Latest news with #GinaWilson
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
When Odin the police dog sniffed drugs, cops could search parked car, court rules
By a bare 4-3 majority Friday, the Kansas Supreme Court expanded police power to perform drug searches on vehicles during traffic stops. I can see the majority's point, but I'm tending to lean toward the dissenting justices' position, due to the potential for abuse of privacy rights. The case involves a woman named Gina L. Wilson, convicted of possessing 30 oxycodone pills and driving on a suspended license. According to the majority opinion, 'Two Wichita police officers performed a traffic stop of Gina Wilson after they twice observed her fail to properly signal after leaving the location of a known drug house.' As it turned out, Wilson's driver's license was suspended, which she admitted. She was told to step out of the car while police brought a drug-sniffing dog to the scene to check her vehicle. Here's where it gets complicated: The legality of the traffic stop was not in question, but police aren't allowed to extend a stop beyond the time it takes to write a citation to give them time to bring a drug dog to the scene. In this case, police dog Odin (who died of cancer last year) and his human partner arrived at the scene about 40 seconds before the officer finished writing up the failure-to-signal citation. The trial judge, Sedgwick District Judge Kevin Mark Smith, ruled that the officers had not impermissibly extended the traffic stop. The Court of Appeals upheld Smith's ruling. The Supreme Court also ruled the search legal, but came up with a different, and potentially disturbing, rationale for why. The drug sniff was legal because Wilson's driver's license was suspended, said the majority opinion, authored by the court's most conservative justice, Caleb Stegall. 'Though Wichita police officers have the authority to arrest someone for driving on a suspended license, they also have the discretion not to,' Stegall wrote. 'The officers here admitted that although they intended to arrest Wilson from the moment they asked her to exit the vehicle, they did not actually arrest her until after they searched the car and found the pills. 'But regardless of whether Wilson was under arrest at the time of Oden's sniff, there are absolutely no circumstances in which the officers would have allowed Wilson to drive away in the vehicle. Put another way, regardless of what happened to Wilson, the car wasn't going anywhere. It simply became a lawfully, publicly parked vehicle in Wichita, Kansas . . . Because the car was legally parked and no one was attempting to or prevented from lawfully moving it, the sniff was legally performed regardless of whether Wilson was seized.' You may be saying, my license is fine, so I don't have to worry about this. Not necessarily. I got pulled over once out in California and was shocked to learn from the officer that my license had been suspended without my knowledge. It turned out it was the result of a very minor accident where another driver and I had tapped bumpers a year of so previously. I didn't think enough damage was done to trigger the requirement to file an accident report, but the other driver did file one. So I'd been suspended for failing to file, though I'd never heard a peep about it from the DMV. Fortunately, the cop was understanding, and let me off with a warning and an admonition to go straight to the DMV and take care of it — which I did. In Kansas, the DMV is generally required to send notice and allow drivers time to appeal before suspending their license. But people don't always get the word. A lot of folks forget to update their license when they move, and the DMV sends suspension notices to the last address they have on file. 'People get caught in that all the time,' said lawyer and state legislator John Carmichael. Carmichael said Kansas police and courts tend to be less forgiving than my laid-back California cop was. If you don't update your license when you're supposed to, they consider that your problem. In the dissenting opinion in Wilson's case, Justice Eric Rosen called it a fantasy to believe that the officers had seized the driver, but not her car. ''It would have been clear to anyone not residing in a fantasy-world parallel universe' that the officers here were not going to let Wilson or her vehicle leave the scene until the dog sniff was complete,' he wrote. 'The majority ignores this reality, insisting that Wilson's car was not seized because she did not have a license to drive it.' 'It would seem that, in the majority's new world, if an officer pulls over a driver who does not have legal authority to operate a vehicle, the officer may seize that driver and prevent anyone from moving the vehicle for as long as necessary to await a dog sniff. I cannot fathom this is what the majority had in mind, but it seems it is the result they have created.' I think Rosen's onto something. So did Chief Justice Marla Luckert and Justice Melissa Taylor Standridge, who joined the dissent. Rosen continued that even if the car was not technically legally seized at the time, 'I could not join the majority in its brazen announcement that officers can perform a dog sniff on any car that is legally parked in public.' I'm not enough of a legal scholar to say if that's the message the court's trying to send. But I'm pretty sure it's the message police will hear. And all our privacy could suffer as a result.
