Tuesday, August 14, 2012


More disheartening news from incarceration nation

What would be of interest here would be to look at the crime-rate in Meridian. If the harsh policies lead to a lower crime-rate, they could be seen as having some justification -- B

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, juvenile authorities in Meridian, Mississippi, have been following a policy in which children suspended from school, even for minor infractions, find themselves being incarcerated:
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has released investigative findings determining that children in predominantly black Meridian, Miss. have had their constitutional rights violated by the Lauderdale County Youth Court, the Meridian Police Department, and the Mississippi Division of Youth Services in what civil rights investigators allege is a school to prison pipeline with even dress code violations resulting in incarceration.

The report declares:
“The system established by the City of Meridian, Lauderdale County, and DYS to incarcerate children for school suspensions ‘shocks the conscience,’ resulting in the incarceration of children for alleged ‘offenses’ such as dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect.”

The report continues:
“By policy and practice, [the Meridian Police Department] MPD automatically arrests all students referred to MPD by the District. The children arrested by MPD are then sent to the County juvenile justice system, where existing due process protections are illusory and inadequate. The Youth Court places children on probation, and the terms of the probation set by the Youth Court and DYS require children on probation to serve any suspensions from school incarcerated in the juvenile detention center.”

Because Meridian has a black population of about 62 percent, it is almost inevitable that many of the adults involved in this outrage also are black, and I have doubts that it is a situation of whites automatically victimizing blacks. Instead, this seems to be yet another example of the Pavlovian response of American authorities to see incarceration as a first option for just about everything.

Nonetheless, as Radley has demonstrated in his articles about Cory Maye and fraudulent forensics by prosecutors in Mississippi, little has changed in the Magnolia State from the days when jurors acquitted the murderers of Emmett Till because they didn’t believe a white person should be punished for murdering someone who was black.

Original report here




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Monday, August 13, 2012

St. Paul Cops Shoot Dog in Wrong-Door Raid, Force Handcuffed Kids to Sit Near the Corpse

A St. Paul, Minnesota family claims in a lawsuit that police officers who conducted a wrong-door raid on their home shot their dog, and then forced their three handcuffed children to sit near the dead pet while officers ransacked the home. The lawsuit, which names Ramsey County, the Dakota County Drug Task Force, and the DEA, and asks for $30 million in civil rights violations and punitive damages after a wrong-door raid, also claims that the officers kicked the children and deprived one of them of her diabetes medication.

The suit also alleges that one of the lead officers with the task force "provided false information" in order to get a warrant to raid the Franco family's home. (That information being the Franco family's address, and not that of their supposedly criminal neighbor Rafael Ybarra.)

And boy, did Ybarra miss out on a horrific raid. Courthouse News reports:
But on the night of July 13, 2010, the task force broke down the Francos' doors, "negligently raided the home of plaintiffs, by raiding the wrong home and physically brutalizing all the above-named occupants of said house," the complaint states.

Even after learning that they were in the wrong house, the complaint states, the drug busters stayed in the Francos' home and kept searching it.

They "handcuffed all of the inhabitants of the plaintiffs' home except plaintiff Analese Franco who was forced, virtually naked, from her bed onto the floor at gunpoint by officers of the St. Paul Police Department SWAT team and officers of the St. Paul Police Department."

The complaint states: "Upon forcibly breaching the plaintiffs' home, defendants terrorized the plaintiffs at gun and rifle point.

"Each plaintiff was forced to the floor at gun and rifle point and handcuffed behind their backs.

"Defendants shot and killed the family dog and forced the handcuffed children to sit next to the carcass of their dead pet and bloody pet for more than an hour while defendants continued to search the plaintiffs' home."

One child "was kicked in the side, handcuffed and searched at gunpoint," the family says.

Another child, a girl, "a diabetic, was handcuffed at gunpoint and prevented by officer from obtaining and taking her medication, thus induced a diabetic episode as a result of low-blood sugar levels."

Shawn Scovill of the taskforce may have raided the wrong house, but he didn't want to let the opportunity to rifle through someone's things go to waste. So he and his team ransacked the Franco house for over an hour, and managed to find a .22 caliber pistol in the "basement bedroom of Gilbert Castillo," which the suit says they attributed to the head of the Franco household, Roberto Franco. According to the suit, Franco was convicted of unlawful possession of a firearm, and remains behind bars. (If anyone can weigh in on the legal loophole that might allow evidence seized during a wrong-door raid to be used in court, please fill me in. Also, are Minnesota gun laws that strict?)

Since the DEA is named in the suit, the Francos' legal team will likely find itself going head-to-head with Obama administration lawyers, who argued a similar case earlier this year before the Ninth Circuit. Short recap of the proceedings: The DOJ sought a summary dismissal of a lawsuit filed against seven DEA agents for their rough treatment of a family of four--mother, father, two very young daughters--during a wrong-door raid conducted during the Bush administration. The Ninth Circuit, denied the DOJ's request for a summary dismissal, and drew a bright line between how adults are treated during raids, and how children are treated during raids.

So there's reason to hope that any request of a summary dismissal of the Francos' case (by local law or federal attorneys) won't fly based simply on allegations that the children were cuffed, kicked, deprived of medicine, and made to sit near their dead pet for an hour. But I don't think suing over the wrong-door aspect will get the Franco family very far, unless they can prove the mistake on the warrant was intentional and that the officers were aware of the address error before the raid was conducted.

Original report here




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Sunday, August 12, 2012

Federal lockups: Lost hope, guilty pleas

One of the constant themes in both movies and television shows dealing with crime and the courts is the use of shortcuts by the authorities to nail someone who obviously is guilty. Messy things like due process of law and rights of the accused are so 1787 and have no place in modern society where outcomes are more important than the way one reaches those ends.

The ends can be frightening. The New York Times reports that one of the reasons that more than 94 percent of criminal charges in both state and federal cases end in plea bargains is that prosecutors can hang the prospect of stiff sentences over the heads of anyone who decided to go to trial and is found guilty, a situation that led Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to note that the American criminal justice system has become “a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”

Innocent people often are swept up on that tide of guilty pleas. Regular readers of this blog may understand this is so, but most Americans are incredulous. Why in the world would innocent people agree to plead to something they had not done? Is it not the situation in the USA that if you have done nothing wrong, you don’t have to worry about being charged or convicted?

Unfortunately, one of the things I hear most from people wrongfully accused of crimes has been, “I didn’t know this was happening in America.” Well, it does and much more often than one would think, especially with federal prosecutors, who have weapons at their disposal that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have considered utterly barbaric.

Not only has federal criminal law essentially done away with the bedrock of Anglo-American law, the mens rea requirement, but federal prosecutors can pile charges upon charges, taking the same alleged act and fashioning multiple offenses from it. For that matter, federal prosecutors are not even required to know the laws they supposedly enforce and prosecute and when they are wrong, they pay no price and innocent people remain in prison.

In a shocking article, USA Today recently reported on a horrific situation in North Carolina in which federal prosecutors went after “scores” of innocent people for acts that were perfectly legal. According to the newspaper:
Terrell McCullum did not commit a federal crime by carrying a shotgun and a rifle out of his ex-girlfriend’s house.

But he is serving a federal prison sentence for it. And the fact that everyone — including the U.S. Justice Department— agrees that he is legally innocent might not be enough to set him free.

A USA TODAY investigation, based on court records and interviews with government officials and attorneys, found more than 60 men who went to prison for violating federal gun possession laws, even though courts have since determined that it was not a federal crime for them to have a gun.

Many of them don’t even know they’re innocent.

Lest one think that prosecutors even care about what they have done, think again. While the U.S. Department of “Justice” worked hard to put them into prison (mostly on plea bargains, of course), it refuses to lift a finger to right the wrong:
Still, the Justice Department has not attempted to identify the men, has made no effort to notify them, and, in a few cases in which the men have come forward on their own, has argued in court that they should not be released.

Justice Department officials said it is not their job to notify prisoners that they might be incarcerated for something that they now concede is not a crime. And although they have agreed in court filings that the men are innocent, they said they must still comply with federal laws that put strict limits on when and how people can challenge their convictions in court.

“We can’t be outcome driven,” said Anne Tompkins, the U.S. attorney in Charlotte.

For Tompkins to make that quote is especially rich, because federal prosecutors in the federal Western District of North Carolina for years have been nothing but outcome-driven. After her office secured a counterfeiting conviction against Bernard Von NotHouse, who had minted silver coins, Tompkins announced that NotHouse was a “terrorist” who threatened “the economic stability of this country.” (One is left asking how the inflationary policies of the U.S. government create stability.)

Tompkins and her colleagues in the Western District also have another weapon they use to try to force innocent people to plead guilty: the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, which also is used as a federal lockup. To put it mildly, conditions in that jail are horrific, and they violate all human decency, and that works to the advantage of prosecutors.

