By Michael Murray
Collegian Staff Writer

A new state law that shields underage drinkers from prosecution when calling for medical attention for a sick friend will take effect on Sept. 5.

The law, which was officially signed by Gov. Tom Corbett on July 7, is intended to encourage young people to do the right thing for a sick friend should a dangerous situation arise, Sean Moll said, legislative assistant for Sen. John Rafferty who sponsored the bill.

“There is no doubt that this law is going to save lives,” Moll said. “Only time will tell how many.”

Moll said young people often try to do the right thing for their friends by putting them to bed while they are dangerously intoxicated. The safer decision in an emergency like this, he said, is to call medical authorities.

Linda LaSalle, associate director for educational services at University Health Services, said the new law will help young people feel more comfortable calling for help in a alcohol related emergency.

“It will support students to make the right decision, and that’s what is important,” LaSalle said.

The law, often referred to as the Good Samaritan Law, does specify a few provisions that help to ensure it will protect callers with the intention of helping the sick individual, rather than those only seeking protection for themselves.

According to the new law, the caller must have reasonable belief that he is the first one to make the call for the sick individual. Next, the caller must provide the authorities with his or her real full name. Finally, the caller must stay with the sick individual until the authorities arrive. If these provisions are met, the caller will not be prosecuted for underage possession or consumption of alcohol.

LaSalle said students should always take action to get their friends help, even if they are only slightly worried for their friend’s health. With this law, she said, students will be able to put their friend’s safety ahead of the fear of getting in trouble.

“It’s always more important to save a friend’s life,” LaSalle said.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — After decades of new laws to toughen sentencing for criminals, prosecutors have gained greater leverage to extract guilty pleas from defendants and reduce the number of cases that go to trial, often by using the threat of more serious charges with mandatory sentences or other harsher penalties.

Some experts say the process has become coercive in many state and federal jurisdictions, forcing defendants to weigh their options based on the relative risks of facing a judge and jury rather than simple matters of guilt or innocence. In effect, prosecutors are giving defendants more reasons to avoid having their day in court.

“We now have an incredible concentration of power in the hands of prosecutors,” said Richard E. Myers II, a former assistant United States attorney who is now an associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He said that so much influence now resides with prosecutors that “in the wrong hands, the criminal justice system can be held hostage.”

One crucial, if unheralded, effect of this shift is now coming into sharper view, according to academics who study the issue. Growing prosecutorial power is a significant reason that the percentage of felony cases that go to trial has dropped sharply in many places.

Plea bargains have been common for more than a century, but lately they have begun to put the trial system out of business in some courtrooms. By one count, fewer than one in 40 felony cases now make it to trial, according to data from nine states that have published such records since the 1970s, when the ratio was about one in 12. The decline has been even steeper in federal district courts.

Cases like Florida v. Shane Guthrie help explain why. After Mr. Guthrie, 24, was arrested here last year, accused of beating his girlfriend and threatening her with a knife, the prosecutor offered him a deal for two years in prison plus probation.

Mr. Guthrie rejected that, and a later offer of five years, because he believed that he was not guilty, his lawyer said. But the prosecutor’s response was severe: he filed a more serious charge that would mean life imprisonment if Mr. Guthrie is convicted later this year.

Because of a state law that increased punishments for people who had recently been in prison, like Mr. Guthrie, the sentence would be mandatory. So what he could have resolved for a two-year term could keep him locked up for 50 years or more.

The decrease in trials has also been a consequence of underfinanced public defense lawyers who can try only a handful of their cases, as well as, prosecutors say, the rise of drug courts and other alternative resolutions.

The overloaded court system has also seen comparatively little expansion in many places, making a huge increase in plea bargains a cheap and easy way to handle a near-tripling in felony cases over the past generation.

But many researchers say the most important force in driving down the trial rate has been state and federal legislative overhauls that imposed mandatory sentences and other harsher and more certain penalties for many felonies, especially those involving guns, drugs, violent crimes and repeat offenders.

