Now that our host is back, relaxed, and ready to retake the reins, I wanted to put up a final post to say thanks to Glenn for letting me fill in for him. Also thanks to you, his readers, for your informative and interesting feedback over the last week.
I’ve had a great time.
You can catch me daily at Reason’s blog or my personal blog. Those of you with extra, extra short attention spans can follow me on Twitter. Tchuss!
Today’s photo of the day is of the Aliak Glacier in Resurrection Bay, near Seward, Alaska.
In the past, Professor Reynolds has mentioned his support for ending qualified immunity, the special protection from liability afforded to government employees. I agree with him. If anything, public employees should be held to a higher standard than the rest of us.
The story of Michelle Ortiz is an unfortunate example of qualified immunity in action. Ortiz was molested by a prison guard while serving a one-year sentence at a correctional facility in Ohio. When she reported the assault, prison officials did nothing. Later the same evening, the same guard raped her. When Ortiz reported the rape, prison officials ordered her to solitary confinement, and did nothing to punish the guard. A jury awarded Ortiz $625,000. But a panel for the US 6th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the verdict, finding that as state employees, the prison officials were protected by qualified immunity.
The Supreme Court will hear the case in the fall. The argument for qualified immunity is that we don’t want state employees hampered by fear of lawsuits when they’re making important decisions–be they policy decisions, or in the case of law enforcement, split-second decisions in emergency situations. The flip side of that, and what I find to be the more compelling argument, is that removing the possibility of liability (or at least making it very difficult for victims to win a lawsuit) is going to affect those decisions too. People tend to act differently when there’s less chance that they’ll be held accountable for their actions. That’s not a knock on government employees. It’s human nature.
Prison rape is another issue Instapundit has spoken out about. The current corrections culture that accepts prison rape as an inevitable part of hard time would change pretty quickly if we were to start holding prison guards, administrators, and wardens financially accountable for their negligence in allowing these rapes to continue.
Five Virginia teens are facing felony pornography charges for “sexting.”
This is happening far too often. I don’t quite comprehend the logic that says in order to protect minors from the dangerous consequences of sexting, we need to ruin their lives. Quote from the prosecutor:
It’s not clear what the consequences of the felony pornography charges might be but the chances of the students being convicted on the charges are as likely “as the moon coming crashing down tomorrow,” Commonwealth Attorney Cliff Hapgood said.
So why charge them in the first place?
I don’t think anyone would argue that it’s a good thing that minors are sending one another nude photos via cell phone. But the criminal justice system is a too clumsy a tool for this problem. In a lot of these cases, the most harmful part of sexting lies in what adult authorities do to these kids when they discover it.
Today’s photo of the day: Memphis, Tennessee.
An appreciation of the vending machine.
Charles Krauthammer and Bill O’Reilly talk about SWAT teams and the drug war.
Over at Reason, I offer some commentary.
Claim: The federal government will make the health care system simpler, more accessible, and more affordable.
Why I’m dubious: The Pentagon’s recipe for brownies is 26 pages long.
Today’s photo of the day is from the Familia Zuccardi winery in Mendoza, Argentina.
Last week, an Illinois judge rejected Chicago artist Christopher Drew’s motion to dismiss the Class I felony charge against him. Drew is charged with violating the state’s eavesdropping statute when he recorded his encounter with a police officer last December on the streets of Chicago. A Class I felony in Illinois is punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison. It’s in the same class of crimes as sexual assault. Drew will be back in court in June to request a jury trial.
I’m currently working on a feature for Reason about man in a more rural part of the state charged with six violations of the same statute, all of them for making audio recordings of on-duty public officials. For several of the counts in that case, the police were actually on the man’s property. He started recording his conversations with police because he felt he was being unjustly harassed for violating a town ordinance he thought was unconstitutional.
Like our host, I’m of the opinion that it should always be legal to record on-duty police officers, both as a matter of policy and under the free speech, free press, and right to petition the government provisions in the First Amendment. We saw the power and potential of audio and video recording technology to expose government abuse in the Iranian protests last summer. But we also see it here in the U.S. with the thousands of police misconduct videos uploaded to YouTube in recent years.