Prisoners there get only a small cup of water each day, the food is especially bad, with dinner in some cases being nothing but a stale piece of cornbread. Authorities do not give prisoners underwear changes, deny them soap, and because bathrooms are not located in cells, prisoners must ask permission to use the facilities, requests that routinely are denied. Forget having soap for showers, and prisoners who are on prescription medications often find those meds either withheld or given in irregular doses at irregular times.

It is not difficult for federal prosecutors to find ways to hold people in lockups indefinitely. They can claim flight risk, or danger to society, or a thousand other things, most of which are not true but federal prosecutors long ago decided that truth was irrelevant to their outcome-driven missions.

Not surprisingly, people held for any length of time in these conditions become malleable to plea agreements. When someone is denied medications, thought processes may become irregular or skewed, and by actively working to destroy both the physical and mental health of people accused of committing federal crimes, prosecutors are easily able to hold out promises of better living condition — as long as the accused give prosecutors what they want.

It is difficult for someone to maintain innocence while being brutalized by the system, and when prosecutors are able to hold out the unhappy prospects for someone to face such horrific living conditions for decades, we should not be surprised that so many people will plead to something — anything — just to get out of their present circumstances.

Such conditions are not limited to Charlotte, although federal prosecutors in the Western District are notorious for using any tricks, including lying to judges and the media, in order to get what they want. The culture of lying and brutality that has been embedded in the U.S. Department of Justice for many decades is alive and well in North Carolina.

Original report here




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Saturday, August 11, 2012

Asset seizure and forfeiture — the state’s (often wrong) rationale for seizing currency during a traffic stop

What are the risks of transporting large sums of cash when you’re traveling? Obviously, you could get robbed or get involved in an accident and lose the money. Your car could catch on fire while you’re buying gas and your currency could go up in smoke. A number of bad things could happen if you carry a large amount of cash on you when you travel. But, one risk that many folks never consider is that a law enforcement officer could decide to seize your cash, even if you are not committing a crime and the officer cannot show any reason to believe that you have committed a crime.

If you’ve never had a law enforcement officer stop you for a traffic violation and then ask for your “consent” to search your vehicle, you probably find it difficult to believe that you or any other “law abiding citizen” could become embroiled in a criminal case or a forfeiture lawsuit just because you happen to be carrying a large amount of currency. But, it can, and does, happen.

One Texas Court of Appeals case, Deschenes v. State, 253 S.W.3d 374 (Tex.App.‑Amarillo 2008, pet. ref.), catalogued the various ways that the State tries to justify a seizure and later forfeiture of a large amount of currency discovered after a traffic stop. Justice Pirtle wrote in the majority opinion in Deschenes listing twenty two arguments the State advanced to justify the seizure:
“Here, the evidence tending to establish a connection between the money and some unnamed criminal activity amounts to mere conjecture. In support of a nexus between Appellant’s $17,620 and some unidentified “criminal activity,” the State points to profiling characteristics and a positive alert by a narcotics dog: (1) Appellant opened the passenger door to speak to the officer, handed him his wallet when asked for his license, and exited on the passenger side at the officer’s request; (2) car had energy drinks and fast food wrappers on the floorboard giving it a “lived‑in” look; (3) he could not give his uncle’s exact address in San Diego; (4) he was traveling east to west on Interstate 40;[9] (5) he was nervous throughout the encounter; (6) he stared at his vehicle rather than maintaining eye contact when answering one of Esqueda’s questions; (7) he denied carrying a large sum of cash; (8) he was in possession of scales; (9) he avoided showing Esqueda [the investigating officer] the money; (10) the money was in a plastic bag; (11) it was a large amount of money; (12) the money was divided into bundles and wrapped with rubber bands; (13) he had an empty suitcase; (14) he denied having any drugs in his vehicle; (15) he stated he was going to Las Vegas; (16) he failed to produce “documentation” for the money; (17) a narcotics dog alerted to the money and the large empty suitcase; (18) an odor of narcotics on the empty suitcase; (19) the close proximity of the cash to the empty suitcase that presumably contained narcotics at one time; (20) an odor of narcotics on the cash; (21) the money was enough to purchase a felony amount of narcotics; (22) money from drug trafficking travels east to west.”

What could have lead to the State’s advancing twenty two arguments to try to justify the search of Mr. Deschenes’ vehicle and the seizure of Mr. Deschenes’ $17,500.00 in currency – and his later indictment for “money laundering”? Was Deschenes in the process of robbing a bank or making a drug deal? Hardly. He was getting a traffic ticket. Here are the facts of the case from the Court of Appeals opinion:
On January 22, 2002, DPS [Texas Department of Public Safety] Trooper Oscar Esqueda stopped [Mr. Deschenes] for speeding on Interstate 40 in Gray County. Esqueda approached [Mr. Deschenes’] car on the passenger side to avoid passing traffic, and [Mr. Deschenes] opened the passenger car door to speak with him. Esqueda observed empty beverage containers and fast food wrappers strewn on the car’s floorboard. After [Mr. Deschenes] produced his driver’s license, Esqueda informed him that he was speeding, asked him to get out of the vehicle, and sit in his patrol car.

In the patrol car, Esqueda continued to ask [Mr. Deschenes] questions. [Mr. Deschenes] told him that his car had been rented by his father and that he was traveling from Connecticut to San Diego to visit an uncle living on a naval base. Esqueda named several naval bases in the San Diego area and [Mr. Deschenes] was unsure of the specific base where his uncle lived. Esqueda became suspicious because [Mr. Deschenes] appeared defensive, nervous, and unsure of the exact location of his ultimate destination. He was also suspicious because [Mr. Deschenes] was traveling east on I‑40, a route used by drug smugglers to move drugs from the west coast to the east coast and cash from the east coast to the west coast. In his experience, smugglers typically did not know exactly where they were going and it appeared [Mr. Deschenes] was driving straight through because the car’s interior had a “lived‑in” look.

Esqueda then asked [Mr. Deschenes] whether he had any weapons in his car, grenades, or narcotics such as marihuana or cocaine. [Mr. Deschenes] looked at his car and answered in the negative. Esqueda’s suspicions were further heightened when [Mr. Deschenes] looked at his car when he answered rather than maintaining eye contact. Esqueda also asked whether [Mr. Deschenes] was carrying any large sums of money. [Mr. Deschenes] indicated he was not and responded he had eighty dollars and several credit cards on his person and intended to fund his trip using a debit card. Esqueda observed [Mr. Deschenes]‘s nervous behavior appeared to increase as the traffic stop progressed. He further testified that the typical motoring public became less nervous as a stop progressed and things were explained to them. In his opinion, a person involved in some type of criminal activity remains nervous, or becomes more so, the longer there is contact.

Esqueda issued a warning to [Mr. Deschenes]. While [Mr. Deschenes] was signing the warning, Esqueda asked [Mr. Deschenes] if he could search his car and [Mr. Deschenes] consented. During the search, Esqueda again observed that [Mr. Deschenes]‘s nervousness escalated. Esqueda found nothing in the passenger side of the vehicle or passenger compartment and found no evidence of drugs or contraband in the car. Esqueda then took the keys from the ignition and went back to search the trunk.

[Editor’s Note: Please take special note that AFTER the officer had written the traffic citation, for the ONLY offense of which the officer was aware, THEN he asked for “consent” to search Mr. Deschenes’ vehicle. Obviously, Mr. Deschenes could have, and should have, politely said “no thank you, officer.”]

In the trunk, Esqueda observed three pieces of luggage — a large, tan suitcase, a medium, black suitcase, and a small carry bag. Esqueda asked [Mr. Deschenes] to show him the bags’ contents. [Mr. Deschenes] showed Esqueda some clothing in the medium bag. Esqueda then asked [Mr. Deschenes] to show him what was in the small carry bag. He believed [Mr. Deschenes] was apprehensive about opening the remaining bags. [Mr. Deschenes] opened the carry bag and showed Esqueda some hygiene articles and underwear; however, from Esqueda’s perspective, he believed [Mr. Deschenes] appeared to be ignoring a blue plastic sack inside the bag.

Esqueda pressed down on the carry bag and felt something hard inside. [Mr. Deschenes] then looked up at Esqueda and said, “Okay, I lied.” Esqueda looked in the sack and found five bundles of cash held together by rubber bands. When he inquired how much money was in the bag, [Mr. Deschenes] responded $17,500. Esqueda testified that, in his experience, people smuggling or transporting illegal proceeds often bundled the money with rubber bands and placed it in plastic bags.

Esqueda then searched the medium bag and found a set of scales. [Mr. Deschenes] indicated he used the scales to “weigh stuff.” The large, tan bag was empty. [Mr. Deschenes] stated he owned the money and had brought it with him because he was thinking of going to Las Vegas. He told Esqueda that he had worked for the money.