Stiffer punishments were also put in place for specific crimes, like peddling drugs near a school or wearing a mask in certain circumstances. And legislators added reams of new felony statutes, vastly expanding the range of actions considered illegal.

These tougher penalties, by many accounts, have contributed to the nation’s steep drop in crime the past two decades. They have also swelled the prison population to levels that lawmakers in some states say they can no longer afford, and a few have rolled back some laws.

The ‘Trial Penalty’

In the courtroom and during plea negotiations, the impact of these stricter laws is exerted through what academics call the “trial penalty.” The phrase refers to the fact that the sentences for people who go to trial have grown harsher relative to sentences for those who agree to a plea.

In some jurisdictions, this gap has widened so much it has become coercive and is used to punish defendants for exercising their right to trial, some legal experts say.

“Legislators want to make it easy for prosecutors to get the conviction without having to go to trial,” said Rachel Barkow, a professor of law at New York University who studies how prosecutors use their power. “And prosecutors who are starved for resources want to use that leverage. And so now everyone acts with the assumption that the case should end with a plea.”

“When you have that attitude,” she said, “you penalize people who have the nerve to go to trial.”

Prosecutors say they are giving defendants options and are merely charging them based on what is allowed under the law for those who turn down pleas.

While legal experts say the effect is clear in persuading more defendants to forgo trials, the trial penalty is hard to quantify without examining individual cases and negotiations between prosecutors and defense lawyers.

That is because threats of harsher charges against defendants who reject plea deals often are the most influential factor in the outcome of a case, but this interplay is never reflected in official data.

“How many times is a mandatory sentence used as a chip in order to coerce a plea? They don’t keep records,” said Senior Judge John L. Kane Jr. of United States District Court in Denver, who believes that prosecutors have grown more powerful than judges. But it is very common, he added. “That’s what the public doesn’t see, and where the statistics become meaningless.”

But one result is obvious, he said: “We hardly have trials anymore.”

In 1977, the year Judge Kane was appointed to the bench, the ratio of guilty pleas to criminal trial verdicts in federal district courts was a little more than four to one; by last year, it was almost 32 to one.

Here in Florida, which has greatly toughened sentencing since the 1990s, felony defendants who opt for trial now routinely face the prospect of higher charges that mean prison terms 2, 5, or even 20 times as long as if they had pleaded guilty. In many cases, the process is reversed, and stiffer charges are dismissed in return for a plea.

Before new sentencing laws, the gap was narrower, and trials less risky, veteran lawyers here say. The first thing Denis deVlaming, a prominent Florida criminal defense lawyer, does with a new client is pull out a calculator to tally all the additional punishments the prosecutor can add to figure the likely sentence if the client is convicted at trial.

“They think I’m ready to charge them a fee, but I’m not,” he said. “I tell them in Florida, it’s justice by mathematics.”

No matter how strongly defendants believe they are innocent, he said, they could be taking dangerous risks by, for example, turning down a one-year plea bargain when the prosecutor threatens additional charges that carry a mandatory sentence 10 times as long.

A Power Shift

The transfer of power to prosecutors from judges has been so profound that an important trial ritual has become in some measure a lie, Mr. deVlaming said — the instructions judges read stating that the jury determines guilt or innocence, and the judge a proper sentence. The latter part is no longer true when mandatory minimums and, in many cases, sentencing guidelines apply, but jurors often do not know that.

Legal scholars like Paul Cassell, a conservative former federal judge and prosecutor who is now a law professor at the University of Utah, describe the power shift as a zero-sum game.

“Judges have lost discretion, and that discretion has accumulated in the hands of prosecutors, who now have the ultimate ability to shape the outcome,” Mr. Cassell said. “With mandatory minimums and other sentencing enhancements out there, prosecutors can often dictate the sentence that will be imposed.”

