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Federal Prisons Could Release 1,000 Times More Drug Offenders Than Obama Did

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This story was originally published by the Marshall Project.

Robert Shipp was 21 when a federal judge sentenced him to die in prison for selling crack. For five months in the mid-1990s, Shipp had acted as a "night shift supervisor" in a small-scale Chicago distribution ring. Because he was held personally responsible for the amount of crack moved during that period—10.29 grams—his sentence was mandatory: life. Even as US District Judge Marvin Aspen handed down Shipp's sentence, he noted that the sentencing guidelines were "not, in my view, realistic in terms of the sentence for the offense, and in my view they are unfair."

Last week, President Obama commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent federal drug offenders whose "punishments didn't fit the crime," as Obama said in a video released by the White House. But those people are a tiny fraction of the more than 95,000 federal prisoners serving years—sometimes decades—for drug crimes. Almost 2,000 are, like Shipp, serving life without parole, according to an ACLU analysis.

A lesser-known policy change, enacted in 2014 with far less fanfare, will affect 1,000 times the number of people as Obama's commutations. Colloquially known as "drugs minus two," the amendment to the US Sentencing Commission's guidelines could reduce the sentences of as many as 46,000 people.

Though the guideline changes are final, hardline Republican lawmakers continue to express concern about their implementation. House and Senate judiciary chairs Bob Goodlatte and Chuck Grassley this week sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch warning of the 10,000 federal "inmates with violent criminal histories" who could be released this year as a result of the amendment, and demanding detailed information about each. (Grassley has also stated his opposition to the Smarter Sentencing Act, a bipartisan bill that would shorten federal drug sentences and eliminate mandatory minimums for some drug crimes.)

The new "drugs minus two" changes become effective in November, but because federal prisons allow inmates to spend up to a year in a halfway house before their sentences end, the first of those with new sentences have, in the past eight months, begun to go home.

One of these is David Mosby. Though it was his first-ever criminal offense, Mosby was sentenced in 1991 to 40 years in prison for conspiracy to distribute methamphetamines. Mosby began using meth to stay awake during night shifts at an aluminum plant and soon learned how to sell the drug to fund his habit. He was slated for release in 2025, at age 73. (With good-time credits he would have served 34 years). But the new sentencing guidelines shaved ten years off his sentence, and Mosby was released in March. The first thing he and his three children did together, after saying a prayer in the prison parking lot, was eat a big country breakfast. A family photo shows Mosby in Cracker Barrel, still in his prison sweats, presiding with a grin over biscuits, eggs, and molasses.

Federal drug sentences are computed with a dizzying arithmetic. Judges assign the defendant an "offense level" based on the quantity of drugs sold. The judge then places that person in a "criminal history category," based on his criminal record, and plugs both data points into a table to arrive at a final sentence. These tables are designed by the United States Sentencing Commission, a judicial agency created in 1984 to help eliminate sentencing disparities that were then commonplace: the same crime might yield very different sentences from different federal judges. But uniform sentencing eliminates judicial discretion, and these guidelines helped usher in the federal government's historic prison boom.

"Under the sentencing guidelines scheme now in vogue, a judge can exercise little, if any, judgment on these matters," wrote an appellate judge reviewing Mosby's case. Though "these sentences defy reason," he wrote, he was obligated to affirm them.

The commission's guidelines have been amended several times since they were first implemented, most notably in 2008, when crack cocaine was reduced by two "offense levels" on the table. Because the change was applied retroactively, it included those already serving time. But it wasn't enough to help those, like Robert Shipp, with the most serious sentences. Even after his "offense level" was lowered, his sentence was the same: life.

This year's "drugs minus two" amendment lowers all drug crimes by another two offense levels. So far, the average sentencing reductions are modest: just under two years. There are several classes of prisoners who are not eligible for the change, including those serving mandatory minimum sentences and those convicted of a "third strike"—even if all three strikes were nonviolent drug convictions. (Shipp's co-defendant, Alton Mills, is still serving life for this reason, although he was lower in the crack distribution command chain than Shipp was.)

For Shipp and others like him, the change is dramatic. As a result of his new offense level, his life sentence was reduced to 30 years. His new release date, with good time, is 2019.

It did "not take me ten years and surely not 20 years to learn the negative effects of my bad choices," Shipp wrote to The Marshall Project in a message. Still, "the two-point reduction represents a new life for me, its my chance at redemption.... I feel like Lazarus of the Bible...like I have brought back from the dead, because this is not living at all."

This article was published by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.


Nicki, Taylor, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Diversity

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Nicki, Taylor, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Diversity

The End of Hulk Hogan

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The End of Hulk Hogan

@Seinfeld2000 Remembers That Time Jerry Seinfeld Had Beef with Donald Trump

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All photos courtesy of the author

[Editor's Note: Meet our friend @Seinfeld2000. He uses Twitter as a platform to imagine a surreal hellscape in which Seinfeld is still on in the modern era. @Seinfeld2000 started out as a parody of the relatively straightforward Twitter account @SeinfeldToday, but through S2K's unique style, consisting of broken English, an irrational hatred of Barack Obama, and a rich internal world in which the Seinfeld characters are murderous sex addicts who measure time with pieces of technology, Seinfeld2000 has in many ways transcended its trollish roots. He's made a video game, written an e-book, and been profiled by the New York Times.]

If Seinfeld charactar Gerge Costanze encountared Donald Trump today, he would push children and old ladys just to get away from him. Because Donald is on fire rite now

Look, whether u love him or just plane hate him, Big Donny T. has brought some drama to the electien and electrified the republicen base, thats why according to the poll's or whatever so many republican voters are saying "I think it moved" when ever they see Trump!

Remember when Jery Seinfeld had beef with Donald Trump? It was April 2011. The Royal Couple was geting maried, Arab Spring was in full efect, and in a month, Bary Obame would wipe Osama bin Laden off the face of the planet. Meanwhile, The Apprentice was still on NBC and its figurehead, real estate impresario Donald J Trump, his regal fluff of sunrise-color Mattel synthetic coton candy hair on fleek, was puting President Barack Husein Obama on blast

Obame was seeking his second term in office, birtherwave was in its prime, and "The Doneld" was every day questiening Barry Obamas U.S. citizenship and DEMANDING that every membre of the Americen people simply have the chance to personaly hand-examine and scrutenize Obame long form birth certifcate

btw did Obame ever actualy release that document? If not it would be hella sick if he surprise Birth Certificate release thru TIDAL

So anyway, while Trump was persitently making on a very rationel and for sure not-racist campagn for the presedent to supply the documentaish to prove hes not born in Kenya (speak of the devil guess where the Presedent is rite now) guess who just hapened to be booked to perform at Donald son Eric Trumps charity ball or whatever to benefit the St Jude Children Research Hospital. I'll give u a hint: it Jery Seinfeld

Do u remember that epsode of 'Seinfend' when Jary he just get Babu deported bc his Visa aplicatien get mixed in with Jer Bear's mail? So obvi the underlying theme of whole epsode is Jary basicaly incapeable of empathy for any 1 or any thing even a foregn man in New york city trying to make a better life for himself even as he endure the crushing beuracracy of the imigratien process in a strange land. But guess wat, so in like fictienal storytelling? k theres a little thing i liek to call 'separatien of art from artist'. Thats what explain why the Drake doesn't wriet his own raps and also why Jary Senfend get so offense by Donald Trump comments that he just skip out on Baby Trumps charity ball

Trump was prety chilax about the whole sitch, jk he went balistic. The mogul-slash-attention black hole fired off a response letter with so many exclamatien marks, it was like a manuscript writen by Elanes ex boyfriend after elane passive agresively edited it bc she was mad that he didnt use enough exclamatien point when he took a mesage that her friend had the baby– btw if this epsode hapened in the current day it would be no sweat becase Elane would have probably just receive an iMessage abt it smdh

Related: @Seinfeld2000 Breaks Down Taylor Swift's Open Letter to Apple

Heres what Trump said abt Jery after he canceled his apearance: "What I do feel badly about is that I agreed to do, and did, your failed show, 'The Marriage Ref,' even though I thought it was absolutely terrible. Despite its poor ratings, I didn't cancel on you like you canceled on my son and St. Jude. I only wish I did."

Ok ok, I know what some of u are thinking. In the words of Gerge from "Seinfeld", back it up back it up–beep beep beeep – what the f is The Mariage Ref

K so if u already know what it is, u can just scroll to the next paragraph bc i dont want u roling ur eyes reading this like "ya I know". I know u know. This part is just for ppl who need a bit of aditional backgrond. From 2010-2012 Jery did The Mariage Ref a reality show where a panel of comediens and celebs helped solve "real couples" relatienship probelms and help them achieve their #relatienship goals. Honestly its one of the most underated shows in TV history and a cult clasic that me and my frends have viewing partys and watch. Once even some girls came to one of my Mariage Ref partys. Earlier in the day i watched the epsode and memorized so many cool and clever coment and respanse to say at the party but they left early before we could start watching Mariage Ref

Anyway u think Jery seinfeld was just gona catch those shot's fired from Donald Trump and not retaliate? Hes not Drake. Hes jery. And the answer is no.

