Category Archives: Justice System Abuse of Power

Morning LInks

  • No more Saturday mail delivery. which is expected to save about $2 billion annually (equal to about an eighth of its annual losses).  The postal workers union is condemning the move, which is probably the best indicator that it’s a step in the right direction.  Interestingly, this decision is being made by the USPS without Congressional approval (like so much of what happens in the Executive Branch these days).
  • Media outlets are reporting on a secret CIA drone base in Saudi Arabia from which drone attacks in Yemen are launch.  While the American media has known about this base for some time, they withheld reporting on it at the government’s request because “the goddamn American people have no business knowing what their government is doing in their name.”  [That last comment is really more of a paraphrasing of American governmental attitude than a specific quote]
  • 18 y/o girl gets 30 days in the slammer for flipping off the judge.  This is right after the judge doubled her bond because of her lack of contrition.  The girl was charged with possession of the prescription drug Xanax.  Most media hasn’t even batted an eyelash at the harshness of the 30-day penalty. While it might not have been in her best interest to piss off the judge, like her, I have no respect for a justice system that would charge and prosecute someone for possession of Xanax to begin with.
  • A new report says the that the Britain’s MI5  wants to install black boxes on UK networks to enable them to monitor virtually everything their citizens say and do online.  While there is some speculation that encryption would render such a system useless, the part of the report that deals with that issue was redacted because, as is the case in any modern democracy, the government can’t have the population knowing what they plan to do.

Afternoon links

  • Greenwald dissects the Obama administration’s latest rationalization for its power to act as judge, jury, and executioner of any American citizen it deems to maybe possibly pose an imminent threat to some U.S. interest somewhere, sometime, with absolutely no oversight or checks and balances by the other two branches of government (which probably suits those other two branches just fine).  Reason.com also weighs in.
  • Argentina still thinks they’re going to get the Falkland Islands back.  I think they’re right.  I expect it to happen about the same time as Israel reverts back to Palestine.  Both cases represent instabilities maintained by force of arms that will eventually be unsustainable.

Police lie! Oh my god! Who would have thought?

The New York Times has an interesting opinion piece about cops who lie in order to bolster arrest and conviction rates.  The article quotes Peter Keane, a former San Francisco Police commissioner:

“Police officer perjury in court to justify illegal dope searches is commonplace. One of the dirty little not-so-secret secrets of the criminal justice system is undercover narcotics officers intentionally lying under oath. It is a perversion of the American justice system that strikes directly at the rule of law. Yet it is the routine way of doing business in courtrooms everywhere in America.”

The article points out that even the NYPD (you know, that icon of truth and justice) isn’t exempt from this kind of behavior:

Remarkably, New York City officers have been found to engage in patterns of deceit in cases involving charges as minor as trespass. In September it was reported that the Bronx district attorney’s office was so alarmed by police lying that it decided to stop prosecuting people who were stopped and arrested for trespassing at public housing projects, unless prosecutors first interviewed the arresting officer to ensure the arrest was actually warranted.

So, why do they do it?

Police departments have been rewarded in recent years for the sheer numbers of stops, searches and arrests. In the war on drugs, federal grant programs like the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program have encouraged state and local law enforcement agencies to boost drug arrests in order to compete for millions of dollars in funding.

Radley Balko has repeatedly warned about the bizarre incentives created by such programs.   Incentivizing any activity generates more of it and there is no incentive not to lie because cops are rarely held to account by their superiors, prosecutors, and certainly not by the public service unions that protect them from any repercussions from their abuses of power and lack of professional ethics.

But, it’s not just because of the drug war incentives.

Even where no clear financial incentives exist, the “get tough” movement has warped police culture to such a degree that police chiefs and individual officers feel pressured to meet stop-and-frisk or arrest quotas in order to prove their “productivity.”

The general claim of “tough on crime” is what defines almost any elected position in the criminal justice system.  Advancement is yet another incentive for high arrest and prosecution numbers, which explains why prosecutors aren’t too eager to know when cops are lying on the stand.  It’s all about quantity, not quality.

Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty.

Code of silence?  Really?  I’m stunned!  Another possible reason might be that the public mostly just doesn’t give a shit.  Most people, regardless of educational level, think that people who get arrested are almost certainly guilty.  Why else would they have been arrested?  It’s like our military operations where anyone we kill must, by definition, be an enemy (otherwise we wouldn’t have killed him).  And anyone who watches cop shows on TV knows that cops are hopelessly burdened with rules that make it almost impossible to get a conviction unless they “bend” the rules.

Luckily for most of us, this kind of behavior most often targets those who are poor and largely defenseless.  And minorities.  Well, they’re minorities until they get to prison anyway.

DEA wants warrantless access to prescription records

From The Agitator’s Morning Links:

The ACLU is challenging a claim by the DEA that it can access confidential prescription drug records in Oregon without a warrant.  Basically, the DEA wants access to information already collected under Oregon state law.

In 2009, the Oregon legislature created the Oregon Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP), which tracks prescriptions for certain drugs dispensed by Oregon pharmacies, including all of the medications listed above. The program was intended to help physicians prevent drug overdoses by their patients and more easily recognize signs of drug abuse.