Typically, police who want to arrest someone for recording them while on duty use a strained interpretation of state wiretapping laws or whatever state or local law addresses obstructing or interfering with law enforcement. These incidents are troubling enough, and I think state legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials. Those laws should include remedies for people wrongly arrested, or who have had their cameras or cell phones illegally confiscated, damaged, or destroyed.
But in Illinois the situation is quite a bit worse. In Illinois it actually is illegal to make audio recordings of on-duty cops–or any other public official. Illinois is one of a handful of states that require all parties to consent before someone can record a conversation. But the other all-party-consent states also include a provision in their statutes stating that for there to be a violation of the law the nonconsenting party must have a reasonable expectation of privacy. On-duty police officers in public spaces have no such expectation.
Here’s where it gets even worse: Originally, the Illinois eavesdropping law did also include a similar expectation of privacy provision. But the legislature stripped that provision out in 1994, and they did so in response to an incident in which a citizen recorded his interaction with two on-duty police officers. In other words, the Illinois legislature specifically intended to make it a Class I felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, to make an audio recording of an on-duty police officer without his permission.
Given the spate of recent stories about cops in Chicago caught on video misbehaving (some of whom were subsequently held accountable only because of the video), the legislature’s already-awful-when-it-passed 1994 amendment hasn’t aged well.
I suspect most state officials know this law is unconstitutional. While several people have been charged under the statute for recording public officials, I’ve so far been unable to find anyone who was actually convicted, much less had a conviction upheld. (If you know of someone who has, please email me!) Prosecutors tend to either drop the charges or offer a plea bargain before the case gets to trial. It isn’t difficult to see why someone would take a misdemeanor plea and a clean record instead of challenging a bad law and risking up to 15 years in prison and a felony record if they lose.
Before Drew the closest anyone came to challenging the law came in 2004, when documentary filmmaker Patrick Thompson was arrested for recording police interactions with patrons outside of bars and restaurants in Champaign-Urbana. He was looking to document allegations that police were treating white patrons differently than black patrons. (See the ACLU’s brief on Thompson’s behalf here). But Thompson took a plea bargain before his case went to trial.
So the law remains on the books. Which Illinois police officers remain authorized by state law to detain, arrest, and jail people who record them while on-duty, and they can continue to confiscate the recordings.
(Cross-posted at Reason‘s Hit & Run.)
UPDATE/CORRECTION: Eugene Volokh emails to say that Massachusetts also doesn’t appear to recognize an expectation of privacy exception to its all-party-consent law, and has upheld a conviction for recording on-duty police officers.
Here’s today’s photo of the day, taken in Breezewood, Pennsylvania last December.
I don’t recommend getting stranded in Breezewood.
Of U.S. cities with populations over 500,000, can you guess which had the lowest murder rate last year, and consistently ranks among the three safest big cities in America? The answer might surprise you.
More on Draw Mohammed Day: Brendan O’Neill explains why he won’t be participating. And my boss, Reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, explains why our magazine will.
Will Saletan delivers a pretty righteous dismantling of Richard Blumenthal’s attempts to explain away his exaggeration of his military record. Saletan takes Blumenthal’s excuses one by one, then points to instances where Blumenthal has laughed off similar excuses from the defendants he has prosecuted in his time as Connecticut’s attorney general. Blumenthal “would you like you to give him a break,” Saletan writes, “But Blumenthal has never given anyone a break. He has made a career out of holding others to the strictest standards of truth—and mercilessly prosecuting them when they fall short.”
In that vein, a reader emailed to ask if Blumenthal might be in violation of the 2006 Stolen Valor Act. As far as I can tell, that law applies only to falsely claiming or wearing military medals one didn’t earn. So probably not. Then again, as Saletan’s article makes clear, Blumenthal himself was a pretty crafty prosecutor. Perhaps he should hope there aren’t any aspiring Richard Blumenthals in the Connecticut U.S. Attorney’s Office looking to make a name for themselves by strectching the law to bring down a high-profile politician.