Jery went on the entartanement programme Extra and brought a litle ether in his fanny pack: "Let me say this about Donald Trump. I love Donald Trump, all comedians love Donald Trump. If God gave comedians the power to invent people, the first person we would invent is Donald Trump. ... God's gift to comedy."

personaly i think that like theoreticaly if Seinfeld still on televisien today and there was a plot where Jery was given the power to invent people, he would invent a superman-obsesed Kate Upton lookalike before he invent Donald Trump but thats just me. Like what u imagen seinfeld would be like today is a very subjective thing and basicaly there is no wrong answar

Jery vs. Donald Trump isnt the only high profile beef that seinfeld has goten himself EMBROIL in. Like, even take this very same week, when it was...

SEINFELD VS BILL COSBY

Look i think its fair to say that things arent exactly going the best for Cosby rite now, just like career wise or whatever. Like this morning it look like hes gona have to do another deposish due all the sex crime

Jery isnt having it. He had a blarb on the latest book about Bill Cosby that said "if you want to join the Religion of Cosby, as I did back in 1966, Mark Whitaker's wonderful new book would be our Bible."

Now this week Jery along with David Leterman jointly demanded that that quote be remove from the book now that its painfuly clear that Cosby spent his whole career as secret leader of the Church of Quaaludes And Non Consensual Intercourse

SEINFELD VS LADY GAGA

Now, on "Seinfeld" Gerge famously worked for the Yankes but we all know Jery loves his Mets. So when Lady Gaga (former pop singer from turn of the 2010s) went to a New York Met game in 2011 and started throwing up middle fingers, then weirdly she got moved to Jery Seinfelds own privete box – u know he had to go on sports radio statien WFAN and do what it do. Listen to some of these verbal darts he hurtled her way

"This woman is a jerk. I hate her."

Omg rekt

"I can't believe they put her in my box, which I paid for. You give people the finger and you get upgraded? Is that the world we're living in now? It's pathetic."

slayy jery

"Get an act. Rhinestone bikinis and giving people the finger?"

QUEEEENNNNNNN

I mean look at Gaga now. Her carere is in the garbage can, not even above the rim. Like if Gagas career was an eclaire, Gerge wouldnt even eat it lmao

SEINFELD VS. YOUTUBE

Speaking of garbage cans thats what Jery called YouTube in April lmaoooo. Literaly he refered to it as a "GIant Garbage Can" of "User Generated Content"

Oh jery, u werent saying that when u had Youtube star Miranda Sings on your web serese, Comedians Geting Cars

SEINFELD VS. BRIAN WILLIAMS

Jery kicked Brian Wiliams when he was down on SNL40. Bri bri had just been suspended for lying or whatever LMAO Jery has zero chill

"You know there are so many things about 'Saturday Night Live' that people don't know. Like for example, I just found out that one of the original cast members in 1975 was Brian Williams. I didn't — I don't know if that's true. But I never heard that. It doesn't sound true. It might not be, it might not be."

SEINFELD VS. PRINCE WILLIAM AND PRINCESS KATE

Jery seinfeld is fucking G ok never forget that as long as you live. Back in 2011, Jery was on ITVs Daybreak in England and when they ask him how he feel about the upcoming royal wedding, Jery just respond "its a circus act, it's an absurd act. You know, it's a dress-up. It's a classic English thing of let's play dress-up. Let's pretend that these are special people. OK, we'll all pretend that – that's what theater is"

Anyway i guess thats prety much it

Follow @Seinfeld2000 on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Three People Are Dead After a Shooting at a Theatre in Lafayette, Louisiana

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Photo via Google Street View

Just before 8.30 PM on Thursday night, a gunman described by police as a "lone white male" opened fire in a movie theatre in Lafayette, Louisiana. Two were killed in the attack and seven injured, some critically. The gunman also died at the scene, reportedly from a self-inflicted gunshot.

No motive has been put forward, but the authorities have identified the shooter as John Russell Houser. Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft said the 58-year-old had a criminal record. Craft made it clear to reporters that the man, who was armed with a semi-automatic handgun, acted alone.

The Grand Theater, a 16-screen multiplex in a busy part of the city, was swarmed by police after moviegoers tripped the alarm.

Twenty-year-old Jalen Fernell is a student at the University of Louisiana. He told the Washington Post that he was in a screening next door. "When those sirens went off, immediately my heart sank into my chest because I was like 'Wait, those gunshots came from inside the building,'" he said.

Robert Martinez, 17, was at the Grand Theater to see Magic Mike XXL with his mom. They were buying concessions when they saw people running. "I thought it was just a joke," he told the New York Times. "People were screaming."

His mother, Tanya Clark, 36, described how the family ran, leaving her purse behind on the counter. "In that moment, you don't think about anything. That's when you realize that your wallet and phone are not important. As we were running for our car, I could see people with gunshot wounds and one lady bleeding from the leg with a T-shirt wrapped around it."

The Guardian reports that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, when asked what possible impact the shooting could have on gun control, refused to engage with the subject. "Let's focus on the victims ... Tonight's not the night for us to be political," he told reporters.

The shooting occurred just hours after Barack Obama suggested the lack of progress on gun reforms during his prresidency was his biggest source of frustration.

The area was been secured while the police investigated three suspicious packages in the gunman's car. The packages, which were detonated by bomb squad personnel, were later found to be harmless.

The film showing in the theatre where the shooting took place was the Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck. It's believed the gunman was sitting in the audience when he suddenly stood up and fired his weapon into the crowd.

No One Should be Surprised by the Royal Family's Nazi Salute

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Photo via the Sun

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

George Orwell once observed that fascism could never take root in England because as soon as someone tried sending soldiers goose-stepping down its avenues, "the people in the street would laugh." Like so many of the designated great man's pronouncements, it has the comforting ring of wisdom while also being absolutely wrong.

In the 1940s, Orwell thought the British had a healthy, ingrained distrust of any militarism; now, in 2015, the Labour party wants insulting members of the armed forces to be classified as a hate crime. If you burn a Remembrance Day poppy, you could end up in jail. And while our soldiers might not goose-step, they do parade around in bright red uniforms while wearing big furry tits on their heads. Nobody laughs. Fascism never needed to take root in England: it's the soil itself.

This is why the kerfuffle that followed the Sun's release of a 1933 video showing the future Queen Elizabeth II (then six years old) performing a Nazi salute is so surprising.

For the chronic genuflectors in the British commentariat, there have been three main lines of defense for our Queen. The first, as deployed on the front page of the Sunday Express, is to say that the "Queen was just waving." This is true, in so far as any salute can look like a wave if you don't look very closely. The second is to say that the Queen was six years old, and didn't know what she was doing. This is also true, although you have to wonder what kind of dysfunctional family would teach the Hitler salute to a six-year-old girl. The third is to say that it was only 1933, and besides, everyone was doing it at the time. This is true as well, but arguing that the salute was normal back then because the entire British ruling class was a gang of fascists isn't exactly comforting.


Related: Meet the Albanian Tattoo Artist Working Out of an Abandoned Bunker


The Allied victory in the Second World War has, somewhere in the political imagination, been turned into the victory of good honest Anglo-Saxons against all forms of global evil. In the prevailing narrative, the British response to fascism was marked first by appeasement, a policy simultaneously born from fear and the naïve belief that there could be a worthwhile peace, and then by a stern-faced determination to sort out this Hitler nonsense for good. The truth is a little less clear-cut: the average Tommy on the front lines risked life and limb to kill fascists, but for much of the 1930s, large portions of the British ruling clique were ardent supporters of the Nazi ideology.

There was of course Sir Oswald Mosely, leader of the British Union of Fascists, with his pathetic ranks of sad-clown Blackshirts. There was the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, which printed "Hurrah for Hitler"-style articles up until the outbreak of war in 1939.

There was also King Edward VIII, the uncle of the current monarch, who visited Germany in 1937, after his abdication, to hang out with Hitler in the Bavarian Alps. The meeting went well: even in 1970 he told a friend that "I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap."

There was Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry and Secretary of State for Air, who was a frequent visitor to Nazi Germany, where he met with Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Hess, and other beswastika'd hosts.

There was the Right Club, a pro-Nazi group within the aristocracy and political class whose members (including MPs and the 5th Duke of Wellington) greeted each other with "Perish Judah," cheerfully trilling their commitment to the extermination of European Jews.

And there were long and deep links between MI5 and the Gestapo, who carefully coordinated their actions against Communism and similar threats to the white race.

The Communism thing was a substantial motivator, and after the war it was easy for some to claim that British fascism was driven more by a principled anti-Communism than any real adherence to Hitlerist fantasies. Nobody knew about the death camps in 1933; Oswald Mosely was as ignorant as the Seig Heil-ing future Queen. (That said, a quick read of Mein Kampf ought to give you some idea of where things were headed.) Fascism was the last line of defense against the Communist menace. But these people weren't afraid of the Soviet Union, on the rough and distant edge of Europe. They were afraid of their own workers.

