Don’t Talk to Cops
(Source: youtube.com)
Michigan Father Killed in Marijuana Child Removal Incident →
A prosecutor in northern Michigan has cleared the police officer who shot and killed a Grayling man as police and Child Protective Services (CPS) employees attempted to seize his three-year-old. The attempted removal of the minor child came after a police officer who came to the scene on a call earlier that same day reported that he smelled marijuana and reported the incident to CPS authorities, who decided the child needed to be removed. The dead man, William Reddie, 32, becomes the 17th person killed in US domestic drug law enforcement operations so far this year.
A child was removed because someone smelled marijuana? A father tried to keep his son from being taken and you shot him? The pig got away scot-free?
Florida quietly shortened yellow light standards & lengths, resulting in more red light camera tickets →
A subtle, but significant tweak to Florida’s rules regarding traffic signals has allowed local cities and counties to shorten yellow light intervals, resulting in millions of dollars in additional red light camera fines.
The 10 News Investigators discovered the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) quietly changed the state’s policy on yellow intervals in 2011, reducing the minimum below federal recommendations. The rule change was followed by engineers, both from FDOT and local municipalities, collaborating to shorten the length of yellow lights at key intersections, specifically those with red light cameras (RLCs).
While yellow light times were reduced by mere fractions of a second, research indicates a half-second reduction in the interval can double the number of RLC citations — and the revenue they create. …
Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year in approximately 70 Florida communities, with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies. In 2013, the cameras are on pace to generate $120 million.
“Red light cameras are a for-profit business between cities and camera companies and the state,” said James Walker, executive director of the nonprofit National Motorists Association. “The (FDOT rule-change) was done, I believe, deliberately in order that more tickets would be given with yellows set deliberately too short.”
Baltimore Cops Sued (Again) For Destroying Citizen Footage of Them Caught in the Act of Being Themselves →
[T]he Baltimore Police Department is being sued for attacking a woman and smashing her camera, marking the second time in two years it has been sued for destroying footage.
The first suit earned them a federal reprimand. The second will hopefully earn them a federal investigation.
In that suit, which was filed last week, Makia Smith says she was stuck in stand-still rush hour traffic in March 2012 when she saw a group of cops beating up a man.
She stepped out of her car, stood on the door sill and began recording.
She was quickly confronted by an aggressive cop named Nathan Church, who grabbed her phone, threw it on the ground and smashed it with his foot.
“You want to film something, bitch? Film this,” he yelled.
He then proceeded to beat her.
Quoting from the suit as filed:
“Officer Church pulled plaintiff out of her car by her hair and beat her. Officers Pilkerton, Ulmer, and Campbell then ran to plaintiff’s car and joined Officer Church in beating plaintiff and arrested her using excessive force. At all times described herein, plaintiff’s two year old daughter witnessed her mother’s beating and arrest by the Officers, as did others.”
Smith claims the cops taunted her and threatened to take her daughter away…
“The officers, despite the pleas of plaintiff, refused to call plaintiff’s mother. Instead, the officers tormented plaintiff by telling her that her daughter would be taken from her and sent to Social Services. Seeing plaintiff’s distressful reaction to these tormenting threats, they continued,” the complaint states. Smith … claims she was arrested and taken to jail on bogus charges that she assaulted Church and resisted arrest. She claims Church failed to appear for her trial – twice, and prosecutors dropped the charges, but she had to hire a lawyer and spend more money recovering her impounded car.
New report blows the lid off America's recent history of torture, and shows that when it comes to conserving the national-security state, it matters little which party is in power. →
Child Protective Services (sic) Takes Baby After Parents Seek Second Medical Opinion →
A Sacramento couple is without their 5 month old baby after Child Protective Services sent in the police to forcibly remove the child from their care.
A hearing is scheduled for Monday, April 29, 2013 on the incident which was triggered when Anna Nikolayev and her husband Alex took baby Sammy out of Sutter Memorial Hospital and sought a second opinion at Kaiser Permanente, a rival hospital, for Sammy’s flu-like symptoms.
Anna and Alex were concerned about the quality of care baby Sammy was receiving at Sutter where he was admitted nearly two weeks ago. At one point, Anna questioned the antibiotics Sammy was being given and was alarmed that the nurse administering the treatment didn’t know why the child was receiving them. Anna claims that a doctor later said that Sammy should not have been receiving the medication.