Without question, plea bargains benefit many defendants who have committed crimes and receive lighter sentences than they might after trial. It also limits cases that require considerable time and expense in court.

But many defendants who opt for trial effectively face more prison time for rejecting a plea than for committing the alleged crime.

In Mr. Guthrie’s case, he was initially charged with aggravated battery on a pregnant woman and false imprisonment. But after he rejected the plea bargains, the prosecutor, more than a year later, filed the more serious charge of first-degree felony kidnapping, based on the girlfriend’s accusation that he pulled her by the arm inside her home and, once outside, grabbed her hair and pulled her on her feet the distance of several parking spaces.

Nobody is suggesting that Mr. Guthrie, previously incarcerated for 18 months on gun, assault and drug charges, is a sympathetic figure. According to a police report, he punched and kicked his girlfriend, left her with a bruised and bloody nose and a face that “appeared to be swollen,” and threatened to cut her stomach with a knife.

The assistant state attorney handling the case, Frank Slavichak, did not return calls. The chief investigator for the office, Spencer Mann, said Mr. Guthrie’s choices dictated the course of the case.

But his lawyer, Craig DeThomasis, hired after the plea rejections, said he was “plainly being punished for exercising his right to trial.” According to Mr. Guthrie’s mother, Claudia Guthrie, the prosecutor told her son at a hearing this spring that if he did not plead guilty and take a five-year sentence, higher charges would be filed that mean “you’re going to get life.” Mr. Mann did not dispute that some sort of warning of new charges was presented.

Mr. DeThomasis said that there was no evidence the girlfriend was pregnant, and that she started the altercation by hitting him in the forehead with a pipe, landing him in the jail infirmary for a week. He pointed out that she was arrested in 2009 for attacking Mr. Guthrie after telling the police he had struck her, leading police to say in a report that she had “changed her story several times and could not explain her actions.” He also said she had a history of involuntary hospitalizations, which she declined to address in a 110-page sworn deposition in February.

Mr. Mann declined to comment on the girlfriend’s background but said none of it affected the credibility of the case.

Judges in many cases can set aside verdicts that they believe are unsupported by the evidence, but they generally have no power in mandatory-minimum cases to reduce punishments below levels established through legislation.

While the Guthrie case may be a particularly stark example of how much power one prosecutor can have over a defendant’s fate, many places have given district attorneys similar influence.

“There have been so many laws passed in the various states that just about always there is some enhancement available to the prosecutor that can be used as leverage in negotiations,” said Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association.

Mr. Burns, a former Utah prosecutor, did not dispute that sentencing-law changes had made trial riskier for defendants and helped drive down the percentage of cases taken to a verdict. He also acknowledged that the plea-bargain process “clearly is coercive” when defendants face harsher or more numerous charges for rejecting deals.

But he said plea bargains were also “extremely lenient in many instances because prosecutors are taking several criminal acts off the table.” He emphasized that lawmakers time and again have given prosecutors more leverage and said it was “grossly unrealistic” to criticize district attorneys for enforcing laws that they are duty-bound to uphold — even those that are ill-advised.

“There are a lot of criminal laws that are passed that we all kind of roll our eyes at,” he said. “Sometimes they are just repetitive; sometimes they are knee-jerk responses to some high-profile case, and therefore politically motivated.”

Though national statistics are not readily available, the trend toward lower trial rates is evident in a number of places.

The National Center for State Courts in Williamsburg, Va., found that the percentage of felonies taken to trial in nine states with available data fell to 2.3 percent in 2009, from 8 percent in 1976.

The number of jury trials rose slightly, while nonjury trials, where a judge decides guilt or innocence, fell sharply — all while caseloads nearly tripled. The states account for more than a third of the American population, and most have mandatory minimums or sentencing guidelines or have passed toughened sentencing laws.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics, after studying partial data on state-court felony prosecutions nationwide, found that from 1986 to 2006 the ratio of pleas to trials nearly doubled.