Esqueda suspected [Mr. Deschenes] was transporting scales to measure drugs and intended to use the empty suitcase to store drugs. Based upon his observations, Esqueda believed the cash represented proceeds from illegal transactions. He accompanied [Mr. Deschenes] to his patrol car and called for a canine officer. When Esqueda asked [Mr. Deschenes] why he lied about the money being in his vehicle, [Mr. Deschenes] responded he was nervous telling anyone he had a large amount of cash in his car because, when he was young, he had problems with the police taking his money.

[Editor’s Note: Again, please take special notice that the law enforcement officer could not identify any specific criminal offense that may be tied to the currency – only that the “believed the cash represented proceeds from illegal transactions.”]

When DPS Trooper Tony Rocha arrived with DPS Canine Storm, Esqueda asked him to run [Mr. Deschenes]‘s car. Storm was trained to detect an odor of marihuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin. Storm did not alert to the interior or exterior of [Mr. Deschenes]‘s car. Rocha put Storm in the trunk and he alerted to the small carry bag containing the currency and the large empty suitcase. Esqueda then arrested [Mr. Deschenes] for money laundering, seized the $17,620, and deposited the money in a bank.

Justice Pirtle correctly points out that the State’s rationale for the seizure of the currency – the twenty two arguments – amounts to nothing more than “mere conjecture.” Helpfully, Justice Pirtle then lists the cases and the rationale which have previously held that the State’s arguments are not based on facts, not based on science, and are, in fact, just wishful law enforcement thinking. These are a few of the cases he cites:
A positive alert by a drug detection dog, standing alone, does not constitute evidence that money was used in connection with a drug deal. $7,058.84 in U.S. Currency v. State, 30 S.W.3d 580, 588 (Tex.App.‑Texarkana 2000, no pet.); $80,631.00 v. State, 861 S.W.2d 10, 12 (Tex.App.‑Houston [14th Dist.] 1993, writ denied).

Although federal circuit courts recognize “that a positive alert by a drug detection dog is, in the very least, strong proof of probable cause”; United States v. Outlaw, 134 F.Supp.2d 807, 812 (W.D.Tex. 2001), aff’d, 319 F.3d 701 (5th Cir.2003), the evidentiary value of such an alert is being questioned because the spread of trace amounts of drugs in the nation’s currency supply increases the likelihood of false alerts. Id. at 813. See United States v. $506,231 in U.S. Currency, 125 F.3d 442, 453 (7th Cir.1997) (refusing “to take seriously the evidence of post‑seizure dog sniff”); United States v. $49,576.00 in U.S. Currency, 116 F.3d 425, 427 (9th Cir. 1997) (positive alert entitled to little weight); Muhammed v. DEA, 92 F.3d 648, 653 (8th Cir. 1996) (discounting government’s argument that dog alert constituted probable cause supporting administrative forfeiture due to high percentage of currency contaminated with drug residue); United States v. $5,000 in U.S. Currency, 40 F.3d 846, 849 (6th Cir.1994)(evidentiary value of the narcotic dog’s alert is minimal because it is well established that an extremely high percentage of all cash in circulation is contaminated with drug‑residue sufficient to alert a trained dog); $80,760.00, 781 F.Supp. at 472 (“[R]ecitation of the profile elements and the alert of a narcotics detection dog, without more, does not establish probable cause to forfeit”).

In United States v. $5,000 in U.S. Currency, 40 F.3d 846, 850 (6th Cir.1994), the Circuit Court of Appeals held that the claimant’s evasive explanation of trip’s purpose provided, at best, “inchoate and unparticularized suspicion.”

Traveling a particular route does not establish probable cause for forfeiture. See United States v. $252,300.00 in U.S. Currency, 484 F.3d at 1274 (“Generalized allegations about . . . `known drug destinations’ and `known drug routes’ do not provide a nexus to drugs on these facts.”); United States v. $10,700, 258 F.3d 215, 228 (3d Cir.2001)(“[W]e cannot credit the fact that the claimant was using a major interstate to be probative of drug trafficking.”).

A number of courts have observed that nervousness is of minimal probative value, given that many, if not most, individuals can become nervous or agitated when detained by police officers. Glass v. State, 681 S.W.2d 599, 602 (Tex.Crim.App. 1984); Lassaint v. State, 79 S.W.3d 736 (Tex.App.‑Corpus Christi 2002, no pet.); $10,700 in U.S. Currency, 258 F.3d at 226. See also $252,300.00 in U.S. Currency, 484 F.3d at 1274; United States v. $191,910.00 in U.S. Currency, 16 F.3d 1051, 1072 (9th Cir.1994). Another source of the nervousness can be that the person is carrying a large amount of cash. United States v. A) 58,920.00 in U.S. Currency B) $38,670.00 in U.S. Currency, 385 F.Supp.2d 144, 152 (D.Puerto Rico 2005) (apparent nervousness is of minimal probative value given [the respondent] was carrying a large amount of currency in their luggage, which could be robbed or lost); United States v. One Lot of U.S. Currency ($14,665), 33 F.Supp.2d 47, 55 (D.Mass.1998)(noting that [the appellant’s] nervousness during interaction with law enforcement officers “is not an unreasonable response, regardless of the source and intended use of the currency”).

So, while there are a number of cases in both state and federal courts that have found that many of the “profile factors” used by law enforcement to justify the seizure of currency where there is no other evidence of a crime being committed are “without probative value” and “conjecture,” law enforcement officers continue to seize currency during and after traffic stops.

You are not breaking the law by carrying large amounts of cash. That, in and of itself, is no crime. But, you need to be aware that, along with all of the other bad things that can happen to your cash when you’re traveling, seizure by law enforcement officers can and does happen. That risk is not limited to “drug dealers” and “criminals” – it can and does happen to everyday citizens.

Original report here




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Friday, August 10, 2012

Cops are here to help you: Tacoma, Washington police Officer Ryan Koskovich and Officer Michael Young taser, handcuff and imprison a deaf assault victim for not obeying commands that she could not hear

In Tacoma, a few months ago, a woman called 911 seeking protection when a fight with a guest turned violent. Unfortunately, when you call 911 they send the cops, and government police are not interested in protecting you; they are interested in controlling the situation. The victim in this case is a black woman who has been deaf since birth. The cops were told ahead of time that she was deaf, but what with a situation to control, when they showed up at the apartment they tortured her with a taser, handcuffed her, and hauled her off to jail for "running at the police in an assaultive manner."

She was running outside to meet the police, so that they could protect her from the person that was beating her up. Instead, a white police officer, Ryan Koskovich, screamed at her, whipped out his taser to drive her to the ground with a painful electrical shock, and then handcuffed her and arrested her, all because she didn’t stop running immediately when they bellowed commands at her that she could not hear.

The police claimed, in reports that they wrote up after the fact, that they had also held a hand out. Other people in the neighborhood were watching and nobody else says they saw the cops hold a hand up. Of course, it’s possible that nobody saw it because it was 11:30 at night and dark; but then, that might be a reason for the police to think that someone might not necessarily be able to see their hands, and might not necessarily be able to hear their bellowed commands, and perhaps they ought to adopt a different strategy from maximal confrontation and "Taser first, ask questions later." But that of course is only the sort of thing that you do if you give a damn about not torturing and imprisoning innocent people.
Police use Taser on deaf crime victim

TACOMA, Wash. — KIRO TV’s investigative unit has discovered Tacoma police used force to arrest and handcuff an innocent deaf woman after she called 911 for their help.

Instead of an apology, she ended up bloody and in jail for nearly three days without an interpreter before a prosecutor declined to press charges.

After months of digging, investigative reporter Chris Halsne found significant discrepancies in the official police version of events leading up to Lashonn White’s arrest.

Late in the evening on April 6, White said she called for police assistance after a guest reportedly attacked her in her own apartment.

. . . Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) logs show Tacoma police officer Ryan Koskovich and his partner, Michael Young, were outside White’s apartment complex in about six minutes.

It also reflects that officers received texts along the way stating, "Person doing the hitting is a Sophia" and "Vict. is Lashonn White."

In addition, it appears from internal police records obtained by KIRO Team 7 Investigators, Koskovich and his partner were repeatedly given information that the victim could not hear a thing.

. . . To her, what happened next defies common sense — especially, for a woman with no criminal record, no arrests and just one minor driving violation on her record.

Within seconds of running outside to meet police, Officer Koskovich pulled his Taser and fired a two-barbed electric wire into White’s ribs and stomach.

"All I’m doing is waving my hands in the air, and the next thing I know, I’m on the ground and then handcuffed. It was almost like I blacked out. I was so dizzy and disoriented," White said.

Witnesses said White began bleeding heavily from her knuckles and the right side of her face swelled up immediately after she hit the pavement following the Taser jolt.

Pictures acquired by Team 7 Investigators also show injuries to her cheek, chin, ribs, neck and arms.

Worse yet to White was the incredible confusion that came with suddenly being handcuffed, under arrest and without the ability to communicate with Tacoma officers, who had no sign language skills.

"The next thing I know, they took me to jail. Told me to stand up, you’re going to jail. I said, "What? What have I done?" I couldn’t figure it out. I had no idea what was going on," said White.