E&E News
14-05-2025
- Business
- E&E News
Florida ‘Cat Fund' has a healthy outlook ahead of hurricane season
TALLAHASSEE, Florida — A state-created fund that backs up private insurers in Florida remains healthy heading into this year's hurricane season, even as it deals with ongoing market volatility and paying off billions associated with last year's deadly storms. 'It would be really nice this year if we didn't have a hurricane,' Gina Wilson, chief operating officer for the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund, said Monday during a meeting of the fund's advisory council. Details: The fund, which offers insurance companies reinsurance at prices generally lower than those in the private market, is legally obligated to provide up to $17 billion in coverage. The advisory council approved a new report that detailed the fund's financial health and how much money it would need to borrow to meet all of its obligations. Advertisement The status of the account, nicknamed the 'Cat Fund,' is important to Floridians regardless of where they live. The state can impose a surcharge critics call a 'hurricane tax' on most insurance policies — including auto insurance policies — to replenish the fund if it runs out of money.
Technical.ly
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Technical.ly
‘Silicon Valley East': Former software dev's debut novel revisits the tech world of the 1980s
When Gina Wilson decided to set her first novel in the 1980s, it wasn't just to jump on a nostalgia trend. Wilson, a former software engineer, lived through the '80s as a young woman technologist firsthand and found those were two angles lacking in published fiction. 'When I started this, I realized there are so few novels that, first of all, talk about tech that are not sci-fi or history,' Wilson told 'And there are few women in tech. You rarely see a woman's memoir or even a non-fiction book about a woman.' The book, 'Silicon Valley East' (the name is a term used by President Ronald Reagn during a real-life visit to Malvern, Pennsylvania, in 1985), takes place mainly throughout the mid-Atlantic region, from Delaware — where Wilson is from and currently lives, in the beach town of Lewes — to Philadelphia to Manhattan. In 1985, The Route 202 Corridor from West Chester to King of Prussia in Pennsylvania really was seen as the mid-Atlantic's own future version of Silicon Valley, where countryside just outside of Philadelphia was making way for high tech, not least of all in the healthtech field that is still prominent, and featured in the book. Wison combined that history with 80s nostalgia — a ' megatrend ' of the 2020s where people look back with an almost desperate fondness at the decades preceding smartphones and social media. 'Silicon Valley East' turns that on its head in a way — it was a simpler time, sure, but getting the most basic tech things done was almost unimaginably slow and inconvenient compared to today. Finding her 'flow' For nearly 30 years after leaving a job as a software developer in Malvern, Wilson has been consulting and coaching. It's her own business that started as a custom software development company primarily serving healthcare clients, the same industry of her 'Silicon Valley East' protagonist, Christina Como. Wilson went on to get her graduate degree in cognitive psychology, moved into management consulting and worked for most of the healthcare organizations in the region. In 2012, she shifted into coaching. 'One thing I encourage my coaching clients to do is mind what it is that restores them,' Wilson said. 'We look for what 'gets them into a state of flow,' which is a state of consciousness where you're so immersed in the activity that you are kind of unaware of time passing, you're just very engrossed' Through coaching other tech professionals to find their flow — a technique that is used to prevent and combat burnout — Wilson discovered her own: writing. 'Silicon Valley East' is the first novel on Bayfront Press, the small publishing imprint Wilson launched in 2021. It's the imprint's third book. Her first two books are nonfiction — one about building soft skills, the other about the transition from high school to college. Historical fiction, but make it tech Though fiction, 'Silicon Valley East' is filled with people using real technology, all of it now obsolete, not for nostalgia purposes, necessarily, but to show how far technology has come since the days of Pac-Man and Centipede. 'I chose the 80s because I really did want to portray the evolution of health tech,' Wilson said. 'Nowadays it's so easy to do registration online, your lab results are sent to you, and it's all seemingly seamless.' In 'Silicon Valley East,' data is transported on physical disks via airplanes with smoking sections. Modern technology is foreshadowed often — characters joke about things like someday being able to 'beam' data across the country like Scotty on Star Trek. When programmers patiently dial in to a staticky switchboard to do their work, it highlights how far tech has come. 'It was a lot different,' she said. 'Even my son, who works in data analytics, couldn't believe the hurdles that we had to get through.' A goal to inspire aspiring technologists, entrepreneurs and writers Wilson's young protagonist is not only a technologist. She also becomes an entrepreneur over the course of the story as she develops software to better manage healthcare records in a time when everything was done on paper. 'I call her an accidental entrepreneur,' she said. 'She doesn't set out to open up a business, but she sees a need, and she goes for it.' That energy is similar to Wilson's advice to aspiring authors. 'My biggest advice is, if you have something to say, then you can write,' she said, noting that she hones her craft through things like online classes and the Iowa Writers' Workshop podcast. 'My whole career, I've been writing in some capacity — mostly technical writing, a lot of specifications, that sort of thing. Writing a novel was actually very challenging because I wanted it to be interesting, and I also wanted it to be factual.' Ultimately, Wilson hopes to add additional authors to the Bayfront Press roster, but for now she's focused on the release of 'Silicon Valley East,' available at regional bookshops and online. 'I hope it's inspiring,' Wilson said, 'especially for someone who's thinking about opening a business or doing something that they're very passionate about.'