In 1926, a general strike called by militant coal miners nearly sparked a British Revolution: parliament declared a state of emergency, soldiers were deployed on the streets, and for nine days it really seemed as if the people might bring down the state. When the British aristocracy praised Hitler for standing up to Communism, it wasn't because they were worried about being sent to a Siberian gulag. It was because fascism promised to violently suppress an insurgent working class.

The affection was mutual; Hitler himself was a great Anglophile and an admirer of the British Empire. The Nazis took careful lessons from Britain's ability to administer a vast swathe of the globe with a relatively small group of clerks and soldiers, as well as its unflinching readiness to exercise mass genocidal violence whenever its rule was threatened. The British example was a major factor informing German policy in occupied eastern Europe. After all, among the great inventions of the British military, somewhere on the far side of the list from Teflon and radar, is the concentration camp.

Fascism didn't spring from nowhere. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when most of Europe was busy grabbing whatever patch of ground it could and slaughtering anyone who resisted, Germany was still a fractured collection of intermittently warring states. By the time it unified, much of the world had already been claimed by one bloated Western parasite or another. So instead of heading for the tropics, Germany drove East. Nazism, with its mass killings and its mania for world domination, was little more than the logic of European colonialism as applied to Europe itself. And nobody was better at colonialism than the British.

For hundreds of years, a tiny, chilly island off the coast of Europe unleashed an ocean of blood that swept from one side of the planet to the other; we caused death and suffering on a scale the Nazis never even approached. Is it any surprise that the daughter of a man who would call himself the Emperor of India from his palace in London might raise an arm in militaristic salute? Some apologists have suggested that the Queen's Hitler salute was actually a kind of mockery, a way of putting Hitler down. That might also be true. Maybe the gesture was a subtle sarcasm: a smug dig at the people who would, in the contest for history's most ruthless, always be the runner up.

Follow Sam Kriss on Twitter.

The Would-Be Astronaut

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The Would-Be Astronaut

South Australia Wants to Solve Their Seal Problem with Underwater Bombs

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Image via Wikicommons

The long-nosed fur seal population in South Australia's Coorong region has been getting out of hand for a while now. The state population now tops 100,000, and the South Australian government is considering using explosives to scare them away from commercial fishing areas. Unsurprisingly, animal rights groups aren't happy about it.

While they might be adorable as hell, the seals are making life tricky for fishermen by attacking their catches and nets. The seals are also decimating other wildlife including pelicans, swans, and musk ducks— totem animals of the local Ngarrindjeri people.

Calling the seals "rats of the sea," Liberal MP Adrian Pederick originally proposed a culling program. Labor MP and South Australia's Environment Minister Ian Hunter argued against that, saying, "Removing single animals from certain areas simply leaves an opening for others to move in and take advantage of the available food."

So Minister Hunter is looking into alternative solutions, one of which being seal-deterring explosives. Known as seal bombs, they're basically firecrackers designed to explode under water and spook seals away from fishing nets. They can also blow up pumpkins. Experts call these things Acoustic Deterrent Devices (ADDs) or "acoustic pingers."

While it's a more humane option than culling, animal rights groups are worried they could kill other nearby species. Phil Cornelius from Animal Liberation South Australia (ALSA) told VICE: "ADDs have been effective in rivers and estuaries, and they're all right, to a degree. But in open water the sound can travel up to 30 kilometers [18.5 miles]—the frequencies can seriously affect creatures like dolphins, porpoises, and sharks, and it can even cause whales to beach due to the sound. It affects their hearing and makes them temporarily or permanently deaf."

There are also questions over their long term effectiveness. The ADDs' manufacturers note if seals adapt to them, they can backfire and act as " dinner bells," alerting seals to areas of fish.


Related: Interested in conservation? Check out our video on logging in the Amazon


In light of these concerns Minister Pederick has doubled down on the cull idea, saying it's the only solution. He says the seal bombs will be too little too late. "Five years ago I called for an overabundant native species management plan, including sustainable harvest. I'm frustrated at the lack of action."

Minister Hunter remains dismissive of his suggestion, as the seals are a protected species. "In addition," he says, "Culling of long-nosed fur seals could damage the state's reputation as a tourist destination." An argument Minister Pederick rebuts by pointing out, "Millions of people travel to Canada and they club seals," he says. "We cull kangaroos and they're part of our coat of arms."

And what's ALSA's solution? They just want the seals to be left alone, and for the "natural order" to recover all by itself. They're holding a rally on August 1 to oppose the Liberals' proposed cull. Phil concludes, simply, "Cull is just another word for kill, and we'd rather have that not happen."


Inside El Chapo's Escape Tunnel

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Inside El Chapo's Escape Tunnel

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Windsor Can’t Handle How Noisy Detroit Is Because Canadians Are Babies

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Look at those buildings over there, just waiting for the chance to be noisy. For shame, Detroit. Photo via Flickr user Lhoon

Read: Let's Not Pretend the Petition to Stop Kanye West from Playing Toronto Doesn't Have Meaning

Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, are very close to each other. There's just the Detroit River separating them. So sometimes when Detroit hosts music festivals, as it does throughout the summer, residents in Windsor can hear some of the acts. Rather than revelling in free entertainment or putting in some earplugs and going to sleep, though, many Windsor residents have been complaining to their city councillor about the noise.

Councillor Chris Holt, whose ward contains the part of Windsor that abuts the river, received 18 complaints this Monday after the "Ultimate White Party" at Chene Park last weekend. Windsor residents complained when the music was still going between 1:30 and 2:30 AM. Holt requested this week that Windsor's city council draft a letter to Detroit requesting that the American city enforce its noise bylaw during the next beachside event. To be fair to the complainants, the "white party" was held outside the theatre, an unusual move at Chene Park, and the speakers may have been pointed at the river and Windsor.

For his part, Holt seems eminently more chill than his constituents. "I have no problems with the music that comes this way, but I have a duty to my constituents," he said. "Because we're so close to Detroit, we tend to enjoy and hear a lot of the music festivals that are going on over there. They're great. I'll be the first to admit I kick up my feet and sit on the front porch and take them in whenever I can."

In 2013, Windsor city councillor Jo-Anne Gignac (who is running for the Conservative Party in the upcoming federal election) wanted the city to be included in Detroit's planning process for riverside events, but after Windsor released a report on the issue it fizzled out.

Ontarians need to band together and ask Windsor to cut the shit, because this is embarrassing as hell. And if Americans' interest is piqued by how uncool Windsor is, they might look further into the province and realize there are 11 PM noise curfews all over the place, liquor stores close at ungodly early hours, and a bunch of white cry-babies here can't stand the idea of one of the most innovative and successful modern musicians playing a few shows in the province. We need to stop the bleeding before our boringness becomes global knowledge, if it hasn't already. Maybe we can do a bake sale to buy everyone in Windsor a white noise machine or soundproof their homes.

Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’ Is as Important and Necessary as Everyone Says It Is

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Ta-Nehisi Coates. Photograph by Nina Subin. Courtesy of Spiegel and Grau

One night last week I was driving to my mother's home in the central Cincinnati neighborhood of Bond Hill. I had the windows of her bright orange Volkswagen Beetle down, and was stopped on Bond Hill's main drag, Reading Road, where the pockmarks of shuttered storefronts and crumbling housing are evident from every vantage point. On many a night, seemingly aimless, unemployed negro boys sit and carp near a Richie's Chicken restaurant, across the street from a long-closed Nation of Islam diner. Although I grew up a few neighborhoods away in slightly leafier and more integrated Kennedy Heights I can remember when the neighborhood wasn't quite like this, before the streets became so hopelessly violent and economically unsalvageable that my father, who'd lived in the heart of the same neighborhood with his most recent wife, decided to get the fuck out. "I'm tired of niggers," he'd said, his processed hair straightened just so, the green eyes we share darting away from each other. It must be tiring to be tired of yourself.

While stopped at the intersection, I glimpsed out of my eye a tall negro dressed in a white tank top, his skin high yellow like my own, crossing the street in what seemed like a beeline toward my car. He was coming from a corner where much wasteful bravado and boisterous ennui takes place, and I felt it immediately, that familiar sensation, the need to secure my body against potential predators. I was driving an orange car with plastic orange flowers on the dash, the same car I had been driving when held up at gunpoint not far from that corner two summers before.

The man sauntered behind my car, and I locked the door. Hearing this, the electronic click of the door locks snapping into place, he looked back at me and we met eyes as I swiveled my head to watch him. We didn't stop looking at each other the whole time he crossed to the other side of the street. The light turned green, and he said, "I ain't trying to roll up on you, bruh."

"It's all good," I replied, but really, it wasn't. You see, for the past 50 years or so, Bond Hill has become predominately African-American, and for the last 25 years or so, moribund and blighted. This is a direct result of redlining, blockbusting, and deindustrialization, of racist federal policy and cynical opportunism on the part of white developers—of America not having a clue how to treat its black citizens fairly.

