Latest news with #guntrafficking
CBC
7 days ago
- Health
- CBC
Overcrowding, lockdowns inside this Windsor-area jail are so persistent, it's leading to reduced sentences
Overcrowding and frequent lockdowns due to short staffing: These are some of the conditions at the South West Detention Centre that led to a lighter sentence of a Windsor man charged with gun trafficking. In March, Lawrence Davis was sentenced to seven years in jail after he was found guilty on gun-related charges. Davis was charged in December 2021 after he got into an argument with a man in a vehicle at a parking lot near Tecumseh Road East and Forest Glade Drive. The heated argument turned into a gunfight — one man died, while Davis was shot in the shoulder and treated in hospital. Without being able to prove whether Davis acted out of self-defence, first degree murder and attempted murder charges were dismissed. But in the publicly available decision related to Davis's probation breaches and gun-related charges, the judge says he considered the conditions the man faced during his pre-sentence custody at the South West Detention Centre (SWDC). Those conditions included multiple lockdowns and sleeping three people to a two-person cell. Courts are able to take these factors into consideration under what is known as Duncan's Credit — the credit is not a defined number of days or months, but rather a mitigating factor. While it isn't anything new, some experts say its use points to persistent problems in Ontario's correctional system. Lawyer says 'harsh' conditions are common in area jail Patricia Brown, Davis's lawyer, told CBC News that she always tries to inform the court of the poor conditions people face in jails. And since COVID-19, she says she's been detailing these conditions more often. "I'm raising the concerns before justices so they can realize that the accused person, although they were not yet convicted or sentenced or found guilty ... [was] in harsh conditions," she said. In Davis's case, she said there were three people in his two-person cell for 523 of the 803 days he was at SWDC. According to the decision, Davis was assigned the floor mattress on "some of these days," but it notes that the arrangements on paper aren't always what actually take place. Davis also experienced a total of 109 lockdowns — on top of the usual lockdowns in place daily from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. Seventy-seven of the lockdowns he experienced were due to "insufficient staffing," the decision notes. "When you think of yourself and your space is crowded, you're dealing with someone that may not be [cleaning] themself properly ... you're frustrated, they're frustrated, they're in a tight quarter ... all of those are factors that you consider can create a frustrating atmosphere that can be potentially dangerous," said Brown. "It can cause inmates to act out on each other, it makes it unsafe for even employees." She stresses that this sort of environment is especially difficult for people who have addiction or mental health issues. Jail operating over and above capacity Overcrowding and frequent lockdowns are common problems, says Katrina Digiacinto, president of Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Local 135, which represents staff at the facility. Though the jail is meant to hold 315 people, Digiacinto says right now they have closer to 400 inmates. Crowding tends to elevate tensions, leading to more violence toward staff and other inmates, she said. But unless the employer approves it, Digiacinto says they can't just bring in more staff. "If the employer was more willing to increase the staff per shift, we would experience fewer lockdowns," she said. Right now, she says they could use an extra 20 staff members to handle a full day and night shift. Ontario's ministry of the solicitor general did not return a request for comment. But in previous stories about overcrowding at South West Detention Centre, the ministry said it recognizes the need for modernization in corrections and is investing $500 million for new staff and infrastructure projects. It has also said it is aware of "capacity pressures" at SWDC. 'Rethink' entire system: corrections reform expert Longstanding issues are driving these problems, says Howard Sapers, who led a two-year independent review on Ontario's correctional system in 2016. That review led to three reports that included 167 recommendations. Sapers says despite the commitment to make improvements, "things haven't gotten any better, in fact they've deteriorated since I did that work." When asked whether these conditions violate someone's charter rights, Sapers said "absolutely." But he said these issues are allowed to persist because even though there's "lots of policies, lots of laws" there is no "absolute prohibition." When a person is charged and a judge declines to release them on bail, "that person is then dropped off at the door of a local provincial jail, and the jail doesn't really have the ability to say, 'we're simply too crowded,'" Sapers said. While he says there's a lot that needs to change to fix these problems, he says it's not about building more jails or hiring more correctional officers. "It's rethinking how it is we use pretrial custody, what the purpose of a correctional centre should be," he said, adding these changes would need to involve everyone from police all the way to the mental healthcare system. For Brown, the lawyer in Windsor, she agrees. Speaking generally — it's not about bigger jails, but rather making changes to the bail system, she says.
CBC
26-05-2025
- CBC
York police, OPP investigation leads to large seizure of drugs and guns
On Monday, York police announced the results of a two-month-long joint investigation with the Ontario Provincial Police into gun and drag trafficking in Georgina, Ontario. CBC's Britnei Bilhete has the details.
