They die and come back to life:

Grievance calls about the D.C.’s aging meter stock hit a record 116,354 in 2008, but that figure bears little relationship to the number of actual broken meters, D.C. Department of Transportation officials recently told a D.C. Council committee. Crews dispatched to repair a broken meter, the agency says, found the device operating as intended 67 percent of the time.

How is this possible? One explanation, according to DDOT, is that 74 percent of D.C.’s 15,453 meters are designed to self-correct, but are also “at the end of their useful life.” So a person who parks at a meter displaying a “fail” message may return an hour later to find a working meter flashing zero time and a ticket on the windshield — a process that may repeat several times a day.

D.C. officials say modernizing the meters has been slowed by budget shortfalls. Which I think means, “We can’t afford to stop ripping people off.”

The Washington Times unleashes a 750-word editorial on the scourge of Fleshbot culture.

Pornography is a major workplace problem in contemporary American society – and yet few private employers or government managers are willing to talk about it for fear of seeming prudish, or blindly trusting their employees, or being accused of infringing on individual liberties. With these attitudes, porn-at-work has grown like a virulent cancer, robbing employers of work time and wasted wages, causing litigation, and – most important – truly corrupting the minds of offenders while helping a squalid and perverted industry.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, to his credit, has the courage to tackle the issue of pornography at work head on. His action is an opportunity to begin a national conversation on the widespread social effects of Internet porn at the office. Is this the kind of America we want to live in?

Given that we now have pretty concslusive data that Internet porn actually reduces sex crimes, I’d say yes! The concluding graphs are especially Bork-a-licious:

Some of these employees know full well that they are being monitored – and get an additional thrill for being so brazen and taking such a risk. This bespeaks the magnitude of the porn-at-work phenomenon.

With so many employees now having their own work computers, the workplace has become a center of pornographic voyeurism among some segment of American society. How to respond, beyond more porn-detecting software and greater vigilance, remains to be seen. We claim no answer. But until we discuss the challenges, America will look less and less like a shining “city upon a hill” and more like Sodom and Gomorrah – a land in which workers betray the taxpayers, cheat their employers, embarrass their colleagues, diminish their lovers, and nobody cares.

I find the “additional thrill” line implausible, or at least assumptive of facts not in evidence—unless the editorial writer is testifying.

To be fair, part of the editorial focuses on reports of government workers surfing for porn on the taxpayer dime, which is a legitimate gripe. But then, so is government employees shopping on eBay. And yes, private employers should be able to fire porn addicts without fear of an ADA suit. I’ve read about one highly-publicized such lawsuit, but is this really a widespread problem?

Beyond that, I fail to see the issue, here. There’s plenty of filtering software employers can use to block access to porn if they wish. If an employee’s porn habits are making him unproductive, fire him. I hardly think we need a “national conversation” about Felicity Fey (Did I reveal too much?).

Moreover, other than the assertions of breathless editorial writers, there’s just not much support for the idea that the widespread availability of porn is “corrupting minds” or morally “cancerous.” Just about every social indicator that one might anticipate being affected by the mainstreaming of porn (divorce and abortion rates, sex crimes, sex crimes against children, teen pregnancy, etc.) has for about 15 years generally been moving in a positive direction. That of course would be the very period during which pornography became widely available on the Internet.

Sorry, but I’m having a hard time conjuring up any sympathy for these guys. They’re due to be sentenced this week. To put it into perspective, all three are expected to receive about the same sentence as Ryan Frederick. That ain’t justice.

I will say, however, that evil and inexcusable as these bastards are, there’s some truth in this excerpt:

Tesler said when he joined the narcotics unit, he was told to “sit, watch and learn” from superiors who cut corners to meet performance quotas for arrests and warrants. “I was a new part and plugged into a broken system,” Tesler said.

Tesler said when he saw Smith about to plant baggies of marijuana inside Johnston’s home to make it look like a drug house, he shook his head in disapproval. Tesler said he falsified the police report and later lied about the raid because Smith told him to follow the cover-up script. Tesler said he wasn’t about to “rat” on a senior officer.

His father, Jack Tesler, said his son was “being vilified and over-prosecuted.”

Smith said his moral compass failed when he began to think “drug dealers were no longer human.”

“I saw myself above them,” he said.

This is what happens when you declare “war” on American citizens. You dehumanize them. And you instill an ends-justifies-the-means, win at all costs mindset in your “warriors.” This mindset infected the entire narcotics unit at Atlanta PD. You’d have to be awfully naive to believe the problem is limited to Atlanta.