My best friend's father, a white man and an intellectual property lawyer, grew up in Bond Hill in the 50s. His white family fled with the rest of them, likely told of the coming negro hordes and the imperative to save themselves from declining property values by huckster slumlords. When I met and befriended his son at a prep school for the city's truly wealthy, and a few coloreds who were nigger-rich like us, his family lived in the tony and almost exclusively white district of Hyde Park. Bond Hill is now only 7 percent white and just as segregated as it was a half century ago, when blacks first started to seek refuge and opportunity there.

My foot hit the gas, and the encounter ended. As I drove home, back to the rings of suburban simulacrum on the outskirts of the neighborhood just a mile away—a suburbia my mother helped build with other negroes—I couldn't shake the anger and shame. Why should I have to be afraid of my fellow yellow brother, or any brother for that matter, in the fucking first place? My mother has spent a generation and a half of her life locking her door, owning a gun instead of employing an alarm system in fear of the type of niggers (yes, the very word we use) negroes fear most. At the "Villages at Daybreak," not far from a golf course and a decaying sports arena that hosted the NBA during the Kennedy administration, my mother is trapped in a cycle of fear white folks of her station in life mostly don't know.

The bleakest takeaways from Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, as rich and abrasive a meditation on the existential quandaries of modern American negro life as any I've come across, include the notion that negroes will always be afraid of each other in these ways described above. Regardless of class, regardless of whether they've succeeded at the bankrupt doctrine of "twice as good" (the necessary effort/skill level needed to succeed in a white man's rigged world, so the saying goes)—in Coates's vision, justice simply isn't in their hands. And the reason for this traces back to white supremacy.

White folks are "Dreamers" in Coates's parlance, and that "Dream" is one undergirded by Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, and racism. These beliefs, even unconscious, provide a special kind of innocence for "Dreamers," an innocence where the sins of slavery and genocide and plunder will not be visited upon the children, where the poisoned seeds of history don't bear strange and dangerous fruit. Coates observes that, for most people who think themselves white, the prosperity of cloistered suburbs with the accouterments of well-to-do modern American life from the 50s onward has no correlation to the crime-ridden streets, underfunded schools, and urban housing tracts purposely fashioned by city planners such as Robert Moses to foster status anxiety, claustrophobia, and dislocation among people of color. They don't see the connection. It is this plunder of the contemporary sort—housing wealth, not slavery—that Coates focused on in "The Case for Reparations," his groundbreaking essay for the Atlantic, where he has become recognized as one of the sharpest cultural commentators on the internet. In the award-winning piece, Coates hints at the billions of dollars of post-war housing wealth blacks were forbidden from accruing due to restrictive covenants, loan discrimination, and outright white terrorism. This is the American Dream in action, Coates is saying. Take it at face value, but do so at your own peril. Especially if you're a young negro man.

The question of whether Coates is Baldwin's equal seems rather beside the point to me, as it surely will to his son, or any young negro child, or any and every American with the intelligence and the humanity to read it and grasp its terrible truths.

Coates's book is somewhat self-consciously indebted to James Baldwin's 1963 classic The Fire Next Time. Addressed to a young black man coming of age in a time of great racial upheaval just as Baldwin's book was, Between the World and Me uses its author's experience as a guide of sorts to the intractable legacies of white supremacy in much the same way. Baldwin has been a flashpoint in early discussions of the book, with Toni Morrison providing the blurb of a lifetime on the back: "I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates." A few days after the book's publication, Cornel West dismissed Morrison's comparison in a somewhat tone-deaf, surely less than charitable Facebook post ("Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power"). The question of whether Coates is Baldwin's equal seems rather beside the point to me, as it surely will to his son, or any young negro child, or any and every American with the intelligence and the humanity to read it and grasp its terrible truths.

The respectability politics of John McWhorter, whose Losing the Race once set conservative hearts afire with his condemnation of black anti-intellectualism and complacence in the late Clinton years, and the moralism of now-disgraced comedian Bill Cosby, whom Coates inadequately profiled in his first assignment for the Atlantic back in 2005, find no purchase here. Coates also shuns the argument put forth a dozen years ago by Debra Dickerson in The End of Blackness that "no one can stop the American, black or blind, who is determined to succeed" and that blacks are mostly to blame for holding themselves back from reaping America's fruits. Scholarship in the ensuing years, from people like Coates, Michelle Alexander ( The New Jim Crow) and Isabel Wilkerson (the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns),has rendered these arguments suspect. The ghetto, in Coates's telling, is the result not of black pathology or irresponsibility, but of government policy and "a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies"—otherwise known as White America.

Fashioned as a six-part letter to his teenage son Samori, Coates's vision of the future awaiting his boy is less than sanguine. This too, has little to do with either of them. The powerlessness the book evokes, of blacks not being able to protect their own bodies and property, is a feat of courage amidst the sea of generally disingenuous positivity concerning racial matters in this country. Coates's atheism informs this surely: He is outside of the tradition of mainstream African-American thought, even as he embodies the feelings of helplessness and anger that so many blacks, despite their God, feel daily. Whether you are one of Cornel West's "black nihilists," ruining the streets of urban America two decades ago, or performing black pain for your own benefit and self-aggrandizement with a "mask of piety" on, as Hilton Als would have it, Coates is here to tell you that you're one of the victims of white supremacy and you can do little about it but "struggle."

Clocking in at a slender 152 pages, Coates's book achieves a grave rigor and thunderous momentum that few authors can muster. Tracing his own miseducation on the dangerous streets of mid-80s Baltimore to Hollande's France, where we are not "their niggers," Coates experiences a lightness and sense of freedom, tinged with skepticism, that he has never found as a African-American in his own country. From this point on, late in the book, Coates's painful insights prove unrelenting. While intellectual curiosity finally finds him at Howard University, where his independent Africana librarian father once worked and the Coateses are something of a dynasty, Coates sees struggle, not hope, as the normal tenor of things. Although he finds a "Mecca" at Howard amongst a lively and truly diverse universe of the African diaspora's best and the brightest—the talented tenth if you will—no arena is safe from plunder for American blacks, in Coates's telling. Not when negroes will always be afraid of the intentions of caucasians, especially ones who wield nightsticks and guns and the authority of the law, although those controlling banks, potential job interviews and community associations can prove just as scary.

On Munchies: 'The New Food Movement Has a Problem with Race'

Coates brings this to stark relief while recalling his college friend Prince Jones, the respected Christian son of a black woman, raised in Louisiana poverty, who became a star radiologist. Jones was shot dead by an undercover black cop, dressed as a criminal, who had followed him across three jurisdictions under the pretense that Jones was involved in criminal activity. The cop claimed that Jones had tried to run him over. Case closed. The dead young man hovers like a ghost over Coates's narrative. The names John Crawford, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown get plenty of mention too. In Between the World and Me, these deaths are but the tip of the iceberg because caucasians will always erect laws, customs, and institutions, along with justifications for these based on their fear and ignorance, designed to keep a large swath of negroes at the bottom of American society, poor and afraid of each other, powerlessly plundering those around them regardless of how many dead black bodies lay at the feet of the police.

Whether those that call themselves white do so unwittingly or with maliciousness is of no consequence to Coates. Whiteness was erected, constructed, formulated, and expanded in order to justify this barbarism. And ultimately, such conditions are out of the hands of African-Americans to change, Coates suggests, whether Black America produces a Marcus Garvey or a Barack Obama, a Nat Turner or a Martin Luther King, whether "black-on-black" crime subsides or "personal responsibility" reigns, whether pants are pulled up or bandannas are removed. Only those that call themselves white, or climate change (likely the latter!), can change the thing.

White folks are "Dreamers" in Coates's parlance, and that "Dream" is one undergirded by Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, and racism.

Coates is currently en route to France, where he'll be spending a year with his wife and kid. Reading the book I couldn't help of but think of Chester Himes, the great and unfairly forgotten negro author, who also spent a significant amount of his adult years in Parisian exile. He once wrote that black Americans were "the most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic, unanalyzed, anthropologically advanced specimen of mankind in the history of the world." A contemporary of Coates's idol Baldwin, who also spent a significant period of his life in Paris, Himes wrote widely about how negro men could navigate the pitfalls of whiteness in novels such as The Third Generation and Pinktoes. Unlike Coates or Baldwin, Himes's negroes weren't victims, but agents of their own fate, regardless of the chips staked against them. They used sex and guile as weaponry against whites, many of whom they fetishized. He found Baldwin and Richard Wright's more celebrated and sentimental works full of alienated negro men to be a bit boorish.

"At times," Himes wrote in his autobiography, "my soul brothers embarrassed me, bragging about their scars, their poor upbringing, and their unhappy childhood, to get some sympathy and some white pussy and money, too, if they could." Himes, who unlike Baldwin or Coates grew up middle-class, was forever fighting the sway of his scared, color-struck, high-yellow mother, whom he himself referred to as an "octoroon."

Himes wanted to know what we were supposed to do after we realized white people were crazy, and had made us crazy, too. Is "race" a handicap negroes have to "marry," as Bob Jones, the hero of Himes's debut novel If He Hollers, Let Him Go once pondered? More days than not, unlike Jones, I think it is: The folks who believe themselves white can't see past or within it (even if they claim they do), and neither can the numerous institutions they've erected.

