So I am quite literally snowed in right now. Front door won’t open. It’s been crazy. Photos and videos of puppy snow frolicking forthcoming.
In the meantime….
Actual sentence from an actual news story: “It’s designed for young girls ages 8 and older, but some say the mysterious product is a “dangerous spiritual game” that opens up anyone, particularly Christians, to attacks on their soul.”
Looks like the former DA Texas Gov. Rick Perry appointed to head up the state’s forensics panel is doing all he can to make sure the panel does nothing to help the state’s forensics system.
Here’s a good cop story: Bozeman, Montana cop buys food for man caught shoplifting school supplies for his kids.
Bruce Schneier: “Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight? I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and giving them free drinks.”
Gay rights, leftist groups in D.C. fight other gay rights, leftist groups in D.C. over right of anti-gay rights groups to take out ads on the city’s Metro trains. Good on the pro-speech folks.
Federal judge won’t toss the obscenity charges against John Stagliano. I think his attorney is right. This is a good chance to bring Miller v. California into the Internet age. “Community standards” means something quite a bit different now than it did then.
This smug op-ed by the guy wrongly arrested in the Snowball Fight Heard ‘Round the World is almost enough to make me support the gun-waving cop.
Congratulations, Democrats. You’ve proven you can pass a major piece of legislation by buying off votes with last minute pork projects and special favors, then shoving it through the Senate in the middle of the night just as well as the Republicans. You’re an all-growed-up corrupt ruling party, now. (CORRECTION: As noted in the comments, the bill didn’t pass, the Dems were just able to force cloture.)
The D.C. cop who drew his gun at a snowball fight this weekend is now international news. This will make it somewhat more difficult for MPDC to continue lying about the story.
Prosecutors are still whining about the Supreme Court’s Melendez-Diaz decision from last term, arguing in a brief for a similar case next term that the decision “is already proving unworkable.” Oh. Well in that case, sure. Let’s go ahead and scrap the constitutional right to confront one’s accusers because, you know, it’s really, really inconvenient to the government to respect it. I always forget about that footnote to the Bill of Rights that says, “*Unless respecting these rights makes the jobs of government employees more difficult.”
A grand jury has ruled that the police shooting and killing of Georgia pastor Jonathan Ayers was justified. I’ll have more on this terrible story in coming weeks.
Eliot Spitzer’s call girl now has an advice column with the NY Post. First question: How can I turn a life turning tricks into an advice column gig with the NY Post?
So the Max Baucus nominating his paramour to be a U.S. Attorney scandal is getting pretty interesting. Turns out she at one point was also sleeping with a forensic pathologist who had a history of questionable diagnoses in infant death cases. Oh, and he was a state medical examiner for the state of Mississippi in the 1980s. Why am I not surprised?
The L.A. Times rounds up the many incidences in which Joe Arpaio has launched investigations into people who have dared to question his tactics. Scariest line from the story: “Though he has said he’s not interested in running for governor, a recent poll showed him crushing the presumptive Democratic nominee, state Atty. Gen. Terry Goddard, 51% to 39%.”
Yahoo, Verizon refuse to release information related to their capability of and cooperation with the government for the purposes of spying on their customers. Their reasoning? Releasing the info would “shock” and “confuse” their customers.
Police enter home unannounced after receiving reports of a neighborhood prowler, shoot and kill family dog. No prowler.
Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley, a frontrunner for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, was the AG who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that forensic experts shouldn’t necessarily be subject to cross examination. Apparently, she didn’t do so well. Coakley has also been aggressive in the crackdown on prescription pain medication and has defended the controversial “recovered memory” sex abuse scandals from the 1980s and 90s.
British towns requiring parents to pass a criminal background check before being allowed to supervise their own children on public playgrounds.
New study further discredits the value of bite mark evidence. Every one of the cases where it has been used needs to be reviewed.
Kentucky Supreme Court rules the state’s sex offender law violates the Ex Post Facto clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Oklahoma sheriff, undersheriff get 27 months in prison for stealing money from motorists in a forfeiture scam. Have to say, though, the difference between legal forfeiture and what the sheriff was doing is pretty slight. Main difference here is that some of the money went directly into the sheriff’s pocket instead of the department’s forfeiture fund. Good on the feds for investigating and setting up a sting, though. We need more federal investigation of local civil rights abuses.
What happens to your keys and passwords after you die? Cory Doctorow looks at the various ways of giving loved ones access to your post-mortem online life.
On the topic of police dogs, someone in the comments posted this 2007 Grits for Breakfast post, in which a consultant expert on the use of K9s says the dogs are wrong about half the time. No idea how accurate that is, though it’s consistent with what cops from LEAP have told me.
Wired follows up on bCurtis Melvin’s work using Google Maps to annotate North Korea’s geography.
WalMart supports an employer health care mandate. Weirdly, this will likely win the company praise from its traditional critics. In truth, this really is an effort to impose expensive, government-enforced burdens on the company’s mom-and-pop competitors. Yet another example of how behemoth companies tend to welcome federal regulation, not shun it. More regs make it more difficult for upstarts to compete.
Stock up on Nyquil and Allerest now. The feds may ban them. Ridiculous. When you consider how many people benefit from the acetaminophen’s pain relief properties, 458 deaths per year sounds almost like a rounding error. (MORE: They want to ban Percocet and Vicodin, too.)
Husien Shehada, a 29-year-old unarmed Virginia man, was shot dead while vacationing in Florida this week. Police were apparently investigating reports of a man carrying a gun outside a nightclub. It doesn’t appear that he did anything wrong at all. The police bizarrely then interrogated the man’s brother and girlfriend about whether “they spoke Arabic,” then arrested the man’s brother for beating his girlfriend (he denies the charge). The cop who shot him was back on duty four days later, during which he was involved in a second fatal shooting. He’s now on paid desk duty. More here.
Another bizarre autopsy case in Mississippi: “His body organs were missing and he was stuffed with bed sheets.” Yes, Dr. Hayne is involved, though it isn’t yet clear just where in the chain of custody his initial autopsy came.
Police officer once again treads onto private land, shoots and kills the owner’s dog. And once again, witness accounts of the incident differ sharply from officer accounts.
My latest on Michael West got the green-light on Fark. Check out the comments from user RedThree in the discussion thread. Interesting.
Virginian-Pilot columnist Roger Chesley looks at the Cory Maye case, and says Ryan Frederick is lucky he doesn’t live in Mississippi. Neither man should be in prison, of course. But if Maye had gotten Frederick’s sentence, he’d be free by now.
Op-ed in the Washington Post says it’s time to sacrifice the Internet at the altar of journalism. I’d like to think this site shows the two can coexist rather nicely.
Great piece on Law Enforcement Against Prohibition at the Washington Post. The comments are encouraging, too. At least those I read.
ACLU says former U.S. attorney, now candidate for New Jersey governor, was routinely tracking American citizens on the cell phones without a warrant.
The director of Omaha’s crime scene investigation unit has been charged with felony evidence tampering. I first wrote about this case last December. It includes a false confession from a mentally handicapped man after a police interrogator said that unless he admitted to the murder, he’d do “do my level best to hang your ass from the highest tree.”
I missed this when it came out: The Mercatus Center ranks the 50 states by freedom. New Hampshire, Colorado, and South Dakota finish at the top. Alaska is tops in personal freedom. New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and California bring up the rear.
Miami-Dade cop steals money and drugs from arrestees. Internal affairs tries in vain for three years to get him off the force. Doesn’t happen until he actually shoots and nearly kills a man.
