Expect your payment in four to six business days.

St. Louis County Councilwoman Hazel Erby may have drafted the solution for stopping the rampant theft of copper from the County's air conditioners, cell phone towers and pipes. Her bill, which received first-round approval Tuesday, would require scrap metal dealers to keep a registry of sellers, sellers would have to provide photo identification and -- this is the elegant part -- scrap metal dealers will pay sellers with a check that's sent by mail.More >>

Ken Henderson may only be guilty of loving too much.

Ken Henderson's van was searched at the Boone County Fairgrounds last June, and police found some unusual contraband -- seven alligators. The gators were seized, and Henderson was charged with 17 counts of animal abuse. The gators were returned to him in August, because a judge banned them from the county.

According to the Columbia Tribune, Henderson would very much like that ban lifted so his gators can attend the July 5  trial on his behalf.
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Jennifer Silverberg

Leonardo Drisdel in prison in 2005.

Former WGNU DJ Leonardo Drisdel has been convicted in the 2005 murder of Cassandra Kovack. Drisdel told police he'd smoked crack at Kovack's apartment and then heard a voice tell him that she was the devil, and ordered him to kill her.

He will be sentenced on June 29.
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An interesting question...

If you have outstanding parking tickets in the City of St. Louis, for a limited time you can avoid paying the fines and just pay the original amount of the infraction. Your window of opportunity on this deal won't be open long, however -- it begins and expires this weekend at the Community Needs Expo at the America's Center (701 Convention Center Plaza).
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In this week's feature story, "Our Military Doesn't Have a Gambling Problem," we narrate the tumultuous swan dive of decorated Army Sgt. Dreux Perkins, who returned home from a combat tour in Iraq with post traumatic stress disorder and a pathological gambling addiction. His condition prompted him to start smuggling cigarettes into the federal prison where he worked as a correctional officer.

Though Perkins is the primary focus of the story, we lead with another, similar case that played out in Canon City, Colorado, involving John Brownfield Jr., a young combat vet who, like Perkins, showed post-deployment symptoms of PTSD and got caught smuggling tobacco into the federal prison where he worked. But instead of sentencing Brownfield to a prison term, as was called for by federal sentencing guidelines, Senior U.S. District Judge John L. Kane gave him five years' probation and ordered that he undergo counseling and an alcohol treatment program. With that decision, not only did Kane buck the sentencing guidelines, he also ignored the deal (recommending a prison sentence of 366 days) that the prosecuting attorney and defense attorney brokered earlier that year.

Judge Kane's 30-page sentencing memo, which can be found here, went above and beyond the more drab, pedestrian court orders associated with sentencing hearings. Heavily researched, rich in context and chock-full of legal citations and footnotes, the memo received significant recognition after Kane filed it in December 2009. The following year Green Bag, a quarterly journal published by George Mason Law School, recognized the memo in its annual list of "Outstanding Legal Writing." (Kane's memo was honored along with three other court documents in the "Opinions for the Court" category.

In an interview with Daily RFT, Judge Kane opens up about why the Brownfield case was probably the most meaningful of his 35-year career, his qualms with the way the government treats veterans, and why he thinks some of the concepts behind federal sentencing guidelines are "bullshit."

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Still here, still lousy, and, yes, if you live within the attendance district, you still have to go.

The law, when it was first enacted, seemed pretty unassuming: If you were a student in an unaccredited school district, you (and your parents) had the right to transfer to an accredited school, and your home district would pay for your transportation and tuition. It was intended mainly for kids in rural areas who lived in school districts without high schools.

But then in 2007, St. Louis public schools lost their accreditation. In other words, they failed to meet the basic educational standards set up by the state legislature. In further words, they were shitty. A few enterprising parents living within the St. Louis public school district, including Jane Turner and Gina Breitenfeld, got wind of the transfer law and decided to send their kids to school in Clayton.

In 2010, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that Turner and Breitenfeld could continue to send their kids to the Clayton schools and told the St. Louis County court to figure it out how the law should be enforced should other parents want to take advantage of it.

Yesterday the court came through with a ruling: The parents may have been acting within the law, but the law is unconstitutional. Back to the lousy St. Louis Public Schools with you!

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Last August we published a feature article titled Smackdown, chronicling the downfall of Angela Halliday, a former dean's list student who became addicted to heroin. After the overdose deaths of an acquaintance and, a month later, her boyfriend, Madison County, Illinois, prosecutors charged her with two counts of drug-induced homicide, alleging she delivered the fatal heroin to each of them, thus contributing to their deaths. (Whether or not Halliday actually "delivered" the heroin to them is a matter of debate.)

Halliday pleaded not-guilty to both charges, each of which carries a six-to-30-year prison sentence. Now, exactly one year after her arrest, without any kind of plea deal in the court record, a potentially high-profile trial looks more likely. (Movement on the second murder case will likely stall until the first case is resolved.)

Last Thursday Halliday's attorney, Steve Griffin, argued two motions in front of Third Judicial Circuit Associate Judge James Hackett. One of those motions sought to prohibit the State from submitting as evidence the very article we published.

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Billy Lee Little

A retired Baptist minister and licensed psychologist who, according to his biography, once hosted a counseling program on KMOX and worked as a sports psychologist for the baseball Cardinals, stands accused today of taking advantage of a female patient.

And the plaintiffs and their attorney believe more victims may be out there.
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ksdk.com

Pour

Following a 2008 shootout in Granite City involving off-duty St. Louis police officers and an innocent man, the City of St. Louis is on the hook for $250,000, Missouri Lawyers Weekly has reported, following a Sunshine request.

As we reported two years ago, city cop Bryan Pour entered a skirmish outside Mac N' Micks Sports Bar and Grill in November 2008, drew his weapon and shot Jeffrey Bladdick, of Granite City. (A second St. Louis officer -- Christopher Hantak -- was shot by a Pontoon Beach police officer when he refused to drop his weapon.) All the victims survived the ordeal. Pour later claimed he was acting in self-defense after being attacked by bar patrons and mistakenly shot Bladdick in the process. Pour, Hantak and a third officer involved in the fight were later terminated from the police force.

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The first of several films in which Favazza unwittingly appeared.

Tamara Favazza, formerly known as Jane Doe in court papers, won her appeal against Joe Francis' Girls Gone Wild empire for what she claimed was non-consensual use of her image in one Francis' videos, Girls Gone Wild Sorority Orgy 2. 

Favazza was only 20 years old when she went to Rum Jungle on Laclede's Landing the night a GGW crew was filming, way back in 2004. She was dancing for one of the cameras when a woman pulled down her shirt and exposed her breasts despite Favazza's stated unwillingness to do so. This brief footage ended up in several GGW DVDs, which Favazza learned of several years later through a friend of her husband. Her lack of consent -- both in the incident and in the use of the footage -- was the cornerstone of her case.
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