But like Jones, I too have used my skin color for a myriad of social and economic gains in various milieus—black, white, and somewhere in between. Blackness, even in these sorry times, can have its perks too. These complexities, of what black people make of their respective colors beyond shared fear and a whole gorgeous culture we've built from the depths, are where answers to our existential quandaries might lie.

This, admittedly, is an area Coates isn't as interested in as the white man's sundry means for tearing it all down. But history isn't over. And the question of "what now?" hangs over the air as you finish Between the World and Me, like a fog one is helpless to traverse until a clearing comes.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is available from Spiegel and Grau in bookstores and online.

Brandon Harris is a contributing editor at Filmmaker Magazine. His directorial debut Redlegs has played over a dozen festivals worldwide and was a New York Times Critic's Pick upon its commercial release in May of 2012. Follow him on Twitter.

Strippers Explain Strip Club Etiquette

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All photos by Amy Lombard

More on strip clubs:
Twenty Hours in a New York Strip Club
My Night In the Magical World of Male Strip Clubs
Strip Clubs Are Being Wiped Out of the South Bronx

A couple months ago, photographer Amy Lombard and I spent nearly 24 hours in Show Palace, one of the only all-nude clubs in New York City. Although we spent the entire lifecycle of a mayfly there, we sensed that the stories we heard were only the tip of the iceberg. So we decided to go back to learn more from the strippers and the club manager about their job, their clients, and how to behave in a strip club.

Over the course of a lazy Sunday night (lazy because who goes to a strip club on Sunday?) we hung out in the dressing room with the dancers, who told us their best stories, advice, and tips from working in the industry. These are their words:

DON'T TRY TO HAVE SEX WITH THE DANCERS

A lot of guys get mad—they don't understand that I'm a dancer. I don't have sex for money, and some guys get very upset about that. They won't shut up. "Oh have sex with me, I'll give you money. I'll give you however much money you want." That's probably the most annoying thing.

A lot of the guys are from Asian countries, or they're Middle Easterners or South Americans. I think there might be cultural differences. Very often, in the clubs in those countries, if the woman is in the sex industry, she will have sex for money. There may not be a subset of women that only dance like there is here.

I don't know if they're serious or not, but I've had guys offer me like $1,000. And I'm like, Listen, I don't have sex for money. If you would just sit back and relax, you could enjoy your dance. It's very irritating. Men need to just try to understand the limits. Enjoy the club for what it is instead of wishing it was a brothel. —Jennifer

I had a girl in the private dance room. We have cameras, you know; we watch the private rooms. She was bent over and she broke the cardinal rule: Never let the guy stand up. So the guy was standing up pretending to like dry hump her from the back, and then he pulled his dick out like he was going to put it in and I was here watching the cameras and caught it. But she was scared. We immediately grabbed the guy and let him out (not so nicely). You can't violate the strippers. You cannot do that. — Mike Diaz, Manager

A guy will pull his dick out a couple times a week, usually in the private rooms. I just go, "You got to put that away," and some guys won't. So I just go, "I'm walking out if you don't put that away," and that tends to work. I think I've only had one guy I've had to walk out on in the six years I've been dancing. Most guys are good about it and do what you say. — Jennifer

BE NICE, NOT CREEPY

I turned 18 on January 17. There was a 70-year-old guy here my first night. He was like, "Just don't give me a heart attack." I was like "Yeah, I'm going to try not to." There was another old guy—he was like 63. He was like, "I would so take you out on a date. Are your nipples pierced? I want to suck on your nipples and fuck the shit out of you right now." And I was just like, "What?!" I always end up with the weird ones. And then a lot of guys will tell me that I look like their little sister or something.

There's a guy who came in once. We went to a private room and he was like, "You're so beautiful." And as I'm dancing on him, he goes, "Oh my God, you remind me of my daughter, I'm going to tip you all night." I was shocked. I didn't know what to say. I stopped. I was like, "Excuse me." He was like, "Oh, I didn't mean to say that. It just slipped out." I was like, "Oh... OK. I'm just going to proceed with what I'm doing." But after that there was this weird tension. He knew he fucked up. So, he just stayed quiet.

But today he brought me cupcakes! He said, "I was at my job, and I was thinking about how precious you are, and so I made you some cupcakes." —Asia

WEAR DEODORANT

I had this one guy who really stunk. He was a college boy. He didn't wear no deodorant. He was sweating nasty. He smelled like onions. I was in there an hour with him and I had to deal with that smell for so long. I kept, like, rubbing my nose trying to give little keys like, you need deodorant. It was horrible. — Asia

YOU'VE GOT TO PAY FOR FETISH PLAY

There was this guy who liked to smell butts. We go to a private room and he goes, "I got this freaky fetish. I'll give you a lot of money for it." I was like, "What is it?" And he was like, "I like to smell butts." At first I was kind of creeped out, but... what happens in the champagne room stays there. He just wanted [me] to bend over and catch a whiff. One whiff and that was enough. — Ruby

There was a guy who liked to dress up as a woman. He put on one of the dancer's clothes, G-string, everything. She let him wear them. Recently, on the day that they changed the law where homosexuals could get married everywhere, he walked around the club in a G-string and a dress and he got on the pole and started dancing. Everyone left him alone though. He had a lot of money—like a few thousand. —Paloma

DON'T COME IN YOUR PANTS

I hate when guys come in their pants. It's nasty. You can just dance on them, like you're dancing on their lap, and they come. And it has gone through and soaked someone's pants before, and you'll feel it on the back of your leg, and you'll be like, "What is that?" And they'll look embarrassed and they'll tell you, "Oh, I just came." But I leave after that. It's not funny! Give me a warning sign so I won't sit in it!

Now that it's happened to me before, I'll tell them, "Listen. When I'm dancing you need to not do that. If you are going to come, please give me a warning so I can stop dancing." — Ruby

RESPECT THE DANCERS

Some guys come in with the wrong idea and they want to treat the dancers like garbage. I had a guy come in the other day, a well-dressed kid. He comes out of the cab and I was standing at the front. You know those guys who get overly familiar right away? He was like, "Hey, what's going the fuck on?" I'm like, "Kid, what are you talking about?" He's like, "You got fucking bitches in there?" I'm like, "All right, first of all, you come in here with that kind of attitude and I'm going to end up throwing you out. Second, you come in and talk to these girls like that, I'm going to throw you out. And you're not getting any refunds either." The guy looked flabbergasted. But you got to defend the girls before they even come in sometimes.

Some of these guys—they just look at them like they're nothing. Nothing. Some of these girls are mothers. Some of these girls are students. My ex-girlfriend, she became a world-class surgeon, but she started as a stripper. There's articles about her. —Mike


Related: VICE investigates the world of illegal ass injections.


DON'T ASK THEM TO MARRY YOU

Of course I get the guys who want to marry me. They say I shouldn't be doing this job. It's a bad job and I should go marry them. And it's almost always Indian guys. They say it's not good that I'm here; that I should be married.

I just tell them that I don't want to be married, and then they tell me that it's terrible that I want to be single. I should be home and having babies. And I'm like, "Nah, I like my independence." —Jennifer

BE COOL AND KEEP IT PROFESSIONAL

Sometimes, if you give a customer your number, they'll call like they're dating you. They have no chill. I'll block them and they'll call from other numbers. There was one I met that I liked. He liked the fact that I was very nice, but he got on my nerves because he talked a lot, but he was spending a lot of money. The first time I danced with him, I got $1,200 from him. I gave him my number the second time I saw him. But once he couldn't get in contact with me, he was actually coming to my job to find me. He tried to pull "I'm going to stop going to the club, we should hang out outside." He wanted pictures in his phone of us together like we were dating. —Paloma

"If I went out with everyone that asked me, I wouldn't have free time." –Jennifer

I get asked out five to ten times a night and I'm just like... I tell them they have to come back if they want to. They got to see me here a couple times first because otherwise how do I separate the good from the bad? I can't tell who you are in a half-hour. If there's a genuine chance I might want to see them again I tell them to come back and we'll see. I try to be pretty honest about it, and guys that I would never see outside I'm like, "Sorry, I don't see customers outside of work." Plus, if I went out with everyone that asked me, I wouldn't have free time.

But I have a couple people that I've made friendships with inside the club and I see them sometimes. I used to have a customer who, on my birthday every year and at Christmas, would take me to a Broadway play and a nice dinner at one of the restaurants around Broadway. That was cool. —Jennifer

BUT IT'S OK TO MAKE A PERSONAL CONNECTION

The hour-long private rooms are always a lot of talking. You almost never dance for a straight hour. I have a bunch of customers who come in who just like to talk to me. I have guys who I don't even get undressed for. One of my best customers here is a French guy. He'll do like two hours with me and we mostly just talk. Guys love to confess to us things they wouldn't tell other people, like their sexual secrets. They like the affection. They like the attention.

Once or twice, someone has gotten emotional and started to tear up. I used to have this customer who would come see me. One time after he got some stuff out of his system, he told me about his life, his childhood—he teared up a little and was just like, "I had a really good time, that really relaxed me. Thank you."