I should add here that I don’t think Blumenthal should be prosecuted. And I have some issues with the Stolen Valor Act in general. We’re too eager criminalize actions that are better addressed outside the criminal justice system–in this case with shame and scorn. But I’ll confess: I’d find some poetic justice in seeing Blumenthal sweat a bit over the possibility of getting Blumenthaled.
Here’s today’s photo of the day. I snapped it in 2006 at the HR-57 jazz club in Washington, D.C. The band pictured is the Donvonte McCoy Quartet.
Or, I guess, half of them.
On Monday, I wrote about NYPD whistle-blower Adrian Schoolcraft, who recorded hundreds of conversations and roll call meetings at his precinct in Brooklyn. The recordings support prior allegations that NYPD is encouraging its officers to harass New Yorkers with “stop and frisk” encounters and bogus arrests while encouraging the same officers to downgrade actual crimes, or not report them at all.
Schoolcraft’s recordings were first brought to light earlier this month in an ongoing series of reports by the Village Voice, but the NYPD officer had been sounding alarms internally at the department for months.
Yesterday, former Newsday police columnist Len Levitt reported a distrubing addition to the story:
Schoolcraft has already paid a price for speaking out. As in the old Soviet Union, police forcibly took him to Jamaica Hospital last October, where, he says, he was kept against his will inside the psychiatric ward for six days.
He landed there last Halloween night after the NYPD came to his home in Queens and ordered him back to work after he says he fell ill and left his tour of duty an hour early.
When he refused to return, officers called Emergency Medical Service, which determined he had high blood pressure, then transported him to Jamaica Hospital, where he ended up in the psych ward – hardly the usual place for treating blood pressure problems.
His father Larry says the hospital has refused to release the records of his son’s stay, including the name of the admitting doctor.
Levitt says the hospital is now going over Schoolcraft’s records again, and will release them to him by the end of the week.
(Cross-posted at Reason’s Hit & Run.)
I’m starting warm up to this Nick Clegg chap.
A “power revolution” in Britain will be promised by Nick Clegg today as he tries to put his personal stamp on the Government in his first major statement as Deputy Prime Minister.
The Liberal Democrat leader will hail his programme of political reform as the most ambitious and radical since the Great Reform Act of 1832. He has told aides that the coalition government has given him the opportunity to implement the changes that he came into politics to pursue.
I know what you’re thinking. I was thinking the same thing. That kind of soaring language usually precedes calls for a panoply of new government programs. But read on . . .
In a speech in London Mr Clegg will promise a “wholesale, big bang” rather than piecemeal approach, including:
* scrapping the identity card scheme and second generation biometric passports;
* removing limits on the rights to peaceful protest;
* a bonfire of unnecessary laws;
* a block on pointless new criminal offences;
* internet and email records not to be held without reason;
* closed-circuit television to be properly regulated;
* new controls over the DNA database, such as on the storage of innocent people’s DNA;
* axeing the ContactPoint children’s database;
* schools will not take children’s fingerprints without asking for parental consent;
* reviewing the libel laws to protect freedom of speech.
“A bonfire of unnecessary laws.” The very thought of it warms the cockles of my cold libertarian heart.
When left and right come together in American politics we tend to get the worst of both sides. So this is encouraging. It’s still early, but the new U.K. Tory/LibDem coalition appears ready to both cut government programs and spending and roll back the British police/Nanny state.
The numbers from Kentucky are in . . . and it’s a Randslide.
Generally speaking, it’s good to see the guy endorsed by the political bosses get his clock cleaned. More party favorites and incumbents need to lose more often. Though I have to say that as a libertarian, I actually liked the Trey Grayson campaign’s caricature of Rand Paul better than I liked Paul himself.
For more on Paul, check the profile my magazine ran of him in our May issue.
The EPA is holding a video contest in which you, taxpayer, are invited to produce a piece of propaganda touting the glory of regulation. The winner gets $2,500 taxpayer dollars. It takes a peculiarly bureaucratic sort of mendacity to dream up the idea of using taxpayer money to promote a contest in which taxpayers are asked to make videos celebrating the way their tax dollars are being used to make their lives more expensive.