When doctors began discussing the possibility of heart surgery, the parents decided to leave without a proper discharge in order to have the child examined elsewhere.
“If we got the one mistake after another, I don’t want to have my baby have surgery in the hospital where I don’t feel safe,” Anna said.
She added, ”We went from one hospital to another. We just wanted to be safe, that he is in good hands.”
While at Kaiser Permanente, the police showed up at the request of Sutter. The police told the parents that staff at Sutter had told them that the child was in such a bad state that, as Anna put it, “they thought that this baby is dying on our arms.”
After the police saw that baby Sammy was fine and examined medical records that clearly stated that Sammy was clinically safe to go home, they left.
The attending doctor at Kaiser said, “I do not have concern for the safety of the child at home with his parents.”
The next day, police came to Alex and Anna’s home.
Alex met them outside and was slammed against the wall and pushed to the ground.
His keys to the home were forcibly removed from him and the police entered the house to take the baby.
Anna’s home video of the incident shows police entering the home.
“I’m going to grab your baby, and don’t resist, and don’t fight me ok?” a Sacramento police officer is heard saying in the video. …
Sammy is currently in “protective custody” at Sutter Memorial Hospital. Hospital officials refused to comment saying the case was with CPS and law enforcement and they would have to deliver a statement.
Alex sums up the situation well.
“It seems like parents have no right whatsoever,” he said.
Indeed.
Parents are increasingly becoming irrelevant when it comes to decisions regarding their children’s medical care. Jodi and Scott Ferris experienced a similar traumatic event when they questioned the Hep B vaccination for their baby at Penn State Hershey Medical Center. Their baby was also taken by CPS.
This is what libertarians mean when we talk about the state’s monopoly on force. Any other individual(s) who would assault a dutiful father, break into a family’s house, and rip a baby out of his loving mother’s arms would rightfully be met with justified defensive force. Except if a parent would respond to agents of the state the same way, that parent would be dead and the corpse would be falsely charged with resisting arrest and all manner of nonsense (further destroying the child’s future). And even if the agents of the state are eventually shown to be wrong, they are time and time again free from punishment - often met with little more than paid time off.
In this situation, who would suffer ramifications for tearing this child away from his peaceful, loving parents? In a just world, the hospital administrators, nurses, and doctors responsible for the false report, the government bureaucrats in Child Protective Services who failed to acknowledge the truth of the situation, and the police officers who actually followed through on their “orders” to introduce force and aggression where there was none would all be fired and criminally charged. Every single one of them.
In reality, none will likely face any repercussions.
Whenever you might feel the impulse to advocate for more state dominion over our lives in the name of safety and protecting the weak, remember this story. This story is not an aberration. This story simply illustrates the soullessness of government bureaucracy and the danger of the monopolization of power. It is not necessarily a story about evil or stupid people, it is a story about the natural consequences of the state.
91% of D.C. Pot Charges Are Filed Against Black People, Only Six Percent Are Filed Against Whites →
Edit: It’s important to note that while D.C. has a majority black population (50.7%), the white population is still 42.4% (source). And there tend to be more whites who work in D.C. but live in surrounding cities. The population alone cannot explain the vast disparity in charges. Having worked on a couple of cop-centric reality shows, I’ve seen the blatant institutionalized racism within the ranks of police officers in over a dozen cities.
While President Obama was starting and expanding unconstitutional wars overseas, Bradley Manning, whose actions have caused exactly zero deaths, was shining light on the truth behind these wars. It’s clear which individual has done more to promote peace.
— Ron Paul: Bradley Manning Deserves Nobel Peace Prize More Than Barack Obama
Crime: Marijuana Possession. Sentence: Death.
This story is from 2008, but today is the first I’ve heard of it — and the time passed has done nothing to lessen the horror.
Jonathan Magbie was ”a 27-year-old quadriplegic sentenced to ten days in jail for his first offense — possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor.” Magbie used marijuana to lessen the pain of his condition, from which he’d suffered since being hit by a drunk driver at the age of four. He was convicted for that use, and died as a result:
Because the Washington D.C. jail was incompetent to meet his special medical needs, including his dependence on a ventilator, that was a death sentence — Magbie was dead within four days.
When he was taken to court, the prosecution maintained that they had no interest in sending Magbie to jail because of his quadriplegia and the likelihood that his death would result from incarceration. The presiding judge, one Judy Retchin, had other ideas.
