Occasionally a robber chooses the wrong victim and ends up becoming the target. This was the case with a robbery in downtown Chicago.

A 50-year-old woman gave a robber a religious lecture last Friday after chasing him for almost a mile and cornering him in an alley, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The incident occurred shortly after midnight when the woman was riding a Chicago Transit Authority bus in the Loop. Jenar Sanders, 18, grabbed her wallet from her purse, jumped off the bus at Huron and State streets and made a run for it.

The woman began chasing Sanders and alerting others as she ran down the street. A hotel staff member at the Omni Hotel and the CTA bus driver notified police, officers said.

The chase ended with Sanders cornered in an alley off Superior Street between Wabash Avenue and Rush Street. He was surrounded by the victim and others who had joined the chase.

“She kept telling him God didn’t want him to steal her wallet,” a police source told the Tribune.

Sanders is 6-foot-3 and weighs 270 pounds. The woman is 5-foot-8 and a little more than half his weight.

“The woman’s lucky,” a police officer told the Tribune. “She grabbed him. She was lucky this guy wasn’t a violent guy. They had him in an alley without an exit. He’s a fairly substantial man.”

I would agree with the police officer. I had a similar incident occur when I was 18 years old. As I was entering the bank where I worked, a young women tried to steal my purse. I beat her up, dragged her into the bank and left her in the lobby while I and my co-workers hid behind the teller glass window waiting for the police to come. I am not a large woman, but I used to have a lot of sassy spunk.

As I have aged and become wiser, I would now just give up the wallet. First of all, I can’t run as fast as I once could, but secondly, there are far too many violent people out there and it’s not worth losing your life or getting seriously injured. Now I carry pepper spray and an alarm in case I am faced with a life or death situation – in which case I think that 18 year-old spunk would kick in. It was instinctive to fight back, now my instincts would tell me to let it go.

I am glad the woman was not harmed and that others joined in the effort to help her.  

Sanders was arrested by two officers at 12:35 a.m. He admitted to the crime and was charged with theft.

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T. Jimenez with Anita Alvarez - State's Attorney

Thaddeus “T.J.” Jimenez spent 16 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon occurrence. There are many people behind bars for crimes they did not commit. I just watched a program where a man could not get help through the regular channels. He hired a private investigator who eventually dug up the truth, the man was given another trial, and he was found not guilty. He had spent about 20 years in prison.

Most wrongfully convicted people are not fortunate enough to be exonerated, let alone receive the type of reward Mr. Jimenez received. Attorneys for the plaintiff say they believe the award made Tuesday is the largest ever by a U.S. jury in a wrongful conviction case. Of course, you can’t put a price tag on someone’s life. You can never give back what that person lost.

“Sometimes the criminal justice system makes a mistake,” said Jon Loevy, one of Jimenez’s attorneys. “In this case, we proved that’s exactly what happened.”

Jimenez sued the City of Chicago and his attorneys won his case. A federal jury awarded him $25 million.

After sitting through a two-week trial at the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago, the jury deliberated for about a day. The evidence exonerating Mr. Jimenez must have been overwhelming for the jury to reach a decision so quickly.

Jimenez was 13 when he was arrested in the 1993 gang-related slaying of Eric Morro, 19, near the intersection of West Belmont and North Sacramento Avenues. Jimenez was convicted in two separate trials. He was then freed in 2009 after a witness recanted and investigators analyzed a recording of a man admitting to the shooting. An Indiana man, Juan Carlos Torres, has been charged in Morro’s case and is awaiting trial.

“They strong-armed witnesses into falsely implicating [Jimenez], and when the real suspect turned up, they chose to ignore him because they had already built the case against the wrong guy,” Loevy said. Loevy said that police had “framed” Jimenez.

In 2010, Cook County Criminal Court presiding Judge Paul Biebel Jr. signed  Jimenez’s “certificate of innocence,” clearing the way for Jimenez to receive state compensation for his wrongful imprisonment.

In what appears to be a show of appreciation and respect, Loevy said he is hesitant to criticize Cook County prosecutors in their handling of the case because “they recognized there had been an injustice and they corrected it.” You have to give the prosecutor’s office a lot of credit for correcting a wrong. They generally don’t want a wrongful conviction on their books. Anita Alvarez is Cook County’s State’s Attorney (shown in picture with Jimenez).

I am not so sure the fight is over yet for Jimenez based on a statement made by a spokesman for the city’s Department of Law. The spokesman, Roderick Drew, said, “We are very disappointed with the decision.” ”We will be exploring all available options.”