. . . Margaret Sims’s apartment is right over the spot where White fell to the ground after being tased. She said it was around 11:30 at night and dark, but she heard Lashonn screaming in pain and ran to the balcony.

"I hollered down and said, "She’s deaf and can’t speak!""

Sims says she went down to the street and spoke with officers while Lashonn was still in handcuffs. She told us during an on-camera interview that the police officers at the scene admitted there was a misunderstanding.

"They had tased her because he thought she was coming at him, but what she was doing was running to him. But he said, "stop" and he didn’t put his hand up. He just said, "stop" and she couldn’t understand that," replied Sims.

Another apartment tenant, Geraldine Warren, said she also heard the commotion and talked to police.

"They just told her to halt. She kept running, she can’t hear—she’s deaf. I said, "Aren’t you supposed to say halt like that?"" asked Warren holding up her right hand.

Tacoma police arrested Lashonn on two criminal charges, simple assault and obstruction of a public servant (law enforcement officer). Then they carted her off to jail. She spent 60 hours there[1] – also without an interpreter- before a city prosecutor reviewed her case and asked that charges not be filed at all. . .

. White said despite her repeated requests to police for a certified ASL interpreter, one was never provided.

—Police use Taser on deaf crime victim, by Chris Halsne, for KIRO TV 7 (5 August 2012)

The Incident Is Being Investigated. But Police Officer Naveed Benjamin has already said that the actions of the officers "do not appear to be outside of policy." Probably not. And what does that tell you about the policy?

This is of course not the first time this sort of thing has happened. See for example GT 2007-12-07: Law and Orders #4: Wichita cops take control by shocking a deaf man for not following orders he couldn’t hear, GT 2007-11-11: Taser first, ask questions later, AP 2005-03-22: Autistic Teenager is Beaten by Deputies After Being Mistaken for a Prowler, GT 2008-02-05: Rapists in uniform, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.

[1] [In other words, a crime victim was imprisoned for nearly three days, because police could not speak her language and chose to respond to her with escalating brutality before they knew what was going on. —CJ.]

Original report here




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Thursday, August 09, 2012

Race tensions rise as mother demands answers to questions over 'suicide' mystery

The death of a young black man who was shot in the head while handcuffed in the back of a police car has caused uproar among the black community in an American state with deep racial faultlines.

Hundreds have taken to the streets to protest against an official explanation of suicide in the death of Chavis Carter, 21, in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

Mr Carter was pulled over by police late last month and searched twice by officers who discovered a small $US10 bag of marijuana. He was also wanted for skipping probation on another drug charge.

Supporters of Chavis Carter and his family hold signs during the candlelight vigil held in his honour. Photo: AP
He had his hands cuffed behind his back and was put into a patrol car.

Michael Yates, the police chief, has conceded that a "very unusual" chain of events led to the later discovery of Mr Carter slumped in the back of the car with a bullet wound in his head. He later died in hospital. "Suspect shot himself in the head with a gun he had concealed on his person," the police report said.

Mr Carter's family are questioning how he could shoot himself in the head with his hands behind his back. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) released a statement calling for an "unbiased investigation" and added: "The public relies upon police to serve and protect all citizens, no matter their race or ethnicity."

Mr Yates admitted that the case was "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance".

But Mr Carter's mother, Teresa, has another explanation. "I think they killed him," she told a local television station. "I mean, my son was not suicidal."

Mrs Carter pointed to two pieces of evidence she believes show that her son did not shoot himself. She says the bullet hole was in her son's right temple - but he was left-handed, making it unlikely that he would have used his right hand to pull the trigger.

She also says that her son had phoned his girlfriend shortly after being pulled over, but before being handcuffed, and told her that he would call her later from jail - hardly indicative of a man who intended to take his own life.

There are two other possibilities; that Mr Carter shot himself by accident while perhaps trying to hide the weapon, or that he was shot by a third party. Police say there is no evidence for the latter theory, but have not ruled it out entirely.

The two white Jonesboro police officers involved in the incident are on administrative duties pending the outcome of an investigation being conducted by the FBI and the police department.

If Mr Carter is found to have killed himself, the officers will have to explain how they searched him twice yet failed to find a weapon before putting him into the car.

Sergeant Lyle Waterworth, of the Jonesboro Police Department, said: "Any given officer has missed something on a search, be it drugs, knife, razor blades. This instance it happened to be a gun."

Mr Yates addressed Mrs Carter's allegations that her son was shot by police in a conversation with The Daily Telegraph.

"I do not pretend to understand a mother's grief and I cannot understand but there is no indication and no factual basis for that as what transpired," he said.

The police have refused to release footage from a camera mounted on the dashboard of the patrol car, but Mr Yates said it corroborated the statements of the officers.

The police report states that the white pick-up truck in which Mr Carter was a passenger, was pulled over shortly before 10pm on July 29 after being spotted driving with its lights off.

After noting a strong smell of marijuana, Mr Carter and his two friends, who were both white, were patted down.

Officers discovered marijuana on Mr Carter and later discovered he was using a false name and had an outstanding warrant against him. He was searched again, handcuffed and put into the back of the car. Moments later the officers heard a "loud thump with a metallic sound". When they checked the car, Mr Carter was "slumped forward with his head in his lap" and covered in blood.

The issue spilled on to the streets on Monday when more than 300 people attended a vigil in his memory. Some carried signs which read: "Justice for Chavis. What really happened?"

Pastor Adrian Rodgers, who helped to organise the vigil, said: "There are certainly some racial concerns that a black man died after being handcuffed and put in a police car by two white officers. There are as many opinions about this as there are people in the city, but we all want the truth. If there were some illegal actions on the side of the officers then we want them held accountable. However, if it was a tragic accident we do not want them to suffer because they were the ones on the scene."

Mr Yates said that suggestions that Mr Carter's race played any part in the incident was not helpful. He said: "I think it is very reckless to make those types of comments without knowing what the facts will bear."

Original report here




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Wednesday, August 08, 2012



The police: Useless, but not harmless

The bad news for Rafael Lopez was that the 27-year-old Iraq war veteran had been robbed and severely beaten by a gang of at least 10 men on the street outside the Aqua nightclub in Minneapolis. The good news – or Lopez initially thought – was that the assault took place less than ten yards away from the 1st Police Precinct station.

Bruised and bloodied, Lopez attempted to enter the station to file a complaint, only to be met by Officer Aaron Hanson, who angrily told him to leave. As Lopez tried to explain what had just happened to him, two of Hanson’s comrades "came out, put their gloves on and were yelling at me, telling me to get out," he later recalled.

This was the second time that evening that the intrepid Officer Hanson of the Minneapolis PD had consciously refused to come to the aid of Lopez and his friends.

Lopez had come to the aid of his friend Joshua Rivera, whose wife Magdalena was being harassed and intimidated by a pack of street thugs. While trying to escort Magdalena to safety, he was blind-sided by several of the goons. When Rivera came to Lopez’s aid, he was swarmed and beaten unconscious. Magdalena ran to the police station to seek help. She was able to get through the front door, but found that the inner door was locked. She managed to get Hanson’s attention and frantically gestured for him to come out, "but he just shrugged his shoulders," she recounted.

Magdalena went back outside and borrowed a cell phone to call 911. A few minutes later – long after he could have provided any help – Hanson ambled outside. After Magdalena described what had happened to her husband and their friend, the officer blithely explained "that he didn’t need to deal with this because it happens all the time," she testified in an official complaint. Without offering to call an ambulance, or even asking if anybody had been seriously hurt, Hanson quickly retreated into the station and locked the door behind him. It was "literally 10 seconds and he was already going back inside," Magdalena observes.

Later that morning, Lopez went back to the station to file an incident report.

"He figured police surveillance cameras on the street and at the police station captured the assault," related the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. "He hoped the videos would lead to the identity of the assailants, whom he suspected were members of a gang because they were all wearing white and red shirts. It turned out he wasted his time."

A few days after the September 2, 2011 assault, the Minneapolis PD dispatched an official notice to Lopez informing him that "this case does not meet our threshold for investigative assignment at the present time."

If the gallant men of the Minneapolis PD can’t be bothered to investigate a violent gang rampage that took place less than thirty feet from a precinct station – in full view of the department’s surveillance cameras – how can the department justify its existence?

As the Pioneer-Press noted, "the building would have emptied had it been a member in blue being pounced on outside." This is proven, ironically, by the actions of Officer Aaron Hanson in an incident that took place seven years earlier.

During the May 2004 "Art-A-Whirl" festival in downtown Minneapolis, two off-duty officers – Robert Kroll and Wallace Krueger – got their skivvies in a bind when a pedestrian named Jackson Mahaffy accidentally hit Krueger’s car with a shoulder bag. The officers tracked down Mahaffy, threw him to the ground, and began to kick and punch him on the pretext of issuing a citation for "misdemeanor damage to property."

