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LAWYERS TURNED FILMMAKERS AIM CAMERAS AT INJUSTICE

MEXICO CITY (Hollywood Reporter) - When two lawyers were filming a retrial of a Mexico City street vendor falsely imprisoned for murder, Mexico's archaic judicial system had no place to hide.

Their recently screened documentary, "Presunto Culpable" (Presumed Guilty), reveals a legal system steeped in incompetence and corruption. Fortunately, this story has a rare happy ending.

In December 2005, police arrested Jose Antonio Zuniga in a working-class Mexico City neighborhood on suspicion of homicide. The prosecution based its case on the testimony of a lone witness who claimed Zuniga had shot a man in the street. Even though prosecutors had no compelling evidence beyond that of a dubious witness, a judge sentenced Zuniga to 20 years in prison.

After the initial trial, Zuniga's family and friends contacted Roberto Hernandez and Layda Negrete, two Mexican lawyers residing in Berkeley, California. They had heard about a short documentary the couple had made, "The Tunnel," which helped spring an innocent man from prison. Hernandez and Negrete agreed to help Zuniga.

The two attorneys have no filmmaking background. So they turned to cinematographer John Grillo ("Rudo y Cursi"), documentary director Geoffrey Smith ("The English Surgeon") and Mexican producer Martha Sosa. During the Kafkaesque retrial process, they compiled more than 300 hours of footage. Smith helped them simplify and bring clarity to the story as they sorted out the material. Well over two years into his sentence and after a failed retrial, Zuniga's nightmare finally came to an end when an appeals court judge watched the recordings of the trial and ordered Zuniga's release based on insufficient evidence.

Lawyers with Cameras, Hernandez and Negrete's production venture, had triumphed once again. Zuniga's plight is not uncommon in Mexico. As the film's title implies, Mexican law presumes suspects are guilty until proven innocent.

After screenings at the recent Toronto and Morelia film festivals (the film nabbed the prize for best documentary at the latter), the filmmakers face a new challenge: using the film as a tool to push for judicial reform. Most immediately they plan free screenings as well as a radio and Internet campaign.

"There are many things that can be done -- like, for example, installing cameras in the courts," Hernandez said. "The film is about complete system overhaul."

Source: Yahoo! News

KERRY PACKER OUTED AS HEATHER MILL'S "SUGAR-DADDY"

A new documentary outs Kerry Packer as a "sugar daddy" of Heather Mills when the ex-wife of Beatle Paul McCartney was working as a high-class call girl, according to London's Daily Mail.

Denise Hewitt, who says she worked as a £10,000 escort with Ms Mills in the Eighties, makes the claims in a program to be aired on the UK's Channel 4.
Ms Hewitt, 44, is quoted as saying: "We went into high-class prostitution behind closed doors and nobody knew about it...[billionaire arms dealer Adnan] Kashoggi, Kerry Packer and one of the Royal princes of Saudi, they were the big fish and there were a couple of others that were classed as Heather's sugar daddies.

"We used to get a lot of jewellery as gifts - rings, watches, Bulgari bracelets, cars. The world was our oyster. We enjoyed it.
"No one knew what we did and we didn't expect it to come out. I don't look on it as sleazy."

Ms Hewitt claims in the documentary that Ms Mills was a master manipulator of men, who devised a plan to coax McCartney into marriage and made disparaging remarks about him.

"She said, 'I'll give him an ultimatum and if he doesn't marry me within say eight months, 10 months, I'm going to leave him', [and] 'Look at me, I'm marrying an old man with bigger tits than me'," the Daily Mail reports Ms Hewitt as saying.

"Heather knows how to play people, she's very clever, she's got an X factor with men for some reason.

"They just fall madly in love with her and I take my hat off to her because she manipulates people and they're besotted, like enchanted, you know - like she throws fairy dust all over them."
Claims about Miss Mills's colourful sexual history were first made in the News of the World in June 2006, one month after she separated from McCartney.

Ms Mills has denied having been a call girl for wealthy businessmen but has never sued over the allegations.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Where's Col Allan? You'd think the famous wide boy of New York journalism would be an important member of the cast of the Eliot Spitzer drama.

But no, he's missing in action. Not only did his newspaper, the New York Post, fail to break the messy tale, but Col wasn't even boozing or hanging about with Spitz and the Emperors' Club babes.

After the sterling service he put in in holding Kevin Rudd's hand through those awkward moments at Scores, an eastside gentleman's club where the future prime minister behaved like a "real gentleman", you'd think the Spitzer story would more or less play out in Col's lumpy shadow.

Wilber Mills and Fanny Fox; Nelson Rockefeller and Megan Marshak; Gary Hart and Donna Rice; Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky; Jennifer Flowers et al; F.D. Roosevelt and Lucy Mercer; Billy Snedden and Ms X; Ben Chifley and Phyllis Donnelly; and now Eliot Spitzer and Ashley Youmans, aka Ashley Dupre.