Retchin understood the implications when she decided to incarcerate someone who used a wheelchair and needed a ventilator to breathe while sleeping. […]
Malek Malekghasemi, associate medical director at the city’s Correctional Treatment Facility when Magbie entered the D.C. jail, called Retchin’s office and asked that she order that Magbie be sent to a hospital because the jail’s medical facilities could not meet his needs.
“Minutes later [Retchin’s clerk] called me and said [the] judge will not issue such an order,” Malekghasemi said.
After Magbie’s death, the ACLU represented his family as they sued the city of Washington. The family received a large settlement, but Judge Retchin maintained to investigators that she had no idea Magbie needed a ventilator to live, despite the fact that court records show she very obviously knew exactly that.
Judge Retchin was cleared of wrongdoing and retains her judgeship — in fact, she was promoted to senior judge in 2010, two years after essentially sentencing a paralyzed man to death for smoking a joint.
Of course, there is one sense in which this tragedy should come as no surprise: Magbie was black, and in DC (as in many places in America) that means he was far more likely than average to get in trouble with the police for his drug use:
More per capita marijuana arrests are made in the District than in any other jurisdiction in the country, [but] even with a high arrest rate, some people in D.C. can probably safely get high without worrying that the cops are coming. Those people are white people. In 2007, 91 percent of those arrested for marijuana were black. In a city whose population demographics are steadily evening out, that’s odd. In fact, adjusting for population, African Americans are eight times as likely to be arrested for weed as white smokers are.
Since Magbie’s death, Washington has legalized medical marijuana, meaning that were he alive today his use of pot to alleviate pain would be completely legal, as it should be. What Judge Retchin did, however, should never be legal — and it’s beyond indecent that she is still on the bench.
Unconscionable.
New York City’s institutionally racist and privacy-violating stop-and-frisk procedure is currently on trial for constitutionality:
Devin Almonor, the teenage son of a former police officer, said he was thrown against an unmarked car and temporarily handcuffed walking home from a bus stop. Medical student David Floyd was frisked by officers outside of his apartment as he helped a neighbor locked out of his home.
For both, the experience was humiliating and frightening. They also say it was illegal, because they believe they were stopped because of their race. Both are black.
“I am not a criminal. I did not commit any criminal acts,” said Floyd, who testified along with Almonor at the opening of a federal trial.
Testimony continued Tuesday in the case that challenges the constitutionality of some encounters under the controversial law enforcement tactic of stopping, questioning and frisking New Yorkers on the street.
Learn more here. Graphic via.
The Last Meals Of Innocent Men
An emotional new ad campaign from Amnesty International asks its viewers to stomach a hard truth — images of the last meals of wrongly executed American prisoners.
As part of an initiative to abolish capital punishment completely, the influential human rights group has highlighted the unintended consequences of imposing the death penalty by focusing on a handful of prisoners who were eventually presumed innocent after they were executed. Since 1973, 142 death row inmates have been exonerated of the crimes for which they were sentenced to die, the Death Penalty Information Center reports. Some of those people spent decades in prison before their innocence was proven.
Meal 1: Ruben Cantu (Texas) was charged with capital murder at 17 years old for shooting a man during a robbery. The one witness to this crime admitted later on that he was pressured by police to identify Cantu as the criminal. He told the police twice that Cantu was not the shooter.
However, Cantu was still executed in 1993.
Meal 2: Leo Jones (Florida) was charged with the murder of a police officer in Florida. Although he said that said he was coerced into confession after hours of interrogation. The police officer and the detective involved in his case, were forced out of uniform for ethical violations a few years after his’ conviction.
Jones was executed in 1998.
Meal 3: Claude Howard Jones (Texas) was sentenced to death in 1989 for shooting and killing Texas liquor store owner. However, the recent DNA tests on the strand of hair that was used as the only physical evidence against him was proved not to belong to him.
“Knowing that these DNA results support his innocence means so much to me, my son in the military and the rest of my family. I hope these results will serve as a wake-up call to everyone that serious problems exist in the criminal justice system that must be fixed if our society is to continue using the death penalty,” - Jones’ son, Duane Jones
Jones was executed in 2000.
Meal 4: David Spence (Texas) was charged and sentenced to execution for the murder of three Texas teenagers. There was no physical evidence against him and both the homicide detective and police lieutenant that were on his case did not believe Spence to be the criminal. The prosecution solely relied on the testimony of other prison inmates in their case against Spence,
He was executed in 1997.