The shift has been clearer in federal district courts. After tougher sentencing laws were enacted in the 1980s, the percentage of criminal cases taken to trial fell to less than 3 percent last year, from almost 15 percent, according to data from the State University at Albany’s Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics. The explosion of immigration prosecutions, where trials are rare, skews the numbers, but the trend is evident even when those cases are not included.

Nearly nine of every 10 cases ended in pleas last year, the federal data show, while one in 12 were dismissed (the percentage of dismissed cases was substantially higher a generation ago).

The number of acquittals dropped even further. Last year, there was only one acquittal for every 212 guilty pleas or trial convictions in federal district courts. Thirty years ago, the ratio was one for every 22.

More Plea Bargaining

Experts like Ronald Wright, a former federal prosecutor and now a professor of law at Wake Forest University, say they fear that the steep decline in acquittals stems partly from more defendants, who might have winnable cases, deciding not to risk trials and reluctantly accepting plea bargains instead.

Some federal prosecutors worried that their power would be weakened by a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that made sentencing guidelines advisory only. But academics say the ruling had much less effect than what some predicted as many judges still largely follow the guidelines, and the ruling did not affect other laws that have given prosecutors more power.

While sentencing changes allowed legislators in this state to take credit for being tough on crime, they have also worked against their goal of trimming prison costs, leaving prosecutors caught in the middle.

“There is a big disconnect,” said Bill Cervone, the state attorney in Gainesville and the chief prosecutor in six counties that make up Florida’s Eighth Judicial Circuit. “There is subtle and not so subtle pressure” to reduce the numbers sent to prison.

Mr. Cervone, who was head of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, added, “Our position is, ‘Please don’t pass any new crime laws while you are also cutting our budgets.’ ” His budget has been cut 20 percent in four years.

The fiscal strains extend to judges, who face pressure to keep dockets moving. Some do not appreciate defendants who refuse pleas and then lose a time-consuming trial, he and other lawyers say.

“There are some judges who will punish you for going to trial,” Mr. Cervone said. “Legally, you cannot impose a longer sentence on someone because they exercised their right to trial,” he said, speaking of judges. “Factually, there are ways to do it.”

In some cases, he added, he wished judges had more discretion, instead of having to automatically impose an inflexible punishment.

So, too, do many judges faced with cases where legislatively mandated penalties do not square with their idea of justice.

Like the one in Polk County, Fla. that began when Orville Wollard said he fired his registered handgun into his living room wall to scare his daughter’s boyfriend out of the house after he repeatedly threatened his family.

In Mr. Wollard’s view, he was protecting his family and did not try to hurt the boyfriend, who was not hit, though the judge said the bullet missed him by inches. But after Mr. Wollard turned down a plea offer of five years of felony probation, prosecutors won a conviction two years ago for aggravated assault with a firearm. Because the gun was fired, a mandatory-minimum law required a 20-year term.

At his sentencing, Mr. Wollard said he felt as if he were in “some banana republic” and described the boyfriend as a violent drug dealer. But prosecutors said the judge had “no discretion” because of the state law.

Reluctantly, the judge agreed. “If it weren’t for the mandatory minimum aspect of this, I would use my discretion and impose some separate sentence,” he told Mr. Wollard, adding that he was “duty bound” to impose 20 years.

You know that photo of you, bleary-eyed and smiley, red plastic cup in hand? You know the one. You look like a hot, drunk mess, your friend keeps tagging you in it, it’s on Facebook for the whole Internet to see? That one. I bet you’d be having words with your tag-happy little pal if the UA administration were keeping tabs on your profile.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, much of the discussion at the National Conference on Law and Higher Education centered around issues presented by Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites. These issues have colleges wondering if there is a need to police the Internet in order to monitor what their students and faculty members are doing or posting online.

