We've got a remarkable story from contributor James Robinson in the new issue of the Phoenix that raises questions about the 40-year-old conviction of Clarence Spivey on charges of rape, kidnapping, and assault.

Spivey, one of Rhode Island's longest-serving inmates, was at the center of a racially charged case involving a young white woman dragged from a hospital parking lot by a black man and brutally raped in a nearby vacant apartment.

In the "in case you missed it" category:

Interesting item in the Wall Street Journal this week - it had appeared on wsj.com's Law Blog a week earlier - focused on Rhode Island US Attorney Peter Neronha, who brought a big case against Google for knowingly running ads for rogue online pharmacies. It resulted in a $500 million settlement.

Well, if you think Google is evil, you have reason to be pleased with your home state today. Rhode Island US Attorney Peter Neronha has announced a mammoth settlement with the search engine. The company will forfeit $500 million after profiting from ads that prompted US consumers to illegally import prescription drugs. From the ProJo:

Journalists and open-records advocates sharply criticized the state police last year and early this year for a new set of guidelines that, they argued, placed unwarranted limits on the information law enforcement is required to release to the public about alleged crimes and the arrests stemming from them.

The chief complaint was about new language requiring the state police's legal counsel to perform a "balancing test" upon receiving a request for information - weighing the public's right to know against arrestees', victims', or witnesses' right to privacy.

The murder conviction of Nicholas Gianquitti, a Cranston man who shot and killed his next-door neighbor Jim Pagano in a dispute over a child's stray tennis ball, was upheld by the state Supreme Court today. The case has a special resonance for this reporter; I covered it as a reporter at the Providence Journal.

A few days after the shooting, I spent a long night in Fitzpatrick's Pub in Cranston, chatting with some of the Garden City Boys - an extraordinarily large and tight-knit group of friends that grew up together in the Garden City neighborhood and came home to bury their friend, Jim.

Attorney General-elect Peter Kilmartin has announced that he is hanging on to some key staffers from the Patrick Lynch era - Deputy Attorney General Gerald Coyne, civil division chief James Lee, and criminal division chief Stacie Veroni.

But Kilmartin will face some pressure to differentiate from Lynch, whose gubernatorial ambitions leant a political feel to the office and whose ties to disgraced Central Falls Mayor Charles Moreau raised embarassing questions, fair or not, about the office's willingness to go after public corruption.

In case you missed it: a powerful piece in the New York Times by a Rhode Island woman, now living in Brooklyn, meeting the Providence Journal reporter who wrote about her mother's murder many years ago.

In the journalist’s articles, drawn in part from reams of disturbingly graphic grand jury testimony, he described how my mother’s face turned purple as the two men twisted a towel around her neck, and how one of them, for leverage, put his foot against her face while saying: “Come on, you rat.

The ProJo reports that Deputy Majority Leader Raymond J. Sullivan, Jr., best known for heading up Barack Obama's Rhode Island general election campaign, was arrested on drunk driving charges early this morning.

NORTH KINGSTOWN, R.I. -- State police said Wednesday that they have charged Rep. Raymond J. Sullivan Jr., D-Coventry, with driving while under the influence of alcohol.

As the RI ACLU prepares to hold a news conference today regarding the Wyatt Detention Center and the death of Jason Ng, the Boston Globe reports on how some other prisons, including the nearby Bristol County Jail, have enhanced their revenue by jailing immigrant detainees:

Bristol and other cash-strapped county jails are increasingly embracing the immigration business, capitalizing on the soaring number of foreign-born detainees and the millions of federal dollars a year paid to incarcerate them.

There's not uncommonly a link between a down economy and a rise in violent crime, so the streetworkers based at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence in Providence have their work cut out for them -- more so than usual.

Appropriately, Ed Fitzpatrick took up the streetworkers and their efforts in a column on Christmas:

The New York Times continues its strong Rhode Island-based reporting on immigration, using a lengthy front-pager today to highlight the meager returns generated by the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility for its host community of Central Falls, and how the privately managed prison functions as a cog in incarceration's answer to the war on drugs

The Rhode Island Family Life Center is an important voice in the local cause of criminal-justice reform, so this is troubling news:

Providence, RI, December 15, 2008-- As the growing impact of Bernie Madoff's outrageous scheme unfolds nationwide, Rhode Islanders might be surprised to hear that a local non-profit has been affected by Madoff's massive fraud.

Ariel returns to the pages of the Phoenix with a look at Stronger than Their Walls, the Family Life Center's new documentary about the need for probation reform and the word on some upcoming screenings.

A precondition for state inmates' release to probation is their promise to "preserve the peace and be of good behavior."

[image from thebrothersbulger.com]

During Colonel Brendan Doherty's appearance this morning on Newsmakers, I was surprised when he responded to a question about Louis "Baby Shacks" Manocchio, the reputed head of organized crime in Rhode Island, by referring to him as "Baby Shanks."

It had been my impression that "Baby Shanks" was a mistaken derivation of the actual nickname.

During the bygone heyday of Raymond L.S. Patriarca, some inferiority complex-plagued Rhode Islanders took solace in how the New England Mob was headquartered out of a storefront on Atwells Avenue.

Now, although LCN has continued its longstanding fade across the country, public fascination (as well as that of the press) continues when Mob-related stories burst into the spotlight