Gangsters in Blue

• Scalia is apparently concerned that capital defense attorneys who screw up their clients’ cases don’t face any professional sanction. Maybe he’s right. But it would also be nice to see some concern over the lack of discipline for misbehaving prosecutors, too.
• “When the officers showed up at the city jail to book Hill a short time later and turn in their evidence, the five pounds of marijuana they bragged about an hour earlier somehow had become a pound and a half.”
• Obama administration cracks down on medical marijuana marijuana dispensaries. Again. At this point, his campaign promises on this issue amount to damnable lies.
• Another isolated incident. What the hell is going on Fullerton?
• California appeals court upholds warrantless cell phone searches during a traffic stop.

More stories you couldn’t make up:

The Internet is full of license plate covers that claim to be able to help drivers avoid getting a red light or speed camera ticket.

According to New Orleans Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas, one of his high-ranking officers, Capt. Michael Glasser, had this type of distortion device on his police cruiser. Serpas took away his car, and the matter is now under review by the NOPD’s Public Integrity Bureau.

“No police officer has the right to violate the rules and the law and police supervisors are especially responsible for insuring that the officers follow the rules,” said Serpas.

According to Louisiana law, license plates “shall be maintained free from foreign materials and in a condition to be clearly legible.”
Glasser’s attorney Frank Desalvo said license plate covers are not illegal.

“I think the state law says if your license plate has to be visible from 50 feet away,” said Desalvo. “I think these things affect the visibility from a certain angle.”

Glasser’s case is particularly thorny because of the unit he commands.

He is the integrity control officer for the Special Operations Division, which also includes highway enforcement, the department that reviews red-light tickets.

“This inquiry is going to get to the bottom of it and it would be terribly troubling to us if a captain who was also responsible for insuring integrity had in fact broken our rules,” said Serpas.

I have no idea if the product Glasser uses it technically illegal under Louisiana law, but it would be interesting to see how many motorists Glasser’s unit has fined for using similar techniques to obscure their license plates from red light cameras. Bonus points: Glasser is president of the New Orleans police union. More bonus points to his lawyer for putting up the “everybody else is doing it” defense.

[Serpasj]  claims there are other police cars out there with illegal tint and improper license plates.

Think about that for a second. Glasser’s attorney is arguing that his client, a high-ranking cop, shouldn’t be disciplined for possibly violating the law because lots of other New Orleans cops also violate similar laws—laws that regular, non badge-wearing residents of New Orleans are expected to follow.

In related news, a Pennsylvania state liquor control officer was arrested over the weekend for DUI.

• Massachusetts high court okays a $70 administrative fee to fight a $100 traffic ticket.
• Steven Pinker: “Why Violence Is Vanishing.”
• After a half million wrongful arrests, NYPD commissioner tells cops to stop tricking pot smokers into breaking the law.
• How state lawmakers pump up their own pensions.
• Girl cuts herself. School makes her sign a pledge she isn’t cutting herself.
• Man with Down Syndrome beaten by cops, who apparently were concerned about a bulge in his waistband. It was a colostomy bag.

• Attempted puppycide.
• “Forty Texas Cops Rob a Strip Club.”
• Cops ticket man for directing traffic at a broken stoplight, then leave without replacing him.
• Rick Perry seeks blessing from Joe Arpaio.
• Barack Obama, drug warrior.
• Police board plane, arrest, cuff brown people, release with no charges.
• Man arrested, charged with DUI despite blowing 0.0 on breath test. Note all the boilerplate language in the arrest report about smelling booze, driver being flush and glassy-eyed, etc.

• Lawsuit: Man contends he was arrested for contempt for not standing on his leg. Which the arresting officer had just broken.
• Another arrest in Austin for providing free rides home from bars. And from the discussion of that post over at Reddit: “I am personally involved in the lobbying effort to keep these guys off the street and honestly the reason is simply to restrict competition.”
• Nice photo of a runway model.
• Good roundup of great journalism on the death penalty.
• Anonymous releases hacked emails from Texas police department. Disturbingness ensues.
• Dustup of the day: Cato’s Tad DeHaven vs. Lloyd Chapman, head of the American Small Business League.
• How U.S. companies profited from torture flights.

Cops in Florida have written thousands of tickets to motorists for flashing their lights to warn other motorists of speed traps. Problem is, flashing your lights to communicate isn’t against the law in the Florida.

So one motorist has filed a class action.

 . . . the lawsuit says the FHP is well aware they are wrongfully applying the state law and they are doing it as a means of generating revenue. In 2005, a court order was even issued saying the state law doesn’t prohibit the flashing of vehicle headlights.