In May 2006, Stacey Snyder was a student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, just days away from her graduation at the time. Then the university denied her a teaching degree. The university claimed it was because a photo on her MySpace profile. Remember, it was 2006 and people still used MySpace.

The photo in question was captioned “Drunken Pirate” and featured Snyder in a pirate hat and drinking from a red plastic cup. According to the university, it promoted underage drinking. Snyder was 25 years old then, and working as a student teacher at a high school. She maintained the photo was taken off campus and after school hours at a costume party.

Snyder sued Millersville University for refusing her a degree, citing it as a violation of her right to free speech. She eventually earned an English degree instead. A federal judge ruled against her in 2008. According to The Washington Post, university officials said the case was not an issue of First Amendment rights, but of performance. The photo, they said, was just one example of many that Snyder did not deserve a degree in education.

Some colleges have codes of conduct and policies pertaining specifically to social media. Concordia University expects students to “assume the responsibility for the content posted and are subject to sanctions” if that content violates Concordia’s conduct code.

These policies also sometimes attempt to address online harassment, especially in response to cases like Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student who killed himself after his roommate secretly recorded him with another man on a webcam. The problem is defining what online bullying is, and where to draw the line between offensive speech and speech that legitimately interferes with someone else’s education.

Cases like Snyder’s or Clementi’s, and discussions like the one at the National Conference on Law and Higher Education, ask: How should a university babysit what its students and employees post on the Internet? Should there be any obligation to do so?

I don’t actually know how much of a reach a social media policy should have. While universities wrestle with the wording of policies that people won’t read anyway, students ought to take responsibility on an individual basis, of their own accord. You’ve had a few too many if you think an employer should be able to find your record for tequila shots via Google.

There are existing precautions for making sure anything that the university, or a future employer, could deem inappropriate and against any code of conduct is hidden. Set your profile to private. Google yourself. If you can still find your Facebook, be more private. The same applies to every hash tag you use on Twitter, each photo you reblog on Tumblr, everything.

But more importantly, remember that privacy settings only go so far. The fact that university administrations are beginning to wonder if they are obligated to include social media clauses in their student and faculty conduct policies should be an embarrassment to all of us. Only the most naive people expect you to avoid all college kid shenanigans. But everyone should expect you to keep them offline.

For the sake of making sure you don’t lose your degree because you had to be a drunken pirate, think before you post.
— Kristina Bui is the opinions editor of the Arizona Daily Wildcat. She can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.

State College attorney Andrew Shubin said Centre County police officers are too concerned with generating a high number of student arrests for low-level offenses at the University Park Undergraduate Association-sponsored town hall meeting Monday night.

“What the students don’t understand is that Penn State is not Pittsburgh or Philadelphia. State College is like Mississippi — the prosecutors, defense attorneys and jurors are very conservative,” Shubin said.

Shubin, a guest attorney at the meeting, said that if he was defending a client in a Philadelphia county, the first thing that he would tell the judge is that his client is a student at Penn State because it is highly recognized institution.

But he said if he were representing a student in Centre County, it would not matter that the student attended Penn State because his client’s background would be nearly identical to that of 40,000 other students.

Shubin said that it is important for students to realize that State College is a school zone, so low-level offenses, such as drinking and selling marijuana, are treated much more harshly. If his client lived in Philadelphia and was caught selling a quarter pound of marijuana, he would get a misdemeanor charge at the most, Shubin said. If his client was caught selling the illegal substance in State College, he would most likely receive a two to four year mandatory prison sentence.

“I hate that I am paying taxes to incarcerate engineering majors,” Shubin said.

Shubin said he stresses the importance of students knowing their rights, which are the same for all citizens regardless of age. He also offered three rules for interacting with the police when questioned by authorities.

“Never give a statement to a police officer if you are the suspect of a crime. The answer to every question after you give your name should be lawyer, attorney or counselor. Always be cooperative with the police officer — anything you say will be used against you,” he said.