Kroll called police dispatch to report "damage of property and an assault" and request assistance. A few minutes later, several squad cars converged on the scene, one of which decanted the valorous Officer Hanson, who quickly established his "command authority" by beating up a woman.

Mahaffy was kidnapped and detained by the Minneapolis PD on patently bogus charges – assault on an officer, damage to property, and inciting a riot – which were promptly dropped by the City Attorney. Mahaffy’s lawsuit against the department was dismissed on the familiar and patently spurious grounds of "qualified immunity."

In his lawsuit, Mahaffy noted Officer Hanson and his partner arrested him without conducting an investigation – which would have meant, at very least, hearing his side of the story and interviewing eyewitnesses on the scene. In its ruling dismissing thelawsuit, the U.S. District Court for Minnesota noted that Hanson and his partner "responded to a call indicating an off-duty officer needed assistance. Under such circumstances, officer safety is considered the first priority." (Emphasis added.)

Of course, officer safety is ever and always the first – and only – priority.

Accordingly, when mere Mundanes were beaten and robbed in front of the precinct station, it was entirely appropriate for Hanson to cower behind a locked door, and then seek reinforcements to help repel persistent pleas for aid from the victims. For the same reason, when a Mundane was beaten by fellow officers as summary punishment for accidentally inflicting trivial damage on a cop’s automobile, however, the department responded in force when the assailants called for "assistance."

By coming to the aid of his friends, Rafael Lopez acted as a peace officer – an individual who interposed himself to protect innocent people from criminal violence. Officer Hanson, who fraudulently collects a tax-funded paycheck for supposedly providing that service, was studiously indifferent to any consideration apart from his own physical safety and the institutional needs of his department. This is exactly what we should expect from a state functionary of his ilk. We should be grateful to him for offering such a compelling illustration of the fact that government police agencies are useless – but not harmless.

A more recent illustration was provided last Thursday (July 26) during a drug store robbery in Portland, Oregon.

Shortly after noon, Rob Anderson, who owns a computer software store, sauntered over to nearby Central Drugs to buy some aspirin.

"I didn’t notice anything until the pharmacist behind the counter yelled for us to `Get out of here! We’re closed!" Anderson told the Oregonian. "I thought that was kind of weird."

Anderson wasn’t aware that just a few minutes earlier, a robber – later identified as Jocelin Olson – had entered the store with his hand concealed in a pocket. "I have a gun!" Olson bellowed. He fled with a bag of prescription drugs.

Anderson, who had seen enough to recognize that a robbery was underway, spotted a uniformed officer in a marked police car, and informed the valiant defender of the public weal that a robbery was in progress a block away. The heroic paladin of public order replied that he was off duty and told Anderson to call 911. He then rolled up his window and drove away.

"We all expect a little better from the police in this situation," Anderson later recalled, expressing entirely appropriate disgust – and entirely undeserved confidence in the character and competence of government law enforcement officers.

While the officer, in compliance with the Prime Directive of law enforcement, "officer safety," was making himself scarce, two employees of the drugstore – one of whom had obtained his personal firearm – gave chase to the bandit, eventually tracking him down and arresting him without the aid of the exalted personages in government-issued official attire. One of them restrained the suspect (who had only feigned carrying a gun) in a half-nelson hold until the police tardily arrived.

The Portland Police Department refuses to identify the police officer who fled the scene rather than tangle with an (apparently) armed robber. That officer would most likely have been as bold as Hector if he had been dealing with an unarmed 12-year-old girl, or a skinny, unarmed, mentally handicapped street person.

Portland Police Officer Chris Humphreys – who, as we’ll shortly see, is regarded as exemplary by that department – shot the former at point-blank range with a beanbag round. In a separate incident, Humphreys – with the help of three colleagues – chased down and beat to death the latter, a 145-pound schizophrenic named James Chasse.

On another occasion, Humphreys beat a helpless man 30 times with a baton before discovering that the victim wasn’t the suspect he was pursuing.

Humphreys was placed on paid vacation after shooting the 12-year-old girl. That prompted a complaint from Sgt. Scott Westermann, commissar of the local police union, who insisted that Humphreys "exemplified everything one could imagine a police officer should be."

Humphreys and another officer were eventually given two-week suspensions for the killing of James Chasse – a trivial "punishment" which was reversed by an arbitrator exactly two weeks before one of their comrades helpfully displayed the utter uselessness of the agency that employs them.

Upset over public criticism of his tax-funded criminal career, Humphreys filed for "stress disability," and his brethren in the police union – insisting that he had "suffered enough" – held a rally at City Hall. Each of them wore a custom t-shirts bearing the unwittingly incriminating inscription: "I Am Chris Humphreys."

Police departments exist to enforce the will of the municipal corporations that employ them. Any actual service they render with respect to the protection of person and property is incidental to that mission. Fortunately – albeit tardily – tax victims across the country are finally starting to understand this fact, as the financial burden of supporting the state’s enforcement caste becomes unbearable.

"Traditionally, U.S. voters have backed generous pay and benefits for the cops and firefighters willing to risk their lives to keep citizens safe," notes a Reuters report (that dutifully regurgitates the official myth that police departments actually serve the interests of public safety). "But as economic conditions have worsened and many local governments have run into severe fiscal problems, that attitude has started to change. Since the 2007 recession, some cities have tried to roll back pension benefits and pay, among the most rigid and, in some cases, highest expenses in municipal budgets."

A suitable example is offered by the City of North Las Vegas, which – reeling from the catastrophic collapse of the real estate market and shackled by untenable union salary and benefit agreements – has declared itself an economic "disaster area."

"We are in a fiscal emergency," City Council Member Wade Wagner told the Washington Post. "North Las Vegas is ground zero basically for foreclosures in the nation…. So because our property taxes have declined so much, we really had to invoke this [emergency statute]."

North Las Vegas spends most of its tax funding (66 percent) on "public safety." It’s not as if police officers in that city serve on sacrificial terms: A police officer like Kent Marscheck, whose base salary is $55,000, can pull down a total of $200,000 a year in overtime and other benefits, and a police sergeant like Bradley Walch – whose base salary is $61,000 – can receive more than $237,000 in total compensation.

The city suspended its union contracts with the police and fire department on June 15. Predictably, the police union filed a lawsuit against the city government to prevent layoffs.

Thanks to the intervention of Sen. Harry Reid, the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services program (COPS) provided a $1.75 million grant to the North Las Vegas Police Department. This money will go to pay the partial salaries of 14 officers – if, that is, the city government can wrangle $3.2 million in matching funds from the cash-strapped taxpayers or leery bond investors. If this deal is consummated, the result will be the worst of both worlds for city residents: They will pay more for a unionized "local" police force that is effectively controlled by Washington, and entirely unaccountable to them.

Then again, all police departments consider themselves unaccountable to the populations they supposedly serve.

Two years ago, Chris Mesley – who serves as spokesthug for the Albany, New York Police Officers Union – gave eloquent expression to the disdain the armed tax-feeders have for the citizens whose paychecks they plunder: "If I’m the bad guy to the average citizen … and their taxes have to go up to cover my raise, I’m very sorry about that, but I have to look out for myself and my membership… As the president of the `local,' I will not accept `zeroes' [no increase in salaries or benefits]. If that means ... ticking off some taxpayers, then so be it."

In a public comment offered at a meeting of the Common Council, an Albany resident who identified himself as "Justin" pointed out that the city's median annual household income in 2009 was about $33,000. In the same year, Mesley – who was hired as a patrol officer in 1992 – received a base salary of $70,289, while also devouring at least another $30,000 for serving as union president. During 2008 and 2009, Mesley’s union contract provided "retroactive raises" of four percent; this happened at time when the productive economy was shrinking and raises of any kind were practically unheard of by people who, unlike Mesley and his chums, earn an honest living.

"Chris Mesley is making three times or more the median salary and is complaining that he might not get a raise," Justin observed. "The sense of entitlement of Chris Mesley and all those who think alike has led to the pilfering of state and city coffers. They are like leeches, sucking the taxpayers dry, and that's an insult to leeches. At least leeches know when to let go."

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg played to that inexhaustible sense of entitlement when he suggested that police nationwide should go on strike until the law-abiding public disarms itself.

"I don’t understand why the police officers in this country don’t stand up collectively and say, `we’re going to go on strike," Bloomberg blurted in an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan. "We’re not going to protect you unless you – the public – through your legislature do what’s required to keep us safe. After all, police officers want to go home to their families."

Given that the police don’t protect us, we’d be immeasurably better off if all of them went home to their families – permanently.

Original report here




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Tuesday, August 07, 2012

How a Single Oxycontin Pill Nearly Ruined One Man's Life

Jail may be the worst thing that can happen to a drug offender, but it's not the only thing

James was pulled over for speeding in 2006 in Vero Beach, Florida while driving back to his home in Jacksonville after a concert. The officer who pulled him over said the car smelled like marijuana, and asked to conduct a search. James agreed, because neither he nor his passenger had been using drugs. When his passenger was found to be in possession of a pipe and several screens (but no marijuana), the officer searched James. His pockets were empty save for a single Oxycontin pill. James told the officer he received the pill from a friend at the concert, but that he had never tried Oxycontin, and intended to give it away.