Yeah, right.  The government is always watching out for “the folks” (a term coined by right wing statist icon Bill Reilly).

The State of Oregon sued the DEA in federal court to defend its right to require law enforcement, including federal agencies, to obtain the warrants required by state law.

Interesting that the Oregon government argues that the DEA should get a warrant to access personal information that the state collects without a warrant.

Today, the ACLU filed a motion to intervenein the case on behalf of several patients and a doctor whose prescription records are contained in the PDMP. Our clients are concerned that the privacy of their medical information will be violated if the DEA is allowed to search through prescription records without a warrant..

Sorry, ACLU, but that ship has already sailed.  The privacy of their medical information was violated a long long time ago with programs like Medicare and the Drug War.  Where were you then?

And for all you gun rights advocates, it’s probably inevitable that prescription drug information mining will eventually be used to identify people who have been treated with psychiatric medications as means to block them from buying a gun.   According to Yahoo, even the NRA suggests people under mental health treatment are fair game for more gun restrictions:

[NRA President David] Keene said officials should focus more attention on a “devastatingly broken mental health system in this country,” if they genuinely want to end gun violence.

Balko’s Morning Links

Check out Radley Balko’s Morning Links.  Highlights include:

  • How the American war on drugs is “one of the most catastrophic foreign policy mistakes in American history”.   I agree.  Whatever it started as, the drug war is now nothing more than a jobs program for testosterone-flooded neanderthals and it’s only accomplishment is bringing misery and destruction to people who engage in an activity that should never have been illegal in the first place.  The fact that it has now enveloped the entire Western Hemisphere in an unstoppable and ever escalating cycle of corruption and violence fits well with a foreign policy whose main goal seems to be pissing the rest of the world off.
  • Mother Jones inadvertently makes the case that banning assault weapons would probably have zero effect in reducing mass shootings.  Not that reasoning or  effectiveness actually play much of a role in any conflict between team left and team right.
  • The DEA (those folks who, as a condition for employment, are required to swear an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution) thinks it can come onto your property and set up surveillance cameras to record your activities in order to catch you in a crime, all without a warrant, of course.  Folks, this goes right to that stunningly ignorant belief (and you hear this a lot from libertarians) that it’s the government’s job to protect the rights of citizens.  It is not.  The government is, in fact, the biggest threat to citizens’ rights.  Government serves government.  Only the public, in large enough numbers, can protect citizens from abuses of power by the government.  And, I might point out that the public is notoriously incompetent in this mission.

Real forensic “science” ain’t like they show it on TV

Radley Balko posted a two part investigative article over at HuffPo that tells the story of  self-proclaimed forensic specialists Steven Hayne and Michael West of Mississippi who helped convict and ruin the lives of numerous innocent people, while the real perpetrators remained at large to victimize more people.  No one can relate his story better than Balko, since he has been investigating these two characters for years.

When I channel hop, I am always amazed at how many TV shows I stumble across that are based on crime investigation and prosecution.  There can be no profession more glorified by Hollywood than law enforcement.  It’s no wonder jurors walk into a court room ready to convict on the word of a forensic expert.  And yet, many forensic methods and conclusions are not based on real science but rather the mere fact that expert witnesses have been making the same claims for so long that they are now treated as indisputable fact.  But, thanks to people like Radley Balko, those claims are coming under more scrutiny and incompetent practitioners like West and Hayne are finally being exposed.

Prosecutors: Judge, Jury, and Executioner

If you read the news at all, you have probably read about the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.who committed suicide after an overzealous federal prosecutor targeted with a crusade of arbitrary intimidation and prosecutorial recklessness. Why do prosecutors do this?  The answer is simple: Because they can.

Radley Balko explains why:

Prosecutors have enormous power. Even investigations that don’t result in any charges can ruin lives, ruin reputations, and drive their targets into bankruptcy. It has become an overtly political position — in general, but particularly at the federal level. If a prosecutor wants to ruin your life, he or she can. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.

Balko goes on to list, item by item, the circumstances in our justice system that make this kind of abuse not only possible, but inevitable.  And brace yourselves, because it is going to continue to get worse.   Unfortunately most people don’t care about it until it happens to them and they are suddenly  confronted by the fact that they are all alone, because no one cares until it happens to them.

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Glenn Greenwald comes down hard on these prosecutors today as well with this concise characterization of the Federal government’s twisted sense of justice:

The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless – or especially, as in Swartz’s case, those who challenge power – are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions.

It’s not always the federal government.  There is probably no better example of prosecutors whose ambition for political fame and fortune have left a swath of destroyed lives in their wake than the daycare sex abuse debacle  of the 80s and 90s.  The state attorneys leveraged off of people’s natural emotion toward children to create a panic that they then used to catapult their careers into positions at the highest levels of the state and federal justice system.  Unfortunately, many of the victims of their self-serving campaign still languish in prison. While many of the convictions were ultimately over-turned or commuted, there were never any serious repercussions for the calamitous abuse of power by the prosecutors.