UPUA President Christian Ragland said it is important that students do not misinterpret Shubin’s advice.

“We should still set the precedent that wrong is wrong, Ragland (senior-political science) said. “Students should know their rights, but above all, they shouldn’t do wrong.”

Shubin said times have changed since he and parents of Penn State students were in college.

“We’re living in a totally different world now — but I’m not convinced that it is a better world, Shubin said. “The government can put so much destruction in your life when we did the same thing when we were younger and grew up to be law-abiding citizens.”

UPUA Programming Committee Chairwoman Ali Cook said she believes students will find Shubin’s advice helpful.

“I think he provided a valuable service for students and I don’t think he encouraged students to engage in illegal activities,” Cook (sophomore-finance and economics) said.

Ragland also discussed the issue of student safety and handed out surveys to collect data on students’ feelings regarding campus safety. The surveys are also available online at UPUA’s website for completion.

PITTSBURGH – The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania filed a federal lawsuit today on behalf of a Newcastle couple, Elizabeth Mort and Alex Rodriguez, whose newborn daughter was seized and held for five days by Lawrence County Children and Youth Services (LCCYS) after the mother failed a hospital drug test because she had recently eaten a bagel with poppy seeds.

“No parent should have to go through what this couple did,” said ACLU of Pennsylvania staff attorney Sara Rose, who is representing Mort and Rodriguez. “This case is a tragic illustration of the harm that can result when the government removes a child based only on the accusation of a third party and without any independent investigation.”

After the birth of their first child, a healthy baby girl named Isabella, Mort and Rodriguez returned home from Jameson Hospital on April 29, 2010, expecting to settle in to the challenges and joys of parenthood. Instead, one day later, the new parents were confronted at their home by two LCCYS caseworkers and two police officers armed with a court order to remove the three-day-old infant. This was the first time Mort learned that she had tested positive for drugs while in the hospital. Despite Mort’s insistence that she had never used illegal drugs while pregnant, the case workers took Isabella away and held her for five days.

“When she was gone our family was just at a loss of words,” Mort said. “I couldn’t stop crying. Alex just didn’t even know how to be himself. It felt like our heart was ripped in pieces. The most important person was missing, and we didn’t know when we would see her again.”

According to the lawsuit, Jameson Hospital, where Mort gave birth, uses a much lower threshold for a positive drug screening than federal guidelines, leading to a higher rate of false positives. Jameson has a policy of testing all maternity patients for drugs and requires its staff to notify LCCYS of a positive drug test. Neither practice is required by federal or state law. According to the hospital’s policy, a screen is considered positive for opiates at 300 nanograms/mL or above. Federal work-place guidelines, in contrast, are set at 2000 nanograms/mL to avoid false positives from common foods and medicines.

Throughout her stay in the hospital, Mort was never informed that she had tested positive for drugs, nor was she asked whether she had eaten any foods that could interfere with her test result. Mort and her fiancé, Rodriguez, only learned that poppy seeds could create a false positive in a drug test after Mort’s distraught father began his own investigation into what could have caused his daughter’s positive result. Mort had eaten an “everything” bagel with poppy seeds from Dunkin’ Donuts two hours before checking into the hospital.

“Jameson Hospital’s policy of drug-testing all obstetrical patients for opiates at cut-off levels so low that they are triggered by the mere consumption of a poppy seed bagel, and then reporting these unreliable results to LCCYS is plainly misguided, and contributed in a significant way to the improper removal of Isabella from the safety and comfort of her home,” said Patricia Dodge of Meyer, Unkovic & Scott and one of the attorneys representing Mort and Rodriguez.

The lawsuit claims that Jameson Hospital was responsible for the harm to Mort caused by the removal of her baby because it incorrectly interpreted the results of her drug test and reported a false positive to LCCYS.

