Gangsters in Blue

In this week’s issue of Huffington, they’ve published an updated version of my March article on Terrance Huff, drug dog searches, and asset forfeiture.

If you aren’t familiar, Huffington is the tablet magazine spinoff of Huffington Post, focusing on long-form journalism. If you have a tablet computer, I’d encourage you to check it out. One of the main complaints I hear about the Huffington Post site is its clutter and busyness. The magazine is very clean. No ads, no extras.

Anyway, while researching my book I recently came across the passage below from The New York Times Magazine. It has almost on-the-nose relevance to the issues at play in Huff’s case.

See if you can guess when it was published. Answer in the comments.

 . . . a number of judges [have begun] questioning police testimony that relie[s] on such legal passwords as “in plain sight” and “furtive gesture.”

“The difficulty arises,” New York Criminal Court Judge Irving Younger wrote last year, “when one stands back from the particular case and looks at a series of cases. It then becomes apparent that policemen are committing perjury at least in some of them, and perhaps in nearly all of them . . . Spend a few hours in the New York City Criminal Court nowadays, and you will hear case after case in which a policeman testifies that the defendant dropped the narcotics on the ground, whereupon the policeman arrested him. Usually the very language of the testimony is identical from one case to another. This is known among defense lawyers and prosecutors as “dropsey” testimony. The judge has no reason to disbelieve it in any particular case, and of course the judge must decide each case on its own evidence, without regard to the testimony in other cases. Surely, though, not in every case was the defendant unlucky enough to drop his narcotics at the feed of the policeman. It follows that in in at least some of these cases the police are lying.”

In California, where many drug arrests are made during highway patrols, Judge Stanley Mosk of the State Supreme Court recently questioned the police reliance on furtive gestures in justifying arrests.

“The furtive gesture,” Mosk wrote, “has on occasion been little short of subterfuge in order to conduct a search on the basis of mere suspicion or intuition.” In so doing, he said, policy imply guilty significance to gestures that are no more illegal than reaching for one’s driver’s license or turning off a car radio.

• It appears that a Utah state trooper has been falsifying arrest records for DUI cases. Bonus: Higher-ups probably knew, covered it up. Double bonus: In 2007 she was named “Trooper of the Year.
• Attempted puppycide.
• Mark Bittman wants food labels to include what mood the workers were in when it was picked and manufactured. Okay, not quite. But awfully close.
• Headline of the day. For your amusement, please note the improbable name of one of the two researchers.
• I’m pretty sure that if anyone who didn’t happen to be a cop responded to a colleague’s teasing by taking out a gun and shooting toward colleague’s feet, they’d be charged with some sort of crime.
• Milwaukee cop charged with sodomizing people performing several illegal body cavity searches is let out on $0 bail. Chief Ed Flynn referred to the officer’s actions as “noble cause misconduct.” You remember Ed Flynn. He’s the one who instructed his “troops” to tackle, detain anyone carrying a gun in the city, even though it’s allowed under state law.
• Houston Police Department admits to pre-writing traffic violations.

• The apes are rising.
• Welcome to our world.
• Six important sci-fi ideas that were invented by a hack.
• Marines catch “deserter” – five years after his honorable discharge.
• Louisiana teachers’ union threatens to sue private schools that accept vouchers.
• “Before being arrested and charged with these offences, Simon was a successful professional and politician in the City who, amongst other things, prosecuted police officers accused of disciplinary offences.”
• Do 3-D printers make prohibitions impossible?
• Today’s edition of “never call the cops for any reason whatsoever.”
• The most important trade agreement that we know nothing about.
• Cop chastises man for not being grateful that said cop harassed and humiliated him and frightened his daughter.
• Federal judge strikes down attempt to make websites liable for user-generated content.
• In today’s Q & A column on my blog, I answered several questions with a plethora of links to older columns that a number of you may find interesting.

(Thanks to Radley for the first two items, Jesse Walker for the third, Grace for the fourth, Walter Olson for the fifth and Brooke Magnanti for the sixth.)

• 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.

• Witnesses shocked after Vista, California deputy shoots broomstick-wielding man.
• New New Jersey law will fine motorists for not putting seat belts on cats and dogs.
• Headline of the day. 
• Daytona’s police chief is outraged that Judge Joseph Will dared to call his lying police officers liars.
• Things cats won’t do.
• Bloomberg’s defenders speak out: “But might there come a day when the New York City Department of Health mandates that burgers be limited to, say, four ounces? Indeed there might. And why not? Eight- and ten-ounce burgers are sick things.”
• Alternate headline: “Drug warriors to chronic pain patients: GFY.”
• Oh. Hi. So you’re home.
• Man arrested for spitting on the sidewalk.
• RIP, Richard Dawson. The only man who ever pulled off the pinky ring.

Here’s what happened:

The U.S Supreme Court has refused to grant cert in an appeal by Seattle police officers who say they did not use excessive force when they used a Taser stun gun on a pregnant woman.

The court denied cert today, report SCOTUSblog, Reuters and CNN.

The woman, Malaika Brooks, was seven months pregnant when she was pulled over for going 32 miles an hour, 12 miles an hour over the limit in a school speed zone. She refused to sign the ticket and refused to exit her car.

But check the last sentence:

The en banc San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that police used excessive force, but they had immunity because the law was unclear.

So these cops were already off the hook for damages. They appealed anyway (with support from a number of police organizations), because they wanted the Supreme Court to forever preserve a police officer’s power to Tase pregnant women who drive 12 miles per hour over the speed limit and refuse to sign their speeding tickets.

• How deep things are.
• Kentucky Supreme Court bars the unfortunately named town of Liberty from setting up roadblocks for sticker inspections.
• Supermoon photos.
• Police brutality cases crack up the town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania.
• Fun photos of New York City rooftops.
• “I was abducted by aliens.”
• The physics of spilled coffee.
• But for video, Broward County, Florida edition.

• Federal judges rules that excerpting articles on a website is “fair use.” I would hope so.
• Obituary for an otter.
• Hockey game breaks out at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
• Lawsuit: Minnesota school forced student to reveal her social networking passwords.
• Here’s a to-scale model of the solar system. Prepare to scroll.
• Iowa Washington puppycide case heads to court.
• Former LAPD detective finally convicted for 1986 murder.
• Wyoming road’s speed limits determined in part by average speed of drivers. We need more of this.

• Last week, the Keene, New Hampshire city council voted 9-4 in favor of purchasing the Lenco, Bearcat.
• 11-year-old handcuffed, taken to a holding facility for having a “bad attitude.”
• U.S. government says it can seize any .com., .net, or .org domain, no matter where the company that owns it is incorporated.
• Good bit of contrarianism from Michael Kinsley: The case against the case against Rush Limbaugh.
• Housing for hipsters.
• San Francisco police haven’t been conducting accuracy tests on breath test devices used in DUI cases. They’re supposed to conduct them every 10 days. They haven’t conducted any in six years.
• Michigan State will offer a course on surviving a zombie apocalypse.

• Thank goodness we’re finally securing the border from the menace of high school valedictorians.
• Two more aggressive police raids over suspected pot offenders: Here and here.
• Orlando police make use of sweet gadgets seized as evidence from a robbery.
• One of the more amusing press releases related to tax policy that you’re likely to see.
• How one bureaucrat almost succeeded in banning car radios.
• How to build a speech jamming gun.
• This looks to be a very cool blog of archival New York Times photos.
• Woman ticketed for resting her injured leg on the seat of a non-operational subway train.
• More taxi protectionist nonsense.