Part of this job is practically being a therapist. It's funny, but as a dancer you don't make the most money because you're the prettiest. You make the most money because you can connect with people. I've seen gorgeous girls not make any money at all and girls who weren't traditionally good-looking do really well just because they knew how to talk. They knew how to connect with people basically. That's what they come here for. These men just want a connection. — Jennifer

Follow Zach Schwartz and Amy Lombard on Twitter.

The VICE Guide to Right Now: Did This Woman Just Solve an Arson on Live TV?

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Read: Welcome to the Sausage Castle, Home to Florida's Most Free-Spirited Freaks

On yesterday's WKBN morning news report in Youngstown, Ohio, the lead story was a fire that broke out in a local couple's garage and spread to nearby buildings in the middle of the night. The reporter, Derrick Lewis, probably expected to be doing one of those largely content-free eyewitness interviews where someone goes, "I was scared. I guess I'll be staying in a motel tonight."

Instead, when Lewis stuck the microphone in the face of a victim named Heather Tenney, she gave him a solid lead on a suspect. That's at 1:50 in the video, just after Lewis asks, "Do you know how this fire started?"

"Yes, I do. It was 'cause of my cousin. And I don't want to mention no names."

It's a dumbfounded position every reporter has been in: getting an actual answer to a question when you weren't expecting one. After a few bewildered seconds, Lewis cobbles together a decent follow-up "Do you know how? Or why?" Then it gets juicy.

"He's mad because he can't get with me," Tenney says. "I'm married to my husband, and it's a long story. Just to make it short, yeah, he already put him"—she points to her husband just behind her—"in the hospital once last month, and he figured he's gonna do something else to get back."

At that point, Lewis gets all "back to you in the studio," and wraps up the interview. Presumably that was so he could rush home and write a Tracy Letts-style play about the Tenney family before someone else wins that Pulitzer prize.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

The Louisiana Theater Shooter Was a Drifter Who Liked the Westboro Baptist Church, Rand Paul, and Hitler

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Photo via LinkedIn

On Thursday night, John Russell Houser parked a 1995 blue Lincoln Continental filled with wigs and other disguises next to a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana. Then he entered theater 14 with a .40-caliber handgun and opened fire at patrons who were watching a 7:10 PM showing of the new Amy Schumer movie Trainwreck.

Hours after the 59-year-old killed two women, injured nine other people, and shot himself, a portrait has emerged of a right-wing Southerner with a history of mental illness who admired deeply racist and bigoted institutions and frightened his own family.

Houser was evicted from his home Phenix City, Alabama, in March of last year, and had reportedly been in a motel in Lafayette since early July, the New York Times reports. CNN adds that he once had an uncle who lived in the Bayou State, but he'd been dead for decades, leaving the man's connection to his new home dubious at best.

What's fairly obvious, though, is that Houser was a misfit in Alabama, and had been consumed by right-wing politics for decades.

Although he claimed on his LinkedIn page (which has apparently been taken down as of Friday afternoon) to be an attorney and two-time bar owner, former acquaintances paint a frightening picture of the man. A man named John Swearingen told NBC News that Houser once tried to burn down his Georgia law practice in the 80s. "He was some kind of religious fanatic and as I recall, he said God told him to do it," the former attorney said.

The online resume also noted that Houser was an amateur political commentator on a local NBC affiliate in Columbus, Georgia. "He was very entertaining," Calvin Floyd, one of the channel's hosts, told the network of his former regular guest. "He made for good TV and when it was over, you would leave shaking your head."

But the hard-headedness that made for entertaining punditry apparently didn't translate well into a home environment. In 2008, Houser's wife filed a protective order against him, indicating that both she and her daughter were afraid of him given his "history of mental health issues, i.e., manic depression and/or bi-polar disorder." They had Houser committed to an institution, though the protective order was reportedly lifted the next year.

Online postings suggest that Houser eventually became too radical for TV. For instance, he was openly concerned that the United States was racist against whites, and he sympathized with both the Westboro Baptist Church and KKK leaders like David Duke. (The forum postings and tweets have been attributed to Houser by the Southern Poverty Law Center, according to the Times.)

Houser's Facebook profile, which is much more muted, is linked to only two groups—one pledging to "Stand With Rand [Paul]" and the other celebrating Irish-American heritage. According to RawStory, Houser also published a short manifesto in 2013 that accused the United States of "oozing the puss of foolishness and perversion." He also called for the country to come up with a right-wing party like Greece's Golden Dawn, according to the site. Another forum posting expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.

The deadly shooting comes just days after James Holmes was found guilty of killing 12 people and injuring 70 others during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012. The sentencing portion of the trial, which could end in Holmes being sentenced to death began Wednesday, but court was canceled because a juror was ill.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

All Hail the 75-Year-Old First Lady of Radio

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All Hail the 75-Year-Old First Lady of Radio

True Stories of Weird Canadian Crime: A Heartbroken Mommy Moose, a Dirty Snow Job, and a Creepy Baby Monitor

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It's a sad moose. Photo via Flickr user Powhusku

Every week, cops across the Great White North have to deal with some spectacular calls. Here's a sampling of some stuff Canadian police have had to respond to over the past two weeks, including goat murders, a heartbroken mommy moose and creepy music from a camera:

Snow Job
Toronto police have arrested two people for allegedly pulling off a fraud that violated the most basic of Canadian rights—to have a driveway clear of snow in the winter. According to police, a company called "Snow Easy Plowing" advertised snow-removal services at "a deeply discounted rate" on sites like Living Social and Groupon during November and December 2014. Because everyone hates having snow on their driveways but also hates getting it off their driveways themselves, a bunch of people went for it, but when the first big snowfall came in December, no one showed up. Some poor snowed-in souls tried calling Snow Easy Plowing and got a voicemail that said the company had gone out of business. Toronto police arrested company owners Zain-Ur-Rehman Shaikh, 25, from Missisauga, and Zaidi Shahmir, 24, from Brampton, on July 24 and charged each with 18 counts of fraud and 16 counts of passing off wares. Police believe there may be more victims who are still probably wishing they paid the kid next door $5 to shovel the driveway instead.

Like the Littlest Hobo, But with a Sad Moose
In the most depressing entry in Canadian Crime so far, the OPP are warning drivers about a moose wandering around Highway 11 between Watson Rd. and the weigh scales in Callander, Ont. Now, a moose wandering around an Ontario highway in the summer is a fairly normal happening... Except that this is a mommy moose whose calf was killed after it was hit by a car on that stretch of Highway 11 earlier this month, and police say she's been searching for it ever since. If this isn't a ghost story in the making, I don't know what is.

Why the Goat Hate?
A small, horned animal out east must've seriously scarred someone's childhood or stolen their boyfriend or something, because the RCMP got a call from a farm owner in Argyle Sound, N.S., on July 19 who said that four goats had been shot. Two of the goats died from their injuries, but the other two were treated by a vet and presumably lived.

Burn All the Baby Monitors
The OPP in Middlesex Centre, Ont., said someone was rocking their kid to sleep in their nursery on July 7 when the the internet camera used to monitor the room started to play "eerie music and a voice could be heard indicating the parent and child were being watched." The internet provider later said the home's router was hacked, which is slightly better than a priest saying the camera was possessed, I guess. Either way, I'd cleanse both the camera and router with fire.

Fast & Furious Carting
A bunch of people called the OPP in Norfolk County after seeing some kids riding around in a shopping cart attached to a pickup truck driving around a Swiss Chalet parking lot "at dangerous speeds," police said July 20. When the crew realized they were being watched, the kids in the cart booked in on foot while the pickup sped away, shopping cart still attached. Says Const. Ed Sanchuck, "This isn't a game, it's real life. People will get seriously injured or killed if they choose to engage in this kind of activity."

What to Do When Egged: A Valuable Report
Regina police are investigating after some people pelted eggs at a moving car's windshield around 11 PM on July 8. When the car tried to stop, the egg-throwers rushed it and tried to open the doors. Police are advising anyone else this happens to to "stay in your vehicle with the doors locked, and do not turn on your windshield wipers, as the egg will smear and further hinder your vision. If you can see enough to safely drive, continue to do so."

Curse of the Were-Car
The RCMP in Moncton, N.B., are looking for a yellow Chevy Cobalt after it hit a pedestrian on a sidewalk not once but twice early on July 12. According to police, four people were walking on Mountain Rd. near Killam Dr. around midnight when the car drove on to the sidewalk and hit one of them. Then, around 3:15 AM, a man walking on the sidewalk on McLaughlin Dr. near Morton Ave. was hit by a car with the same description. Both people received minor injuries. If you've ever been to Moncton, you'd notice that no one ever walks there, so was this a weird coincidence or a warning?

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.

Harper Government Loses Court Battle to Restrict Refugee System

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Protesters outside the Central East Detention Centre in Lindsay, Ontario. Photo by Jeff Bierke

Canada's Federal Court has once again shot down the Harper government's attempts to restrict our refugee system.

In 2012, Canada's Immigration Minister implemented a new Designated Country of Origin (DCO) list, also referred to as the Safe Countries of Origin list, that includes 42 countries the government deemed to be safe for its citizens—from many EU countries to Israel, and even crime-ridden Mexico.