Meal 5: Cameron Willingham (Texas) was convicted of murdering his three children in a 1991 house fire . Four national arson experts have concluded that the original investigation in the case was flawed, while an independent investigation into the case concluded that the prosecution centered its argument on arson theories that have since been repudiated by scientific studies.
Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004
I think that’s very clearly an abuse of power on the judge’s part. If I cannot summarily jail a random person on the street for flipping me off and otherwise acting rudely, then why should a judge? A judge - nor any other government worker/leech - is not a higher class citizen. He is not more important or special. In fact, I’d argue the opposite.
Fair trials and free speech are not rights reserved only for the polite.
NYPD officer who sexually assaulted teacher beats rape conviction →
A New York police officer who brutally sodomized and inflicted oral sex upon a schoolteacher at gunpoint has not been convicted of rape, despite DNA evidence and witness testimonies about the violent attack.
New York’s state law excludes nonconsensual oral and anal sex from the definition of “rape”, calling them “sexual assault” instead, the New York Daily News reports.
“New York lags behind such liberal bastions as South Dakota and Tennessee in how we define rape,”said Assemblywoman Aravella Simolas, who last year introduced a bill that expanded the definition of “rape”, which failed to get passed. “New York should be at the forefront to protect crime victims.”
Lydia Cuomo, the 25-year-old schoolteacher who was victimized on the first day of her new job at a Bronx charter school, was sexually assaulted by off-duty police officer Michael Pena on Aug. 19, 2011. The cop asked her for directions to the subway at about 6:15 am, while she was waiting to be picked up by her principal.
But the NYPD officer suddenly pointed his 9-mm handgun at the woman’s face, threatening to kill her and violate her in every way imaginable. The officer let her live, but not without sexually assaulting her first.
And the evidence was there: doctors found Pena’s DNA on the victim’s undergarments, a witness testified to seeing the man penetrate the woman, and even NYPD officers admitted that Pena sexually assaulted Cuomo.
“I feel like essentially I had a silver platter of a rape case. I had witnesses, I had DNA, I had my own testimony, I had two cops,” Cuomo said, speaking publicly for the first time in an interview with the Daily News
Pena was found guilty of committing a criminal sex act and predatory sexual assault, but fell short of being convicted of rape in Cuomo’s case – even though he was convicted of rape in several other cases involving different women.
“Anal’s not rape?” Cuomo said. “On what planet do you live? It never occurred to us that that’s not rape.”
The young woman is now going public with her case to try to change the New York statute limiting the definition of rape. States like Tennessee and South Dakota define forced sodomy and oral sex as rape, while New York has repeatedly failed to change its statute.
(Source: thefreelioness)
The TX state trooper who performed a roadside cavity search on two women (using one glove) has finally been fired after a month and a half of paid leave. →
…that’s it?! This is a truly striking example of inequality before the law. If either of this trooper’s victims had done likewise, they would now be in jail.
It turns out it’s actually not all that hard to get a confession out of an innocent person. The same high-pressure psychological techniques meant to wear down a guilty suspect will make a lot of innocent people confess to something they didn’t do. Since innocent people are more likely than criminals to waive their right to remain silent, they’re put in a high-stress situation where they’re not even clear about what they’re being charged with. They also may feel guilt for some unrelated reason (they saw the crime and failed to report or stop it, for example). So, they say whatever they need to say to make the interrogation end.
For instance, one popular interrogation technique has the interrogator give a monologue claiming he already knows the subject is guilty, and then follows nine scripted steps to get a signed confession. It’s incredibly effective — it gets guilty suspects to confess nearly 84 percent of the time. Oh, and it gets innocent people to confess approximately 43 percent of the time. Add hinting at fake evidence, and you can up that false confession rate to about 94 percent.
—
Let’s take up that last sentence a few more times:
“Add hinting at fake evidence, and you can up that false confession rate to about 94 percent.”
“Add hinting at fake evidence, and you can up that false confession rate to about 94 percent.”
“Add hinting at fake evidence, and you can up that false confession rate to about 94 percent.”
So, that leaves the question: how often to interrogators hint at fake evidence during interrogations?
If you guessed often, you’re on the right track. If you guess quite often, you’d be correct.
Related: Perillo & Kassin (2010) (discussing the basis of the 94 percent figure).
(via letterstomycountry)
