Gangsters in Blue

• Whether you support abortion rights, oppose abortion rights, or are somewhere in between, there’s one position on which we can all join together in agreement: Tennessee Rep. Scott DesJarlais is an asshole.
• Virginia man exonerated of rape after accuser admits to a detective that she lied. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is still blocking the man’s release, claiming the judge didn’t have jurisdiction to exonerate him. Remember, following procedure to the letter is only important when you’re trying to exonerate someone. When you’re trying to convict them, straying from the rules is just “harmless error.”
• Good article looking at how and why conservatives joined the prison reform movement.
• Spokane police officer who beat a mentally disabled man to death after falsely accusing him of stealing from an ATM . . . gets a four year prison sentence. Otto Zehm’s last words: “All I wanted was a Snickers bar.”
• TSA detains, jails a man for wearing a “weird watch” and having “unusually large boots.”
• Headline of the day.
• Runner-up.
• Step 1: Take advantage of nepotism to get elected to Congress. Step 2: Be corrupt. Step 3: Go into a deep depression when you’re caught for being corrupt. Step 4: Offer to resign, but only on the condition that you get disability pay because of the depression you’ve suffered after you got caught being corrupt.

• The preliminary hearing is underway in the case of Matthew Stewart, the Ogden, Utah man who shot a police raid team as they broke into his home. Stewart had six marijuana plants inside.
• Bubbles likes mail.
• Sweden wants your trash.
• Amazing tales of asset forfeiture abuse at the Bal Harbour, Florida police department.
• Headline of the day.
• Today’s lesson in in why you avoid calling the cops.
• Another exoneration in a shaken baby case.

• “GMO Opponents Are the Climate Skeptics of the Left” – Yep. And people are unnecessarily starving to death because of it.
• Due to recent events, The Almighty Muhammad’s Porkalicious Toon Jihad has been cancelled.
• I’ve addressed this issue here in the past, but yesterday, USA Today ran a front-page story on how convicts who get released after serving their sentences usually get more government aid than the wrongly convicted.
• Brazil has a law prohibiting anyone from criticizing a politician around election day. How backward of them!
• Headline of the day.
• Runner-up.
• “The video is one of the most troubling things I have ever seen. It’s simply unconscionable to watch what happens in the back of that squad car.”
• The only remaining certified police officer in the town of Vaughn, New Mexico is the drug dog.

Hi Folks : It’s Lenore from Free-Range Kids, already upset by the post below this one – William Anderson’s piece about kids in a  Mississippi town being incarcerated for “crimes” like violating the school dress code, or even flatulence!

Which reminded me of today’s “happy” story in the NY Post about a young man who’d been given a $100 ticket for riding his unicycle on a Brooklyn sidewalk — even though he offered to show the cop a government web site on his iPhone that stated it is NOT a crime. The cop didn’t care. Worse — when he got to court, at first the judge refused to listen to him.

[Judge] Delury also warned him not to ride his bicycle on the sidewalk again “or I’ll put you in Rikers.”

Isn’t that a little FLIP? A high school student rides a unicycle on the sidewalk (incidentally NOT breaking the law) and the next thing you know a judge is threatening to send him to JAIL?

Eventually the judge backed down — but only after the kid had the guts to request a second appearance in front of him to ask for a jury trial. By then the judge had finally DEIGNED to read the ACTUAL LAW. He then declared the issue “dismissed.”

What a lucky break! The kid is not going to do hard time for not breaking a law! – L

• The crisis of “vanishingly rare trials.”
• Carlos Miller helping develop a smart phone ap design specifically to record police. And you can help test it out.
• Here’s some local coverage of Leigh Stubbs’ release from prison.
• The Obama administration has shut down 500 California medical marijuana dispensaries in the last eight months.
• NYPD precinct posts mug shot poster of “professional agitators” who record on-duty police officers.
• “Evers began to tell me that he had 19 years on the job and asked me where the ‘brotherhood’ was for being a cop. He indicated that Philadelphia police officers ‘take care’ of one another.”