Refugees originating from one of the countries on the list faced a different procedure than those from other countries. Their refugee claims were rushed through the system faster than other applications, and had no chance of appeal if they were turned down, meaning their deportations would be effective almost immediately.

The government claims the changes prevents people who aren't actually facing danger from taking advantage of Canada's refugee system.

But in a 116-page decision released yesterday, the court said the list violates the rights of certain asylum seekers in Canada and declared the whole process unfair because it "serves to further marginalize, prejudice, and stereotype claimants from DCO countries" and "perpetuates a stereotype that refugee claimants from DCO countries are somehow queue-jumpers or 'bogus claimants.'"

The court declined the government's request to delay the effect of their decision.

The Federal Court judge found that every day the policy remained in place, those refugee claimants would be "deprived of their rights."

It's just the latest in a string of defeats for Harper government when it comes to its stance on immigration and refugee issues. In February, the Federal Court ruled it unlawful for the government to ban women from wearing niqabs during their citizenship ceremonies. And last year, the court also struck down the government's decision to cut healthcare for certain refugee claimants, including those from the list of safe countries.

Activists and refugee lawyers are calling yesterday's decision a victory for asylum seekers from those countries because they can now appeal their claims if they had previously been denied. For years, the list has received sharp criticism from LGBT groups, which are also applauding the ruling.

"A 'safe' country list cannot accommodate the current state complexity and flux in persecution and protection of Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans people," reads a 2012 submission on the DCO list by Rainbow Refugee, an NGO dedicated to helping queer refugees claim asylum in Canada. "Extreme forms of homophobic and transphobic violence often co-exist with constitutional protection for LGBT people on paper, particularly in newer democracies."

The applicants in the case include three refugees from the DCO list who tried to get status in Canada: a gay Serbian man from Croatia who fears he will be attacked or killed if he was sent home, and a gay couple from Hungary who also fear for their safety if they were refused entry. Their claims were rejected on the basis that Croatia and Hungary were democratic countries capable of protecting their citizens.

Sharalyn Jordan, an activist and professor at Simon Fraser University who has worked extensively with LGBTQ asylum seekers told VICE that South Korea is another good example of this. "It's a country that offers protections to LGBT people, but when the government discovers gay or trans people during their screening for mandatory military service, they risk being hospitalized and medicated involuntarily, because they are seen to be mentally ill," she said.

"We have worked with people who were successful as refugees because of this, but since the DCO, many were sent back into danger without access to appeal."

Immigration Minister Chris Alexander's spokesperson told the Canadian Press the government intends to appeal the court's decision.

"Asylum seekers from developed countries such as the European Union or the US should not benefit from endless appeal processes," the spokesperson said. "We remain committed to putting the interests of Canadians and the most vulnerable refugees first."

Follow Rachel Browne on Twitter.

Ottawa Women Fighting Back Against Pickup Artist Who Was Secretly Filming Them

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Screenshot of Lukeutophia's YouTube channel. Photo courtesy Rosella Chibambo

Women in Ottawa have been raising awareness of a man who is secretly filming his conversations with them to teach other men how to talk to women, by asking other to share stories and use the hashtag #corneredinottawa.

So-called pickup "artist" (or PUA) Luke Howard has become known more as a street harasser to many women in Ottawa, for posting his videos on his YouTube channel Lukeutopia. His videos aim to teach other men how to approach women in the street and be a "daygamer," someone who picks women up on the street during the day rather than at night in a club or bar. After recent press coverage, the videos became unavailable online.

So far, Ottawa police have said that filming in public isn't necessarily illegal, although some of that type of behaviour could fall under harassment. Some women have already filed complaints with the police. Although Howard has stated that he doesn't feel like his actions have been menacing, many women have been coming forward to call him out on his "work."

An informal group of women have come together, over social media, to bring more attention to what Howard has been doing. This past Sunday, the group of women got together to talk about what they can do, so they created the hashtag and a Tumblr page to share stories.

VICE spoke with one of the group's members, Rosella Chibambo, about what some women have come forward talking about, and what the real problem is with PUAs.

"Women have actually secretly telling each other like 'look out for this guy' around Ottawa for months before the story broke," Chibambo told VICE. "Because there's a lot of shame associated with coming forward about something like this you get a lot of hate, you get a lot of haters telling you that you're over sensitive or that you're trying to prevent men from talking to people."

The group's Tumblr page is dedicated to sharing stories about run-ins with Howard has been created to help bring more attention to the issue.

One anonymous submission to the page alleges that Howard blocked and grabbed a woman more than once, and that she eventually would run across the street to avoid him. She wrote that she found these incidents disturbing, especially since he recorded them and put them online.

Another anonymous submission says that he told a woman to fuck off when she asked him to leave her alone, on more than one occasion.

In a statement on his blog, Lukeutopia, Howard issued a statement saying "If a women ever felt threatened or uncomfortable in my presence then I'm genuinely and truly sorry, that was never my intent."

"The street is very different to being "cornered" in a bar or club. Women are free to walk away at anytime or to simply not engage. That's there (sic) right. The same right you have if a homeless person asks you for money or a charity sign up person try's (sic) to engage you. You can say NO!"

"This is still a free nation & I'm thankful for that," he added.

Chibambo doesn't fully trust that this apology was genuine.

"In terms of how genuine his statement was, I do question that because i think that fact that he didn't realize women felt intimidated by his behaviour is definitely questionable," she said. "He knows that behaviour is inappropriate."

In an interview with the CBC, Howard said that his whole purpose for these videos was to help men get over their anxiety and fear of talking to women.

"I don't know if it's unethical because my goal was always to show guys that it's not scary to talk to women in the daytime. They're not going to bite your head off," he said. "Ninety-nine percent of women love this, they enjoy it.

"I didn't want to hire actresses, I wanted it to be raw and I wanted it to be real."

But Chibambo has doubts about Howard's claims.

"It became apparent to all of us that this went further than just a couple of people being sort of harassed," she said. "They really were quite disturbing videos of him sort of harassing women, cornering them in the streets of Ottawa attempting to get their numbers.

"Some of the titles of the videos were pretty sexist and racist."

Some titles in a screenshot of Howard's YouTube site when the videos were still available include "Ottawa Day Game Number Close A Colombian Girl," "Daygame Ottawa Number Close a Hot Jamaican Girl," and "Ottawa Daygame Number Close Savannah with a BF."

Pick up artistry is nothing new to Canada. In Toronto, two years ago VICE reported on pickup artists who were trying to invade the Eaton Centre. Pickup artists also flooded news in Vancouver and Montreal.

Roosh V. Photo via Facebook

Another PUA currently making Canadian news is Roosh Valizadeh (AKA Roosh V), who is planning to visit Toronto and Montreal to give talks on how to treat women—spoiler: he doesn't think women deserve very good treatment at all. He claims he has the guide on how to bang girls. There is already a petition to keep him out of Canada, and not allow him to give his speech.

According to the petition, Roosh is the creator and administrator of the website Return of Kings. The site "aims to usher the return of the masculine man in a world where masculinity is being increasingly punished and shamed in favor of creating an androgynous and politically-correct society that allows women to assert superiority and control over men," as described by the blog.

The site has recently shared articles saying that women are only good for sex and that women fighting in the army is a bad idea. Another article written by Valizadeh features the headline All Public Rape Allegations are False.

But Chibambo says she understands the similarities between the two PUAs, and something that all PUAs have in common.

"One of the key similarities with all these sort of PUA people is that they really do prey on women's insecurities and they dehumanize women," she said. "So they're not based on the assumption that women are human beings with the right to do what they want and speak to who they want and go where they want, without being intimidated they're based on this idea that women are there as prey."

The problem with PUAs is that they treat women like they are simply objects and intimidate without taking into considering the feelings of the person in front of you, she added.

Chibambo hopes that women will keep using the hashtag and that this issue will gain more attention "as a mechanism for women in Ottawa to be able to share stories if they have them and know first and foremost that they weren't alone in this experience and know that the experience wasn't appropriate, it wasn't right for them to feel like that."

Follow Sierra Bein on Twitter.

Blood Lady Commandos: Blood Lady Commandos Enter the Tunnel of Drugs

We Asked a Lawyer What's Next for Alleged Serial Rapist Bill Cosby

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, the California Supreme Court rejected a petition filed by Bill Cosby's lawyers to review—and possibly quash—a civil suit against the comedian for sexual misconduct. Filed by 56-year-old Judy Huth, the suit alleges that the once-beloved actor, author, stand-up comic and musician sexually assaulted her in 1974—when she was just 15—after bringing her to a party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Huth was unable to press criminal charges against Cosby when she came forward with her story in December thanks to California's statutes of limitations. But thanks to more generous limitations for civil suits and the state high court's affirmation of her case's legitimacy, Huth's celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred should get to depose Cosby within 30 days.