A second officer was called to the scene. James' passenger was arrested for possession of paraphernalia, and James was arrested for illegal possession of a prescription narcotic.

The next morning, James' mother drove to Indian River County to plead for a lightening of her son's bond. She told the judge that James, then 24, was both a full-time graduate student at the University of North Florida and a full-time stock broker with Merrill Lynch. James' lawyer advised him to plead no-contest, saying he would likely get probation and then have his record expunged.

"After being assured that the penalty would be light," James told Reason in an email, "it turned into a bigger ordeal than I could ever imagine."

The judge who heard James' case accepted the no-contest plea. Then he began stacking on penalties.

Despite having no criminal record and never having taken Oxycontin, James was required to attend two Narcotics Anonymous meetings a week for an entire year, and 15 weekend-long state-run drug classes (the latter he was required to pay for). Despite the fact that he was going to school at night for his MBA, James was given a curfew, and had to be inside his own home between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. every day of the week, for the entire year. As a final punishment, the judge instructed James to immediately report his arrest to his employer, and to let his probation officer know when he had done so.

With his case settled, James returned to Jacksonville and told his boss at Merrill Lynch what happened. His supervisor told him not to worry. A week later, he was instructed to modify his broker's license to reflect that he'd pled no-contest to drug possession. This is both a federal and a state-level requirement, generally meant to protect investors. It ended up ruining James's career. The modification to his license triggered an internal warning at Merrill Lynch. The firm placed him on paid leave for two weeks, and then fired him.

Once James's probation officer found out he'd been let go, she required him to bring with him to their meetings a list of every job for which he'd applied since they last met. His probation officer then called each and every company's HR department to verify that James had actually applied.

"I am sure once the HR department at my prospective job talked to her, that my resume was thrown away," James wrote in an email.

It took James a month to find a new job, but it wasn't with a financial firm. Instead, he was hired on as a short order cook by a woman had opened a restaurant after an underage drinking charge prevented her from teaching.

The humiliation didn't end there. Twice a week, he sat in Narcotics Anonymous meetings, despite not being addicted—or even recreationally using—narcotics. At his state-run drug class, he listened to a facilitator warn against the dangers of drinking BC Powder and Coca Cola, watched Meg Ryan fall in love with Tom Hanks over and over ("three of my 15 weekends were spent watching movies," he says), and was frequently told, along with other participants, that if they were going to test positive for drugs, to just let the facilitator know. For $200, they could re-enroll in the state's drug course without their probation officers finding out.

"Later," says James, "I was told that the guy who collected our money every week for treatment was fired for doing cocaine in the back room."

All of this was supposed to be temporary. James hoped that after 12 months, his record would be wiped, and he could find his way back into the finance industry.

He was wrong. While his probation officer told James that he could break curfew if he was working late (and only then), she didn't tell him that he needed permission from the judge do so. This led to him being charged with violating his probation, and the extension of his punishment until March 2008. And those two years were more than enough time for every third-party private background-check company in the state to register him as having pled no contest to a possession charge.

Thanks to the records maintained by those third-party companies, he had trouble finding a new place to live, even after his record with the state had been expunged. "I lost out on at least five jobs as a direct result of having this on my record, even though it is not technically on my record," James says. "I even relocated for jobs just to have them notify me the day before or even after two weeks of training that they could not hire me due to this."

One insurance firm agreed to hire James if he could present an official copy of his criminal record that explained the circumstances of his arrest. "When I tried to explain to them that it was expunged," James says, and thus didn't exist, they said it was company policy. "A few weeks later, someone from HR called and said, 'We understand if you think this is not worth your time.'"

The experience has changed not just James's life, but his thinking about drug policy.

"I could really see how someone could get caught 'in the system' and have a stigma attached to them, and, for people with, say, a high school diploma, why they would just resort to drug dealing, or worse, because the government prevented their ability to find a job due to this," James said.

"It's sad that the government creates this group of 'drug offenders' who are not harming anyone, be it pot smokers or pill poppers, and then indirectly prevents them from getting jobs. Once you get something like this on your record, it is either start your own business or become under-employed."

Today, James is happily married (he met his wife while working at the restaurant), has a child, and is studying for a second graduate degree. He's also out of the kitchen, but says he is still underemployed as a result of his arrest six years ago.

As horrifying as the last six years of James's life have been, an actual Oxycontin addict would be lucky to have his fate: In Florida, the possession of just seven prescription pain pills (a hardcore user can go through that many before lunch) qualifies as drug trafficking, and comes with a mandatory minimum sentence of three years.

I asked Greg Newburn, director of the Florida chapter of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, what would happen if James had been caught with a single pill today, at the height of hysteria over prescription pill abuse.

"He probably wouldn't be facing any mandatory sentence for just one pill," Newburn said. "More than likely he'd probably be charged with possession of a controlled substance, which is a third degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a level 3 offense under the Criminal Punishment Code. Assuming no priors, that only scores a 16, so no prison time would be required, but the judge could still give up to five years," Newburn said.

Considering what a judge could have done to him, James got off pretty easy. But six years later, it doesn't feel that way at all.

Original report here




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Monday, August 06, 2012



San Francisco mayor Ed Lee knows a useful tragedy when he sees one

I do not accept the first and most extreme assertion of Truthers — the proposition that mass-casualty tragedies are secretly engineered by (unusually competent, unusually close-mouthed) government agencies.

I do, however, accept the second and eminently correct assertion of Truthers — that politicians and law enforcement make cynical and unscrupulous use of tragedies for their own ends.

This week San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee is here to prove it.

San Francisco is a city that’s famous — or notorious — for being liberal, depending on your point of view. But in modern America “liberal” does not reliably mean “an advocate of limited police power” or “a supporter of Fourth Amendment rights.” Nominal “liberals” in government are as eager to milk fear and law-and-order sentiment as the most gravel-knuckled conservative. Ed Lee is no different.

Mayor Ed Lee remains resolute in implementing some form of a stop-and-frisk program – even if it’s not called that – in the wake of Friday’s horrific movie theater mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., and a trip to Philadelphia, which has its own controversial stop-and-frisk program.

“I am as, if not more, committed, and especially in light of the massacre that occurred in Aurora, but also the review of what’s happening in New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and the crime that’s committed,” Lee said Monday on the sidelines of an announcement about federal transportation funding.

Bringing up Aurora to justify a stop-and-frisk policy is jaw-droppingly dishonest — the sort of argument that shows not only shamelessness but a willingness to insult the intelligence of one’s audience. If you’re a guy in red clown hair and body armor carrying a rifle and a shotgun into a movie theater, well-established law is more than sufficient to justify the police to conduct an investigative stop of you. No special stop-and-frisk policy is required. Rather, a stop-and-frisk policy is a device calculated to give legal and political cover to arbitrary harassment of the sort of people they like to harass and in an attempted end run around Fourth Amendment principles like probable cause and reasonable suspicion.

That this is common does not make it less outrageous. Yet after 9/11, perhaps our capacity for outrage about such rhetoric is exhausted. We live in a country, after all, where politicians tell us they need to use post-9/11 anti-terrorism powers against people who pirate Shrek. So what’s a little callous misappropriation of a mass shooting, in the scheme of things?

Original report here




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Sunday, August 05, 2012

Chicagoans should think twice before permitting passengers

An Illinois appellate court rejected Ivy Jackson’s challenge to Chicago Municipal Code § 7-24-225, which provides that the owner of a vehicle found to contain controlled substances or cannabis is liable for an administrative penalty and permits the taking of their vehicle. Because Chicago Municipal Code still lacks an innocent owner defense, a vehicle owner can lose their car despite a lack of knowledge of the presence of controlled substances or cannabis and despite a lack of participation in the alleged controlled substances or cannabis presence.

While Jackson was elsewhere, her parked car was occupied by two individuals who allegedly possessed a 1.4 gram cigar containing cannabis and a bag with approximately 1.6 grams of cannabis. The individuals were arrested and the automobile was seized by the city.

Jackson argued, among other things, that substantive due process demands the capacity to raise an innocent owner defense and that because her due process rights were violated when she was prevented from raising an innocent owner defense, she therefore suffered from an unreasonable seizure.

Whether due process does demand it, or it merely should, legislators are capable of requiring that an innocent owner defense be afforded to anyone who cares to argue one. They should move quickly to do so.

It is strange and inhumane to permit police departments to acquire your car because someone else, absent your permission or knowledge, allegedly possessed a small amount of cannabis in your vehicle (according to the police department).