My colleagues at Reason.tv have produced three entries. Here’s one of them:
[youtube TvXmDaqNueU]
It appears that temptation has brought down another family values crusader. I blame gay marriage!
Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) will reportedly resign over an alleged affair with a staffer. Souder has long championed abstinence-only education, opposed gay marriage (because that would, you know, ruin the sanctity of hetero marriage), and has been one of the most vocal proponents of sending federal SWAT teams in to raid medical marijuana clinics in states that have legalized the drug for treatment. In fact, Souder once said merely discussing the idea of legalizing medical marijuana is akin to debating the legalization of rape.
Souder’s website sums his political phiolosophy as one that’s “committed to fighting the assault on American values.”
I wish my fellow Hoosiers had had the good sense to oust Souder on his record. But this will work.
Good riddance.
UPDATE: Here’s a video produced by Souder’s office in which the congressman explains his passion for abstinence-only education. The woman interviewing him in the video . . . is his mistress.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
Today’s photo: Las Vegas. Five-second exposure. Taken from the roof of the Rio Hotel in 2009.
This week, my crime column for Reason looks at 117 audio recordings of roll call meetings in a Brooklyn NYPD precinct that were recently obtained by the Village Voice.
Some background: Last March, a study from Molloy college suggested that NYPD higher-ups were pressuring police officers to under-report or reclassify serious crimes to juke the city’s crime stats. At about the same time, an NYPD officer released a few recordings in which his commanding officers can be heard telling rank-and-file cops that they’re required to meet a minimum number of arrests and citations each month. Both stories were played down by NYPD and its supporters.
The new recordings obtained by the Village Voice reinforce both sets of allegations made last March. The implications are pretty startling: As a matter of policy, NYPD seems to be encouraging its officers to harass innocent people, even to the point of arresting and detaining them for non-crimes (the city had a record 570,000 stop-and-frisk searches last year). At the same time, the department may be pressuring some officers and citizens to downgrade actual crimes–even serious ones–or to not report them at all.
We obviously want to hold government employees accountable. But it’s important that the metrics we use in doing so both reflect political realities and create a proper alignment of incentives. Much of what’s wrong with the criminal justice system today isn’t the product of evil or malevolent law enforcement personnel, but of poorly structured incentives put in place by bad policy. And bad policy usually comes from clueless politicians (the issue of crime seems particularly prone to unnuanced, slogan-based policy making).
I’ll look at other incentive problems within the criminal justice sysem in future posts this week.
An Arab-American wins Miss U.S.A.
The always-excellent Popehat blog explains why this clearly shows that the terrorists have won. As for all the crazies alleging a conspiracy, I’m trying to figure out how one might go about “fixing” a competition that’s completely subjective in the first place.
Still, intrepid journalist that I am, I have spent quite a bit of time reviewing the evidence. And I’ve come to the conclusion that Rima Fakih’s title is very well-deserved.
Greetings, Instanation. Since I’m new to the Instapundit guest blogging crew, I thought I’d take a moment to introduce myself. (And plug some my work, of course!)
I’m a senior editor for Reason magazine, where I write a weekly crime column and a couple of investigative features per year, generally on criminal justice issues. I’m also a media fellow with the Cato Institute and I publish the weblog TheAgitator.com. If you read this site regularly you might recognize my name from the Cory Maye case, my reporting on SWAT teams and police militarization, or my investigations into Mississippi’s forensic system, particularly the controversial medical examiner Steven Hayne and his sidekick, fraudulent bite mark specialist Michael West.
Like our esteemed host, I also dabble in amateur photography. I’ll post a photo or so a day of some of my favorites over the years. I currently live with my pup Daisy in Alexandria, Virginia, though I’ll be moving to Nashville, Tennessee in a couple of weeks.
Welcome to my fellow guest bloggers. And a big thank you to Glenn for inviting me to help fill in for him this week.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
