becomes an invasion of privacy issue. Not only this, but personal, handheld recording devices cannot be used outside to commit other criminal acts, such as staging a burglary or taking pictures up a person’s shirt or skirt.

2. There are a few rooms where indoor security cameras are off limits.

As a homeowner, you can legally place a security camera anywhere inside of your home as long as it is visible to guests and unconcealed. However, when it comes to stores and restaurants, things get a little bit tricky, and you have to be careful to make sure that you are not committing a criminal act or held liable for any customers’ perceived lack of privacy. Ultimately, you cannot place a security camera anywhere in which privacy is expected; this includes hotel rooms, locker rooms, and public bathrooms. The reason for this is purely common sense: No one should have to be conscious of being filmed or broadcasted in an intimate setting.

3. Security cameras are not disallowed in dressing rooms.

There is one exception to the “no cameras where privacy is expected” rule, and it is one that I’m not sure many people are aware of. Believe it or not, security cameras are completely legal inside of dressing rooms. In fact, according to Legal Beagle, there are only thirteen states that outlaw cameras in this intimate setting including Georgia, Alabama, and Delaware. While this lack of legal restriction may seem contradictory to the last statement, the logic behind this is that nudity is not required in dressing rooms, thus undressing entirely is a person’s own choice. Luckily, however, the majority of companies and businesses refrain from placing security cameras in dressing rooms not due to issues regarding privacy laws, but because they do not want to upset or estrange their customers.

In conclusion, security cameras today are a great, affordable way to protect your belongings from criminals, and using them can be quite easy as long as the user is aware of the video surveillance laws present.