The lawsuit also alleges that LCCYS has a policy of violating parents’ due process rights by authorizing its caseworkers to take infants into protective custody based solely on positive drug tests by their mothers without any reasonable suspicion that the infant has been abused or is in danger of abuse. In this case, LCCYS made no attempt to interview the parents or other family members or contact Mort’s obstetrician before seizing Isabella.

During one meeting between LCCYS and Mort, a caseworker admitted the agency had experienced problems with Jameson in the past and that it made a mistake by removing Isabella. The baby was returned to her parents on May 5, 2010. The following day, LCCYS filed a motion with the court saying “[a]fter further investigation, there is no evidence to support illegal drug use by the natural mother, Elizabeth Mort.”

Testing positive for opiates after eating poppy seeds is not an urban myth. Several courts have recognized the risks of a false positive due to common foods and medication. In a 2004 opinion, the Pennsylvania Superior Court stated “We note that eating poppy seeds can produce an opiate positive test result.”

The case is Mort v. Lawrence County Children and Youth Services, et al., and Mort and Rodriguez are represented by Dodge of Meyer, Unkovic & Scott and Rose and Witold Walczak of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

More information about the case, including a client statement, photo, and a copy of the complaint, can be found at: http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/mortvlawrencecountychildre.htm

Alcohol offenses and thefts continue to be the biggest problems at Penn State, according to the university’s annual crime report.
“If you look at driving under the influence, liquor law and public drunkenness, those numbers are still high,” said Penn State Deputy Police Chief Tyrone Parham.
In 2009, those three offenses alone accounted for 783 of the 1,726 Part II offenses. Part II offenses also include drug offenses and weapons possession.
During the past three years, alcohol-related offenses have gone up, along with the blood alcohol content levels of Penn State students who have required medical attention for alcohol overdoses, Parham said.
“We’d like to see all of those numbers go down. Unfortunately, the trend is people seem to be drinking larger quantities and volumes of alcohol,” he said.
Theft is also a big concern for police on campus. In 2009, theft was responsible for 439 of the 526 Part I offenses, which also include forcible rape, assault and burglary.
One reason for the large number was that a lot of the stolen property was either unattended or not secured. “They’re kind of crimes of opportunity,” said Parham.
In general, the total number of Part I and Part II offenses — more serious and more violent crimes and lesser offenses, respectively — has remained consistent during the past three years. In 2007, 2008 and 2009 offenses totaled 2,055, 2,268 and 2,252, respectively.
The only notable increase in Part I offenses during the past three years was in aggravated assaults. In 2007 and 2008 combined, there were 13 aggravated assaults. That number jumped to 23 in 2009, with 12 involving dangerous weapons.
Still, the rise in aggravated assaults hasn’t been a big problem, Parham indicated. Many of the assaults involved people who knew each other and were not random acts of violence, he said.
The report was sent out Saturday by e-mail to students, faculty and staff at University Park.
Parham said Penn State and its surrounding community remain one of the safest places to live in the country.
“Generally speaking, it’s a good thing that we don’t have significant increases in serious assaults, robberies, homicides, forceful rapes and all those types of things,” he said.
Chad Lear is a Penn State journalism student.

At its meeting on Tuesday night, the Interfraternity Council (IFC) hosted State College attorney Andrew Shubin.

Shubin talked about knowing one’s rights, Vice President for Standards Nick Rodriguez said, but the presentation was aimed more at fraternities.

Tom Piarulli, Vice President for Risk Management, said this kind of presentation is especially important for organizations like fraternities that have a house and property.

“It’s good to know your rights as a college student and a fraternity in general,” Piarulli (senior-security and risk analysis) said, “Plus, we want to make sure we’re in compliance with borough regulations.”

Shubin originally reached out to the IFC to come to Tuesday’s meeting.

“He’s really proactive,” Vice President for Public Relations Dan Cartwright said, “He did his presentation for free in order to get fraternities to bring him to their house for a more formal presentation.”