• Headline of the day.
• For a glimpse at the absurd reach of the regulatory state, take a look at the federal regulations for miniature golf courses.
• Here’s an update on the case of Virginia death row inmate Justin Wolfe, who is only still in prison because of Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul Ebert, a three-time nominee for TheAgitator.com’s Worst Prosecutor of the Year award.
• “This is the most transparent administration in the history of our country.”
• You know we’re losing ground when the Berkeley campus gets a Bearcat. Oh, and Stop & Frisk may be coming to San Francisco.
• Houston woman jailed for 12 hours for warning motorists about a speed trap.
• Another forensics scandal is brewing. This time it’s in Dallas, over a drug testing specialist who is alleged to be a fraud.
• Another survey, this time of 2,000 retired NYPD officers, suggests that commanding officers regularly pressured their subordinates to manipulate crime data.
• Popehat has more on the outrageous censorship of Massachusetts blogger Dan Valenti.

• Was money really that big of a factor in the Wisconsin recall?
• Illinois politicians decide they’d rather just not know the extent to which Chicago cops have tortured people, and whether any innocent people are still in prison as a result.
• Public employee pension reform also passed overwhelmingly this week in San Diego and San Jose.
• Fullerton, California recalls city council members in response to the Kelly Thomas beating.
• Amazing time-lapse video of Venus in transit across the sun.
• K-9 officer shoots his own dog.
• Waco deputy demands reporter turn over her cell phone.
• Your latest tedious defense of Bloombergian paternalism. Includes bonus defenses of drug and prostitution bans and organ markets.
• But for video, Philadelphia edition.

U.S. District Court Judge Joan A. Lenard is keeping a man in prison even though prosecutors have dropped the charges against him, even though the FBI says he should be released, and even though the only evidence against him was from a police officer who has since resigned after he was caught selling drugs and shaking down massage parlors.

Why? Paperwork.

Elroy Phillips will remain in federal prison in Miami while prosecutors and his defense attorney file a joint motion outlining again why they think he should be set free. U.S. District Court Judge Joan A. Lenard demanded the paperwork at a hearing this afternoon instead of accepting a joint motion to release Phillips.

The new paperwork is yet another legal hurdle for Phillips, who thought he was going to be released two weeks ago when prosecutors finally agreed to drop the charges.

Phillips spent years while behind bars trying to prove his innocence. He requested documents, hired a private investigator, and got a paralegal’s license so he could file his own court paperwork. When he learned two weeks ago that prosecutors planned to drop the charges, his daughter, Shatroyia Phillips, brought him clothes to wear when he’s released. At his hearing today, he wore a jail-issued white shirt and brown pants, his hands handcuffed behind his back.

Lenard said she couldn’t release Phillips because she needed to see it on paper. “It has a very broad sweep and differing legal theories,” Lenard said. “There are a lot of moving parts here.”

Lenard also happens to be the judge who presided over Phillips’ trial in 2003.

• People really did this?
• Something else to worry about: Worms eating your brain.
• Videos exonerate photographers wrongly charged with crimes in New York, Seattle. Be sure to appreciate those first three paragraphs.
• Walter Olson takes on Nicholas Kristof’s latest crusade: Boycotting alcohol manufacturers because of alcoholism on American Indian reservations.
• Pakistan bans Twitter.
• Congressman from the party of limited government procured millions in earmarks to purchase $17,000 helicopter drip pans from a contractor in his district.
• Before he was taken off the case, a Texas judge was preparing to posthumously exonerate Cameron Todd Willingham.
• Photo of the day (via Brian Tannebaum, via Carlos Miller):

• California liberals worry that federal pot raids will make people distrustful of government. Let’s hope so!
• National Guard Units aiding state drug war efforts. And possibly in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Kyllo.
• This article on the Otto Zehm killing aptly demonstrates the many problems with police unions.
• Both Reuters and Walter Olson throw water on the notion that Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine laws are filling the streets with blood.
• The sponsors the 1978 California law that substantially expanded the state’s use of the death penalty are now arguing for its repeal.
• Clark County, Nevada DA won’t charge a cop who was caught on film repeatedly kicking a man in the head. The man was in diabetic shock at the time. The officer has a history of misconduct, which the DA apparently didn’t know about until it was uncovered by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
• Union claims it should be able to force anyone who wants to work in a particular field to join the union and pay dues, and that it should then be able to use a portion of those dues for political activities. And it claims that preventing it from doing so is a violation of the union’s free speech.
• How the pun changed world history.