Politics usually play a large part in these types of cases. For example, if it can be proved that those working on the case when Jimenez was arrested and convicted are guilty of any wrongful doing, they have to answer a lot of questions – even 16 years later.

Jimenez, who now is in his early 30s, lives in the western suburbs and works at a Sonic restaurant. He has another set of legal problems facing him. In December 2011, Jimenez was convicted of illegally possessing drugs and now faces up to three years in prison at his sentencing on Feb. 1.

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A Wisconsin man charged with domestic abuse told police that a “ghost” had attacked his wife and was responsible for her injuries.

The weird story by Michael West, 41, did not provide much of a defense as police arrested him for strangulation, battery, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest.

After responding to a report of a domestic dispute on Jan. 15, at the West residence in Fond du Lac, Wis., police found West’s wife crying and bleeding from the nose. Drops of blood stained areas of the kitchen and her Packers’ jersey.

The woman told police her husband repeatedly punched her in the face and attempted to strangle her “to the point that [her] vision went black and [she] felt like she was going to pass out,” the report said. In a criminal complaint, the victim says that when she tried to dial 911, her husband punched her in the face.

Police said West appeared intoxicated and was yelling and swearing at the two officers questioning him. The man claimed his wife had fallen several times, causing her to sustain injuries to her face and neck.

When pressed by a cop–who pointed to marks on the woman’s neck–the intoxicated West replied with slurred speech and shifted his story. “A ghost did it,” he said.

After a struggle, he was handcuffed and transported to the county lockup, where he remains in custody in lieu of $1000 bail.

His wife told police the fight was started over the impending foreclosure on their home.

Sources: MSNBC and The Smoking Gun

Although the picture in this story shows a book for “dummies,” it would take some extremely intelligent people to stay one step ahead of the constant attacks being made on corporations by cyber-criminals. This book wouldn’t really help you very much. You might need a Master’s degree in computer programming at minimum.

Malware designed to damage computer systems is now being secreted into portable documents, commonly known as PDD, by cyber-criminals whose efforts usually are thwarted by antivirus software. Everyone should have antivirus software on their computers – that is Computer Protection 101.

These PDF attacks are said to be aimed at corporate and government institutions and according to Defense analysts cited in online commentaries. The attacks are part of sophisticated schemes aimed at extracting information from systems otherwise thought to be firewalled and secure.

Several corporate sources confirmed defense organizations were targeted in the attacks. The attacks not only appear to be well-funded, but they could come from an unknown country or corporate entity. This, of course, makes it harder to track down these cyber-criminals.

This latest cyber-threat became news after warnings came from the computer software company Symantec, along with comments from defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin and software provider Adobe that acknowledged the risk.

Cyber-criminals trying to take advantage of the alleged weakness in Adobe’s PDF reading and editing software use a well-known family of malware called Sykipot, Symantec said.

The attackers aim the malicious code at so called zero-day vulnerabilities. These are vulnerabilities that haven’t yet been reported by security experts or software makers. The attackers also hit PDF as a common business application hoping that many users wouldn’t have kept up with the latest security patches. This is another good reason to keep your software current with updates. Many of us are guilty of putting off our updates because we are rushed, working on open programs, or it’s a bad time to reboot our computers.

On Dec. 1, Symantec reported a high volume of e-mail carrying Sykipot malware aimed at Acrobat Reader and Acrobat editing software. The attackers sent the messages mostly to high-ranking executives who could have sensitive or strategic information on their computer networks.

Just to give you an idea of how sophisticated these attacks are: Commands can be sent to targeted computers to gather system and network information and determine whether a computer system is even was worth hacking into. The attackers were also able to customize commands to exfiltrate the information.

Symantec said cyber-attackers were behind a March 2010 attack on a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Adobe was apparently alerted to the risk by Lockheed Martin and the Defense Security Information Exchange (DSIE), a group of major defense contractors that share information about computer attacks.

DSIE includes companies that are part of the so-called the “Defense Industrial  Base.” It includes some of the largest U.S. defense contractors including Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Pratt and Whitney and Raytheon, Computerworld said.

Symantec published an image of a redacted email of the attack’s bait — the promise of a 2012 guide to policies on new contract awards — that it said was a sample of the pitches that tried to dupe recipients into opening the attached PDF document.

The Sykipot malware encrypts the stolen data after it has been retrieved from the victimized firm - while it is still stored on the company’s network and as it’s being transmitted to a hacker-controlled server.

Symantec said the same group of hackers who launched the attacks against IE6 and IE7 in 2010 were also responsible for Reader-based attacks since November.

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