Campbell isn’t the only one. Since 2005, FHP records show more than 10,429 drivers have been cited under the statute.

In addition to seeking the refund of the $100 ticket, the lawsuit seeks damages in excess of $15,000…

This is pretty incredible:

Drivers have no recourse if police say the tape from a dashboard-mounted video camera is not available, according to a ruling Wednesday from the Texas Court of Appeals. Mark Lee Martin wanted to defend himself against drug possession charges filed in the wake of an August 29, 2008 traffic stop, but he was told no video was available.

Travis County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Jennings claimed that he pulled over Martin that evening because he failed to signal a left-hand turn. Within less than two weeks after the incident, Martin’s attorney formally requested that the department preserve video evidence from the stop. Subpoenas were issued to ensure “all videos and dispatch calls” would be saved. At trial, Jennings was asked why the camera evidence had not been kept.

“Since I didn’t put it in my report it wasn’t preserved because I didn’t believe it had any type of evidential value,” Jennings told the court.

The dashcam is automatically activated when an officer turns on his emergency lights. Department policy states that all video must automatically be saved for thirty days. Jennings could not say whether his machine was operating that night, but he would have noted either at the beginning or end of the shift if the device had not been functional. Jennings stated that the only way to know for sure if the video had been taken would have been if he had preserved the video. Martin argued the police were obviously hiding evidence.

“The officers intentionally destroyed the video and thereby put exculpatory evidence as far as the search is concerned or evidence favorable to the accused out of the reach of the accused,” Martin’s attorney claimed. “We feel that for no other reason the search is invalid and any evidence found as a result of that search should be suppressed.”

The appellate court found no merit in this argument.

“We agree with the state that the record supports a finding by the district court that the police did not act in bad faith,” Justice Bob Pemberton wrote. “The United States Supreme Court has held that ‘unless a criminal defendant can show bad faith on the part of the police, failure to preserve potentially useful evidence does not constitute a denial of due process of law.’”

The court found no evidence of bad faith because the officer testified that he had “no clue” whether there even was a recording made.

Relevant excerpt from my Reason piece “The War on Cameras”:

Last March, Justice Lee Ann Dauphinot of the Second Court of Appeals in Texas complained in a dissent that when defendants accused of driving while intoxicated in Fort Worth challenge the charges in court, dash-camera video of their arrests is often missing or damaged. “At some point,” Dauphinot wrote, “courts must address the repeated failure of officers to use the recording equipment and their repeated inability to remember whether the car they were driving on patrol or to a DWI stop contained the video equipment the City of Fort Worth has been paying for.”

Well I guess they are addressing it, now. They’re giving cops a how-to guide when it comes to destroying dash cam footage that makes them look bad, or that could exonerate a motorist: Just make it look like you’re incompetent, not malicious.

• Agitator guest blogger alum Alyona Minkovsky does a Q&A with Brian Lamb tonight on C-SPAN.
• LAPD officers allege ticket quotas.
• More laws named after dead people.
• Next in line for a bailout: the U.S. Postal Service.
• Ken at Popehat has been on a rampage lately—a delightfully entertaining rampage of truth, light, and goodness.
• DOJ files secret brief in wiretapping case that plaintiff’s attorneys aren’t permitted to see.
• Anonymous claims to have hacked 70 law enforcement websites, says big information dump is coming.
•  Up next: the higher education bubble.

• I know my tray table is in its locked, upright position. If you know what I mean.
• After two deaths, Charlotte police department shelves tasers pending a safety review.
• Some good perspective on “Leiby’s Law.”
• Amazing how the verbiage changes in these stories when the home invaders who shoot the dog aren’t wearing badges.
• Massachusetts plans to use high-speed license plate scanners to create massive database to indefinitely store driver whereabouts. Sure. This isn’t creepy at all!
• Newark cop arrests, puts choke hold on TV camera man, then charges him with “disorderly conduct.”
• Republicans for limited government.

• No rest in the war on lemonade stands.
• Pittsburgh police commissioner orders cops to make at least 10 traffic stops per month in predominantly black district.
• Hope you have a permit for that imaginary gun.
• Another lefty activist group that’s demanding transparency from free market groups . . . but won’t disclose its own donors.
• When al-Qaeda is defeated, will we get our civil liberties back? (This is a rhetorical question.)
• Photo of Pete Eyre with one of the jurors who acquitted him yesterday.
• More on that study of Alabama judges who override juries in death penalty cases: Not only do they overwhelmingly override juries in favor of sentencing defendants to death, they’re more likely to do so in an election year.
• Prosecutor still on the job after two DWI arrests in two weeks.
• Utah woman pulled over for driving too slow,  then arrested for recording the stop.