The ruling came just weeks after United States District Judge Eduardo Robreno decided to honor a request by the Associated Press and unseal testimony court documents from a separate 2005-06 civil suit against Cosby. Filed by Andrea Constand, who accused Cosby of drugging and sexually abusing her in 2004, the case gathered testimony from 13 anonymous collaborating witnesses. Most dramatically, Cosby himself was deposed and admitted to procuring Quaaludes (back when they were still legal to prescribe), but not for his own use—instead, they were intended for the targets of his sexual advances. But the case vanished in 2006 after Constand accepted a settlement in exchange for putting a lid on most of the trial.

Still, the AP's findings were quickly followed by more extensive leaks: The deposition itself was dug up—albeit not published in its entirety—by the New York Times earlier this week.

There's technically no legal wrongdoing contained in Cosby's 2005 admissions, as the comedian weaves around or straight-up avoids questions about whether women knew he was giving them Quaaludes and whether they were, when on drugs, able to consent to sex. But it's safe to say the statements serve as a glaring indicator of dubious character and a pattern of sexual behavior that should help Cosby's many accusers (over 40 women have come forward with similar stories about him involving drugs and sexual assault, most of them over the last nine months) and hurt his chances in the various legal cases he's currently involved in.

Beyond Huth's suit—the only one directly seeking damages for sexual misconduct—Cosby faces two defamation cases in California and Massachusetts, claiming that he tarnished the reputations of accusers by denying their stories. He also faces a criminal investigation in Los Angeles related to a December claim by model Chloe Goins that he drugged and assaulted her in 2008 at the Playboy mansion..Huth's case is perhaps the most explosive right now, and has the most momentum, but all four are obviously problematic for Cosby.

To tease out what recent developments could mean down the line for Cosby I called up Jody David Armour. The Roy P. Crocker Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, Armour is an expert on celebrity trials, sex offenses, and defamation—all highly relevant in the Cosby saga. Here's his take on the future of America's former lovable role model.

VICE: Let's start with the 2005 deposition. What effect will that have on the new deposition Allred is set to conduct for her case and for the two defamation cases out there?
Jody David Armour: Oh, it's going to have a huge impact. It corroborates the claims of plaintiffs and those who allege that they've been victimized by Bill Cosby.

A large part of their essential claim is that he non-consensually drugged them to have sex with them. The [2005] deposition doesn't prove that he non-consensually gave women Quaaludes or any other drug as part of sex. But [it does] establish that he does mix sex and drugs and considers it a kind of acceptable and ordinary practice for him. It is powerfully corroborative of their essential claims that something like that may have gone on in their cases.

How about the criminal investigation?
We have two parallel tracks of claims going against Bill Cosby: one on the criminal side, one on the civil side. The criminal side has typically not been a route that any of the other alleged victims could pursue because of the statute of limitations on the alleged crimes in most jurisdictions. But 2008 is within the statute of limitations period for sexual assault criminal prosecutions in California. So that is the one case that has some criminal implications to it. That's reason the DAs of Los Angeles County are looking into it for a possible criminal charge.

This kind of revelation that came from these depositions will certainly affect most human decision-makers in a predictable way. It's going to make you even more suspicious of the person who you're investigating. Indirectly, it has certainly created more drive for the DA to take these charges seriously and to investigate them very thoroughly and to recognize that they'll be able to bring in some of the evidence from that deposition if this goes to trial as evidence that he was engaging in predatory behavior, using drugs and mixing them with sex.

It may never go to trial, but just pointing to this deposition and saying: If this [evidence] goes to trial, or we know that most of the people in the jury box have heard of this even if they don't bring it into the trial, you're going to look very bad in the eyes of the jury. You don't want that do you? So why don't we just plea bargain here? It really strengthens their plea-bargaining hand and may make it unnecessary to even go to trial, because he and his lawyers can see just how weak a position he'll be in at a criminal trial with this kind of evidence.

The deposition gives Allred a real template to work off of when she's deposing Cosby. What sort of questions is she empowered to ask that she might not have been before?
Oh, yes. She has the sworn deposition that he made in 2005. He has some statements that he cannot go back on. So she can say, simply, Mr. Cosby, are you in the habit and practice of mixing sex with young women with drugs, yes or no? And he has to say yes because he's already said that in his deposition.

As you put it, it is a template: She goes through the deposition and all the damning statements that he makes in that deposition that we're talking about now, all of those same damning remarks and admissions. She's just going to ask him [the same questions] again and get him on the record and then say: Let's go a little further. Have you given these drugs to women without their consent or awareness or knowledge? I can't imagine that he will say anything other than no to that. He will say that he gave it to them like you offer wine or whiskey. You're giving them something to alter their mood, but not doing it in a surreptitious way.

Can she ask him to account for each individual Quaalude pill that he had in his possession as a powerful act of corroboration, even if he doesn't admit to anything?
Absolutely! She is, in these depositions, speaking not only to Cosby, but to an imaginary jury out there, a familiar court of public opinion right now.

One thing we teach in law school is the art of discourse, the art of rhetoric—persuasive discourse. It's powerful rhetoric to be able to march through, identify, and discuss each separate Quaalude, like you're talking about each separate bullet that he put into a chamber of a revolver. Yes, that has rhetorical power, and that's going to be a big part of the deposition process going forward. She recognizes it, and his lawyers recognize it, too.


Watch: Inside America's Lucrative Divorce Industry


Is your sense this is more likely to end in litigation or a settlement?
What complicates it, here's the wild card: Is there going to be a criminal prosecution?

It's one thing to talk to someone who's worth hundreds of millions of dollars about losing millions of dollars, even hundreds of millions of dollars. It's another thing to talk about a 77-, 78-year-old man sitting in a jail cell. When he's looking at that possibility, he may become a lot more reluctant to say things that may be incriminating.

Right now, he has to recognize that anything he says under oath as part of these civil proceedings could have criminal implications, in the way of self-incrimination. How feisty he remains, if you will, is going to depend on what happens with this criminal case. Are charges going to be filed? Is he going to have to defend both a civil and a criminal case simultaneously? So he's looking at both a loss of a lot of money and a loss of liberty simultaneously—that's like a double barrel of legal actions aimed on him.

Who knows what kind of impact that could have on his decision making to fight the civil claims in a certain way or not?

The accusers might not accept a settlement either, right? How likely is this to actually play out in court?
Let's say the criminal case doesn't go forward and there's no criminal prosecution. [Then] the defamation claims are the only ways that the rape charges can actually have a day in court. Even though the claim will be "defamation" in court, what will really be on trial is if Bill Cosby raped women, drugging them and then having sex. There may be something very important about that claim having its day in court to these plaintiffs on the one hand.

On the other [hand], a big settlement carries its own implied admission at this point. He's already suffering a lot of condemnation from public opinion and a lot of sponsorship [implications], etc. They might want to say, I've had a lot of pain and suffering that I've gone through because of his actions and I need to work towards healing and being better. This compensation will help me to start the healing and move on.

And by the way, any settlement is going to be huge because it's going to have to cover what they're going to be going for marginally in the trial, which is not just compensatory damages, but punitive, exemplary, punishment damages. A jury could give someone $1 million or $2 million in compensatory damages and then slam them with $100 million in punitive damages. The settlement would have to be large to account for that possibility. But if they got that large a settlement, they might say: Maybe I don't gain a lot more if it runs in court to trial.

I could see both perspectives and that's something they'd have to discuss with their lawyers. I don't know Allred, what her opinion on these matters would be. That's going to be important, because she's going to be counseling her clients and advising them to go one way or another. Her perspective on whether it's better to have a day in court on all these issues or settle is going to have a big impact on what actually happens.

As we've said, nothing in the 2005 deposition or the cases thus far is slam-dunk evidence. Some of this will come down to he-said-she-said. So if this does go to court, what would it take for Allred or the other lawyers to win their cases?
I teach law school, so I'm big on the rules. I do believe rules matter and laws matter, so I'm going to nod in that direction as I tell you what practicing attorneys say.

In the Bronx they used to say in the DA's office: "Charge him with anything; prove he's a son of a bitch." Once you prove to a jury's satisfaction that a particular defendant is a wicked individual—is just an SOB—then it's a lot easier to convince them of any particular facts that you're trying to establish. And I've heard a tort attorney say the same thing: He used to say, "When I was suing a corporation, the first thing I'd convince that jury of is that that corporation is wicked, evil. Then I'd start talking about causation."

Gloria Allred is going to go into trial—if this goes to trial,—with a defendant who many people view already as perhaps depraved, at least morally deficient. It's much easier to prove anything else you have to prove in that case once you have fact-finders convinced of that.

Especially after the California Supreme Court denied his attempts to get Allred's case reviewed, it seems like Cosby's running out of legal tactics. Does he have any other recourse, or is he just in a litigate-or-settle position?
No question, he has to litigate or settle.

He's also got to try to, at the same time, reclaim his tattered public image, as I understand some people in his camp are trying to do now. Repairing that public image isn't just going to deal with any future commercial viability he might have, which I think is nil, zip, zero. It may also have an impact on affecting any perspective jurors if he can get a less dastardly image of himself in front of the public. Maybe some of the jurors in the jury box won't go in with the presumption that he's an SOB and therefore probably guilty of whatever he's being charged with.

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

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