It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die. The world will always welcome lovers, as time goes by.

That's OK for Casablanca, but if you are just about anywhere in the US and are paying the lover, you are a criminal and can be locked-up for anything up to three years. A poll in 2004 reported that 15 per cent of all American men had paid for sex, which seems a generous understatement.

According to Wikipedia, the only places in the US where the buying and selling of sexual services is not illegal are Nevada and Rhode Island.

In Rhode Island it is legal as long as it happens indoors. In Nevada prostitution is permissible everywhere except in Reno and Las Vegas, the two places in the state where you get the impression it's compulsory.

It's a weird country, and the Spitzer story shows just how disconnected and alien a place it is. What are we doing going into wars, signing treaties and free-trade deals with people who want to lock up purveyors and consumers of commercial sex?

Just look at the dazzling array of offences that can flow from the horizontal collaboration between the (former) governor and Ms Dupre.

There's a crime called "structuring", which covers payments made over several months in a way that could conceal the purpose of the transaction. Since Spitzer made electronic payments over time to the Emperors' Club and even paid in advance for liaisons yet to be had, conceivably he could be in the gun for structuring, which carries a five-year sentence, plus fines.

Maybe there's a sort of futures market in prostitutes. Certainly it appears that like everyone else at the moment, Spitz should have called in his margin loan with the Emperors' Club.

There are also possible money laundering offences and a law that bans the interstate movement of hookers. This, appropriately, is the Mann Act, a 1910 law that addresses human trafficking for immoral purposes.

Indeed, there is even a law that Eliot Spitzer championed himself as New York attorney-general that was designed to close down sex-tourism operations such as Big Apple Oriental Tours. The legislation seeks to go after the men, rather than the girls. "If you eliminate the demand, you eliminate the problem," said Ken Franzblau, who has been responsible for enforcing the law in Spitzer's administration. Then there's the offence of "pandering", which aims at the go-betweens in the paid sex caper.

Clearly, our legislative efforts are pathetic. Why can't we have a law against the interstate transportation of hookers, and against paying for sex in structured dollops? It hardly makes us a serious sort of country to just turn our back on these fruitful parliamentary opportunities. Instead, in NSW the police seem to have vacated the business entirely, and it's now an issue for the "planning" departments of local councils, which naturally puts the whole enterprise beyond reproach.

Yet there can be a dark side when it comes to politicians and extramural sex. The circumstances and the denials associated with semen stains on Ms Lewinsky's blue dress led to the president being impeached. There was one story that a US "congressman" used the situation for a bit of home-town leverage to advantage his farming constituents. He told Clinton he'd vote against his impeachment if he reduced the amount of Australian lamb that was imported into the US. Sex for lamb - nothing could be more opportune.

An interesting aspect of the current New York case is that the investigation began after a bank noticed that Spitzer was moving money around in a way thought to be suspicious. It is, of course, the big New York banking and broking houses that Spitzer targeted and prosecuted during his time as attorney-general. The vigilant bank tipped off the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue agents got involved.

Could this minute attention to the movement of a miserable 10 grand or so be some sort of Wall Street square off, rather like sex for lambchops?

Source: Richard Ackland, SMH

Gordon Brown is turning Britain into a surveillance state', Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg claimed.

The Prime Minister should end the 'scandalous fingerprinting' of children at school, Mr Clegg said during a furious exchange at Prime Minister's question.

He added that the British public were the 'most spied upon in the world'.

Mr Brown, who told the House an inquiry into the alleged bugging of a Labour MP would be 'detailed and quick', defended the use of CCTV.

He said: 'We are taking the steps to protect the liberties of citizens.'

Labour's Ann Cryer had raised the alleged bugging of conversations between Labour MP Sadiq Khan and constituent Babar Ahmad at Woodhill Prison, Milton Keynes.

Mr Clegg said: 'This week's bugging controversy shouldn't come as a surprise to you.

'After all, it is this Government that has turned the British public into the most spied upon on the planet – 1,000 surveillance requests every day, one million innocent people on the DNA database and 5,000 schools now fingerprinting our children.

'Is this what you meant when you spoke so stirringly a few months ago about the great Brittrainish tradition of liberty?' Mr Brown replied: 'I take it you and your Liberal authorities support CCTV.

I take it they support the action taken on intercepts when it is necessary to do so for national security.'

Mr Clegg told him: 'You seem to see no limits. You are creating a surveillance state.'

Mr Brown said he hoped the Lib Dem leader had looked at the protections that had been put in place where surveillance and intercepts are involved.

'That includes authorisation by a senior officer, the right to appeal to an independent tribunal, a commissioner for surveillance who looks at matters and reports annually,' he added.

Source: Metro.co.uk