Washington Post
16-05-2025
- Washington Post
The US indicts a Mexican citizen on terrorism charges for helping cartel
MEXICO CITY — A Mexican citizen will face charges related to providing material support to a terrorist organization for the first time for allegedly conspiring to traffic guns, grenades, drugs and migrants for a drug cartel, U.S. prosecutors said Friday. The cartel was recently designated a foreign terrorist organization. An indictment alleging the crimes by Maria Del Rosario Navarro Sanchez, a 39-year-old Mexican, was unsealed Friday in the Western district of Texas. It was not immediately clear if Navarro Sanchez had a lawyer.
CBS News
09-05-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Democrats urge Trump administration to ramp up efforts to curb trafficking of U.S.-made guns across border
Washington — A group of House and Senate Democrats is urging top Trump administration officials to use the recent designation of Latin American cartels and gangs as foreign terrorist organizations to take action to curtail the flow of American-made guns across the southern border. The 14 Democratic lawmakers said in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi that the designation unlocks additional legal tools that would allow the administration to disrupt the cartels' financial networks and impose harsher penalties on entities that provide material support to them. Federal law makes it a crime, subject to fines and up to 20 years in prison, to knowingly provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization. Entities that provide weapons, money, equipment or other support to those groups can face federal prosecution if found liable. "If you want to really tackle the fentanyl trade, you have to tackle the source of the power of the people who are involved in that trade, and there's no way to do that without addressing the guns that they receive from American-made manufacturers and dealers," Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat who led the letter, told CBS News. "It's a choice I would say, which is you can't actually successfully dismantle the cartels without also dismantling the gun trafficking that goes southward that allows them to send the fentanyl trafficking northward." The Democrats urged the Departments of Homeland Security, State and Justice to take "immediate" steps to stem the flow of firearms manufactured in the U.S. into Mexico by boosting interagency cooperation to dismantle smuggling rings that facilitate gun trafficking; expanding inspections at border crossings; increasing law enforcement efforts against straw purchased and gun dealers that provide material support to smugglers; and bolstering intelligence-sharing between the U.S. and Mexican authorities and other partners to target weapons traffickers. "This steady supply of weapons coming in from the north has allowed these criminal organizations to gain control over fentanyl and human trafficking across the border and undermine Mexican law enforcement," they wrote in the letter. "Put simply, if we do not stop the flow of American-made guns across the southern border to Mexico, we cannot stop the flow of fentanyl into our country over that same border." Goldman said the Justice Department should initiate investigations into gun makers and dealers to determine whether they're knowingly distributing and selling guns to drug cartels, either directly or through straw purchasers. "The fact that there is an intermediary does not mean that there isn't a criminal conspiracy that they are a part of, and that the DOJ needs to use this new foreign terrorist organization-designation to apply more pressure on the gun industry to stop the flow of American guns to the cartels," he said. Between 200,000 to 500,000 American-made guns are trafficked into Mexico each year, a pipeline that's been called the "iron river." Nearly half of all firearms recovered at Mexican crime scenes are manufactured in the U.S., according to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Mexico, meanwhile, has just one gun store in the country and stringent firearms laws. An investigation from CBS Reports exposed how Americans are helping Mexican drug cartels smuggle weapons across the U.S.-Mexico border. Guns are purchased by straw purchasers in the U.S., and a network of brokers and couriers then transport them across the border and into Mexico. U.S. intelligence documents and interviews with current and former federal officials revealed that the federal government has known about the weapons trafficked by cartels for years, but has done little to stop the networks that operate in the U.S.. In an effort to combat the violence wrought by drug cartels, the Mexican government filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court in 2021 against seven of the biggest U.S. firearms manufacturers and one wholesaler. Mexico is seeking $10 billion in damages from the gun industry, as well as other forms of relief. Firearms manufacturers, though, are seeking to block the suit because of a federal law that shields them from liability for harms stemming from the criminal misuse of their products by another person. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether Mexico's suit can proceed, with a decision expected by the end of June. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum sought to use the suit as leverage in trade negotiations with President Trump after his administration designated drug cartels as terrorist groups and threatened earlier this year to impose 25% tariffs on Mexican imports. Mr. Trump agreed in February to a 30-day pause on the tariffs on Mexican imports after speaking with Sheinbaum. Mexico's president said at the time that the U.S. government is "committed to working to prevent the trafficking of high-powered weapons to Mexico." Goldman, who served as lead counsel in the first impeachment investigation of Mr. Trump before he was elected to Congress, said dismantling drug cartels to stop the trafficking of fentanyl and other drugs into the U.S. is a shared goal with the administration and should bring collaboration. "One component of doing that has got to be stopping the Iron River streamline of American guns going into the cartel's hands," he said. Goldman introduced legislation in the last Congress that aimed to strengthen border security by curbing the trafficking of U.S.-made guns and ammunition across the southern border and said he is working to re-introduce the bill in the current Congress. Joining Goldman on the letter are: Senators Ben Ray Lujan and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Michael Bennet of Colorado, and Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, and Representatives Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Eric Swalwell of California, Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island, Lou Correa of California, Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, Jill Tokuda of Hawaii, Nellie Pou of New Jersey, Timothy Kennedy of New York and Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico.