Until then, residents of Chicago might want to consider banning passengers from their vehicles as anyone could, unbeknownst to you, potentially possess the passport to your car’s forfeiture. Of course, forbidding passengers might not do enough to prevent the impounding of your vehicle. Chicago’s current code is written so unfairly that you might be eligible to have your vehicle re-taken if someone steals it and is caught with a controlled substance while you are on vacation:
“(a) The owner of record of any motor vehicle that contains
any controlled substance or cannabis, as defined in the Controlled Substances Act, 720 ILCS 570/100, et seq., and the Cannabis Control Act, 720 ILCS 550/1, et seq., or that is used in the purchase, attempt to purchase, sale or attempt to sell such controlled substances or cannabis shall be liable to the city for an administrative penalty of $1,000.00 plus any applicable towing and storage fees. Any such vehicle shall be subject to seizure and impoundment pursuant to this section. This subsection shall not apply:

(1) if the vehicle used in the violation was stolen at the time and the theft was reported to the appropriate police authorities within 24 hours after the theft was discovered ***;

(2) if the vehicle is operating as a common carrier and the violation occurs without the knowledge of the person in control of the vehicle; or

(3) if the owner proves that the presence of the controlled
substance or cannabis was authorized under the Controlled
Substances Act or the Cannabis Control Act.”

Original report here




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Saturday, August 04, 2012

CA: “Pepper spray cop” loses his job



The infamous “Pepper Spray Cop” who attracted widespread criticism toward a California college last year is off the beat permanently, The Sacramento Bee reports.

A spokesperson for the University of California-Davis, where John Pike was captured pepper-spraying a group of seated protesters last November, said Pike was no longer employed with the school as of Tuesday, but did not specify whether Pike was fired or if he resigned, citing campus privacy rules.

Pike and his supervisor, campus police chief Annette Spicuzza, had been on paid administrative leave since the Nov. 18 incident. Spicuzza resigned in April, saying she did not want it to become a “defining moment” in her career. According to The Bee, Pike’s 2010 salary was reportedly just over $110,000.

“This whole time we were paying him, and he’s just sitting on his ass?” one student asked KOVR-TV.

After video of Pike’s nonchalant pepper-spraying of the protesters went viral, he became both the subject of internet memes and a target: at one point he reportedly received 10,000 text messages, 17,000 emails and scores of items sent to his home after his personal information was posted online.

Original report here




(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here

Friday, August 03, 2012

Terry Bressi and the checkpoint goons

On December 20, 2002, Terry Bressi was arrested at a roadblock in Arizona being operated by a joint task force including tribal police and agents of the US Department of Homeland Security.

After all of the trumped-up charges brought against Mr. Bressi were dismissed, he sued the tribal police department, the DHS, and the individuals who were responsible for establishing and operating the illegal roadblock for violating his civil rights.

The police tried to justify the roadblock as having been solely a sobriety checkpoint, but the police on the scene admitted to Mr. Bressi that they had no reason to doubt his sobriety or suspect him of any other violation of law. He wasn’t an Indian subject to tribal law, and the roadblock was on a state highway and public right-of-way through the reservation.

In reality, as evidence revealed in the course of Mr. Bressi’s lawsuit made clear, the “sobriety check” by tribal police was merely the pretext being used to try to justify the suspicionless search and seizure of innocent travelers, for general Federal law enforcement purposes.


Three thousand four hundred and fifty-one days after being dragged out of his vehicle & arrested at an illegal roadblock conducted by Tohono O’odham tribal police (with the assistance of U.S. Customs agents and the U.S. Border Patrol), Terry Bressi settled his lawsuit. He received a $210,000 check.

From the moment he filed his suit, he fought for exactly 3,087 days — all the while driving in the same area and becoming a target of enforcer rage. It wasn’t a complete victory. No individual officer paid a penalty. No principle of law was changed. Nevertheless, he won.

In doing so, he also posted a treasure-trove of documents to help others who might want to push the right-to-travel fight even farther.

As a born Ghost, somebody who just wants to go around “the system” rather than contend with it, I can’t even imagine fighting such a fight. But then, that’s what Agitators are for, and if there’s ever an Agitator Hall of Fame, surely Terry Bressi has earned his place in it.

He was kind enough to answer a few questions about what motivated him. Q&A follows. (He also gave some more practical information about his setup for recording police stops; that will be in another blog post.)

Q. Did you realize right after the initial incident that you were going to fight back, or did it take you some time to work up to it?

A. I knew immediately that not only would I do what was necessary to vigorously defend myself against the charges but that I would use an acquittal as a spring board into a civil rights lawsuit. To that end, I wrote up a rough draft of my initial report within a few days of the incident while everything was still fresh in my mind. I also immediately began looking for a good attorney to represent me regarding the charges along with providing counsel on how best to prepare for a lawsuit upon successfully defending against the charges.

Q. Did you consider other options besides pursuing the issue in the courts?

A. I decided early on that not only would I pursue the issue in a court of law but also the court of public opinion. To that end, I used the incident in particular and the issue in general as a motivator to create a website, CheckpointUSA.org and blog, Roadblock Revelations. These online resources could then be used as a discussion platform for issues related to the right to travel and the abuses that always seem to manifest themselves after men and women with guns and shiny badges are empowered to seize people absent suspicion and investigate/interrogate them regarding unknown crimes.

I also wanted to use my website as a comprehensive legal document repository for my interaction with the ‘justice’ system. One of my frustrations over the years while reading about other people’s cases and researching associated legal issues has been the lack of documentation regarding specific cases or documentation that only told part of the story.

Q. Were you motivated more by a desire to right the wrong done to you? Or more by sheer principle? Or was it a mix?

A. For me, the individual wrong was merely the offshoot of the violation of the principle. If I wasn’t concerned about the principle, if I didn’t have the principle to help guide my response to begin with, I wouldn’t have been motivated to question the officers who stopped me and would have shown a government issued ID after the first ‘request’ to do so.

The principle enshrined within the Right to Travel is fundamental. Without it, most of the other rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights have little to no meaning. What good is the right to speech, press, assembly or petition if you can’t travel somewhere to speak to a group of like-minded individuals, distribute media, assemble regarding an issue of common concern or stand in front of the government official(s) you’re trying to petition? What good is a right to keep and bear arms if the only place you can keep or bear them is within the boundaries of your home? How will you exercise your right to face your accuser if you aren’t allowed to travel to or enter the court house where you’re being accused? How will you pursue your life, liberty or happiness if the substance of your life, liberty or happiness lies outside the boundaries of your property line?

The principle, Right to Travel, was interfered with the moment I was seized by armed government agents along a public highway no where near an international border while admitting they had no reason to believe I had done anything wrong in order to investigate me for crimes they had no reason to suspect me of violating. Everything that transpired from that point on was merely the result of my response to that violation of an individual’s right to travel unmolested along roads paid for by a public whose name ‘the government’ purports to exist for and operate in the service of.

Q. Now that it’s over and you’ve had some time to reflect, what are your thoughts & feelings about the outcome?

A. In many ways, the legal outcome was not what I wanted but it was more than I expected. After all, any legal action involving the King’s men that you can walk away from is a good one. Additionally, nine years of legal wrangling in justice court, federal district court and the 9th circuit has provided a treasure trove of experience and information that others can use without having to recreate the wheel regarding similar legal challenges.

Legally, we made a few tactical mistakes along the way. Mistakes that shouldn’t have made a difference in the outcome but did. We also did a lot of things right but learned the hard way that when it’s your word and the word of other witnesses against the word of the King’s men, the King’s men almost always get the benefit of the doubt in the King’s court. That’s why audio and video of every interaction with a government agent who is forcing himself on you is so important.

My purpose in filing the lawsuit was to establish legal precedent regarding what actions enforcement agents can/can’t take while seizing people absent suspicion at police checkpoints. I also wanted reasonable compensation for the thousands of dollars the incident initially cost me in legal defense fees and other costs. What I got nine years later was a purely monetary settlement after the courts whittled the lawsuit away to a few basic, out of context, facts that would be difficult to present in any meaningful way to a jury.

By whittling away at the substance of the lawsuit before a jury ever got close to hearing it, the court was also pushing us towards settlement due to several factors that I didn’t fully understand until I was standing right in the middle of them. Specifically, judicial precedent over the past decade has had the effect, intended or not, of undermining the right to sue for constitutional torts under 42 USC 1983. Specifically, courts are increasingly instructing jurers to only assign nominal damages of $1.00 to plaintiffs who prevail in a 42 USC 1983 action for constitutional violations that don’t involve substantial physical or financial harm.

The justice system’s rationale is that from it’s perspective there is no monetary value in a constitutional right in and of itself so significant monetary damages for a constitutional violation shouldn’t be awarded to someone who can’t prove any other substantial harm associated with the violation. To add further insult to injury, court’s are increasingly limiting or denying attorney’s fees to civil rights attorneys who prevail on 42 USC 1983 claims but only win nominal damages for their clients.

This of course creates the perverse incentive that individuals who want to realize change to unconstitutional government policies, procedures and practices through non-violent legal action must stand their ground to such a degree during an incident that they place themselves in significant jeapardy of physical or financial harm before it’s realistically feasible to bring suit under 42 USC 1983.

What civil rights attorney, after all, is going to take a case pro-bono knowing that the chances of recouping his or her costs after a lengthy legal battle will be slim to none – even if the case is successful?

What individual, who isn’t independently wealthy, is going to pay an attorney to bring a 42 USC 1983 claim forward knowing there’s a significant chance that even if they do win, the court will only award nominal damages?

What government agency is going to be persuaded to change its ways when the only liability it faces for the wholesale disregard of individual rights is $1.00 in nominal damages?

While this wasn’t exactly the situation we were facing here, we weren’t very far removed from it either – especially after the most recent judge in the case denied several of our claims while leaving the core constitutional claims intact. We could have appealed the denial but we wouldn’t have been able to do so until after the trial. Additionally, another appeal would have added several more years to the case and all the costs and aggravation that goes along with it.

As such, I had a front row seat to just how badly the judicial system wants settlement over trial and just how little respect the system as a whole has for the fundamental individual rights it was allegedly created to protect.

Original report here




(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here

Thursday, August 02, 2012

Blundering British fraud squad

"We ARE the law", they seem to think

The Serious Fraud Office committed a catalogue of errors during its disastrous probe into the Tchenguiz brothers, two leading judges said yesterday.

Their scathing High Court ruling found that the agency had unlawfully obtained search warrants for its investigation of the property magnates.

The agency is bracing itself for a huge damages lawsuit which could run into tens of millions of pounds – possibly dwarfing its annual budget of £32million.

The judges warned that 'incalculable damage' will be done to markets if proper resources are not made available for future fraud investigations. Last month the SFO began investigating attempts to manipulate the Libor interbank lending rates.

Oral evidence given by the SFO at the original search warrants hearing was 'unfair and inaccurate' and its tone was 'unjustified', the court found.

The judges said there was a failure to set out the background, a lack of clarity, errors and a failure to put forward the issues against them being granted.

Investigators have been probing the Tchenguizes' dealings with Icelandic bank Kaupthing, which they tapped for large loans shortly before it buckled in 2008.

The brothers were arrested and questioned last March after their offices were searched – but both were released on bail without charge, pending further investigation.

Yesterday Queen's Bench Division president Sir John Thomas and Mr Justice Silber upheld the challenge against the legality of the warrants and sent the case to another court to assess the level of damages.

The ruling piles further pressure on new SFO chief David Green, who dropped the case against Vincent Tchenguiz in June as one of his first jobs in office.

But the SFO last night vowed to press ahead with its probe into brother Robert who, along with his firms, owed Kaupthing £1.6billion when it collapsed.

The brothers said the publicity surrounding their arrest and raids has inflicted lasting damage on their reputations and businesses.

In a statement Vincent said he would be seeking compensation. 'The series of concessions made by the SFO following the raids on my home and offices had already shown that the search warrants were flawed,' he added. 'Today's judgment highlights that the orders for those searches, which have caused massive damage to my business and to my reputation, should never have been granted.

'I will be seeking damages from the SFO – and from any other parties who contributed to the court being misled.'

Original report here




(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here




Wednesday, August 01, 2012

USDA Threatens Small Business Owner with $450,000 in Fines

Without much fanfare, Dean Moyer has raised gerbils and hamsters for 12 years. He’s sold them to distributors who, in turn, have sold them to pet store owners across the country. Chances are good that the pet hamster your neighbor’s kid always carries in his hand came from Moyer’s Sand Valley Farms, Inc. But that could change soon if the folks at the USDA have their way.

“Basically, the USDA just wants me to close up,” Moyer said. “They just want me to get out of the hamster business.”

During the week of July 15, Moyer received a “really thick registered letter” from officials at the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the USDA’s investigative and enforcement services agency. Inside the envelope was a “Settlement Agreement” dated two days earlier. Under the boldfaced subhead, “Why You Are Receiving This Letter,” Moyer found an explanation that began this way:

We believe you violated the Animal Welfare Act (7 U.S.C. § 2131 et seq.) (AWA), as described in the attached Settlement Agreement. our agency, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), is responsible for enforcing the AWA, and other agriculture laws that help prevent the spread of animal and plant pests and diseases, and ensure the welfare of animals.

After providing you with an opportunity for a hearing, we may impose civil penalties of up to $10,000, or other sanctions, for each violation described in this Settlement Agreement. We are offering you the opportunity to resolve this matter by paying an amount that is much lower than the maximum civil penalty.”

The letter went on to list 45 alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act dating back to Sept. 16, 2009.

Among other things, inspectors reported finding dead animals on the premises and a strong ammonia odor due to inadequate ventilation of the 10,000-square-foot facility.

Moyer explained, however, that anyone familiar with hamsters knows 50 dead animals among 6,000 live ones on the premises in a given week is neither unusual nor unheard of. Similarly, he said hamster-savvy folks know the strong odor associated with hamster urine is virtually impossible to get rid of.

During a Monday afternoon phone conversation, Moyer shared his assessment of the dire situation he faces today as president of a 21-year-old family business headquartered at 83 Mouse Track Lane in Richfield, a community one hour north of Harrisburg in central Pennsylvania.

The conversation began with a humorous bent.

“Gerbils are very, very, very expensive right now if you want to buy any,” said Moyer. “It’ll cost you $450,000 right now if you want a gerbil — I’ve got a fine to pay!”

The rest of the conversation was more serious and focused on the content of the USDA letter.

After answering the “why” question, USDA officials offered a description of how Moyer can waive his right to a hearing and pay a penalty — conveniently, no less, by check, money order or credit card — of $22,143 by Aug. 29. It even offered a payment plan if he’s unable to fork over the entire amount in one lump sum.

Believing he has done nothing to warrant such fines, Moyer said he called a phone number on the signature-free letter a couple of days after receiving it and eventually connected with Sarah Conant, a USDA bureaucrat with a very long title — Chief, Animal Health and Welfare Enforcement Branch, Investigative and Enforcement Services. If you recognize the name, it’s because I’ve written about Conant on more than one occasion.

Conant was the focus of my June 27, 2011, post, Animal Rights Activism Fuels USDA Rabbit Chase. In addition, she earned noteworthy mentions in my Chasing Rabbits series which, among other things, chronicled John Dollarhite’s battle with overzealous federal regulators in tiny Nixa, Mo. [Hint: Family Facing $4 Million in Fines for Selling Bunnies is a good place to start.] Finally, her agency figured prominently in my reports about Doug Terranova, a Dallas-based animal trainer who I described as caught up in a “legal circus” last summer.

Then unaware of Conant’s history as highlighted in the cases above, Moyer said he asked her what he could do to get the fine reduced and told her, “There’s no way I can afford a $22,000 fine.”

When Conant replied by telling him that $22,000 “IS a reduced amount,” Moyer said he couldn’t believe what he was hearing and asked her, “What do you mean that’s a reduced amount?”

“She said, ‘We can fine you $10,000 per violation,’” he said, noting that the letter listed 45 violations — or $450,000 worth of violations.

Moyer said he literally begged her for mercy and, in turn, she said she would see what she could do. Apparently, however, she couldn’t — or wouldn’t — do much. Inspectors are scheduled to return to the business for another inspection Tuesday morning.

Rather than send the local inspector who is both familiar with Moyer’s operation and lives less than 20 miles away, the USDA will likely send inspectors from afar.

Moyer said his last inspection was conducted by two individuals, including one veterinarian, from Youngstown, Ohio. In order to spend six hours inspecting his facility, they drove four and one-half hours each way and incurred meals, lodging and travel costs at taxpayers’ expense. Apparently, the USDA has figured out that it’s easier for their inspectors to “lower the boom” on complete strangers.

The long and the short of this situation is this, according to Moyer: “The way the regulations are written, it’s absolutely impossible for me not to get written up for a violation.”

If the fine isn’t dropped, Moyer’s entire livelihood stands at risk. He has no other viable source of income to support his wife of 23 years and their four children, two boys and two girls who range in age from 8 to 17. The income generated by the sale of rats and mice, his original business that began in 1991, simple isn’t enough.

“Potentially, this whole thing could put me out of business,” he said, explaining that he has nine employees dependent upon their jobs at Sand Valley Farms.

Moyer’s business won’t be the first shut down by the USDA. He said the agency has put at least two other large hamster businesses (i.e., operations that raise 1,000 animals per week or more) out of business in recent years, leaving only three or four large firms in the entire United States. In addition to those, only one- or two-dozen small raisers exist nationwide.

In addition to hosting inspectors tomorrow, Moyer said he’s also meeting to discuss his options with representatives of The Cavalry Group, a St. Louis-based group dedicated to fighting the radical animal rights agenda.

Original report here




(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today. Now hosted on Wordpress. If you cannot access it, go to the MIRROR SITE, where posts appear as well as on the primary site. I have reposted the archives (past posts) for Wicked Thoughts HERE or HERE or here