Officers Junnier, Smith, and Tesler are going to prison. But you could make a good case that they were only responding to incentives. A lot of other people have Kathryn Johnston’s blood on their hands too, people with names like Bennett, Gates, Walters, Souder, Tandy, and Meese. They’ve been ratcheting up the war rhetoric of drug prohibition for 30 years. It boggles my mind that I’m “known” for this issue. For this to even be an issue, we had to have reached the point where most of America is now accustomed to the notion that state agents dressed in battle garb can and will tear down the doors of private homes in the middle of the night for nothing more than mere possession of psychoactive substances. And most of the time, they do it under the full color of law.

It shouldn’t be at all surprising that this particular war’s boots on the ground might start to take all of that war imagery to heart, and take shortcuts around whatever largely ritualistic Fourth Amendment procedures we have left to “protect” against whatever it is we still might call “unreasonable” searches (if a violent, terrifying, paramilitary-style raid in the middle of the night on someone suspected of a nonviolent, consensual crime isn’t “unreasonable,” I don’t know what would be).

Kathryn Johnston’s death is tragic. But the real tragedy here is that had the cops found a stash of marijuana in her basement that actually did belong to her–say for pain treatment or nausea–her death would have faded quickly from the national news, these tactics would have been deemed by most to be wholly legitimate, and we probably wouldn’t still be talking about her today.

These cops were evil. But they worked within an evil system that’s not only immoral on its face, but is rife with bad incentives and plays to the worst instincts in human nature.

UPDATE: Via the AJC:

U.S. District Judge Julie Carnes sentenced former officer Gregg Junnier to six years in prison, Jason Smith to 10 years in prison and Arthur Tesler to 5 years in prison.

Q: What police department, under federal oversight for most of the last decade due to excessive force and civil rights violations, was recently deemed to have “improved” to the point where said oversight is no longer necessary?

A: Here’s the punchline.

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone who helped push the Hayne/West video story, particularly those of you who posted it on bulletin boards and discussion threads around the web. Also thanks to all the blogs who posted about the story, including Boing Boing, Instapundit, Outside the Beltway, Unqualified Offerings, Popehat, Julian Sanchez, Jacob Grier, Rogier van Bakel, Cato@Liberty, Code Monkey Ramblings, Right Thinking From the Left Coast, Simple Justice, Lippard Blog, Libertarian Lifter, Blank Slate, and Windypundit, among others (sorry if I left you out!)

So far, the story has received almost no play at all in the regular media, save for J.D. Tuccille at the D.C. Examiner website. That’s too bad. Maybe it’ll pick up when the magazine comes out, and when the cover story goes online.

I wrote a column last month about how Washington, D.C. is not only largely escaping the recession, the D.C. metro area has become the wealthiest region in the country—a troubling development, given that the largest employer and chief industry here is government.

Business Week reports that it’s only going to get worse.

In fact, Moody’s Economy.com estimates that metro Washington’s economy will actually grow 2.5% from mid-2008 through mid-2010. New York’s economy is expected to shrink 4.2%…

Washington is getting a boost from government spending to fight the recession and fix the financial system, as well as the ongoing expenses of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and promoting homeland security. While President Barack Obama pointedly left Washington for Denver to sign the $787 billion stimulus package on Feb. 17, locals expect the metro area to garner a big share of the dollars.

The cost of course goes beyond the price tag of the bailout. All of the money spent lobbying for a cut of the largess is also money sent to Washington that could have been spent actually creating wealth. The article also points to a looming brain drain, as the country’s best and brightest no longer fan out across the country to innovate and thrive in the private sector, they’re going where the money is.  Which means they’re converging on D.C. for lucrative jobs with government contractors.

Job-seeking Wall Streeters who jump on Amtrak’s Acela to Washington may be dismayed to find that the maximum pay for an FDIC bank review examiner is close to $180,000. That’s great for most folks, but paltry next to the bonus-swelled compensation many bankers are used to. The pay can be a lot better, though, at the Beltway Bandit consulting firms that are ramping up to assist the FDIC, Treasury Dept., and others. Consulting jobs for senior specialists in finance “can pay north of $200 an hour,” says Andrew Reina, a practice director for risk consultant Ajilon Solutions.

Companies such as Computer Sciences Corp., Science Applications International Corp., or SAIC, and Booz Allen Hamilton employ tens of thousands of people in the Washington area and continue to expand. Even before the current crisis, professional and business services, which include private-sector lawyers, accountants, engineers, and consultants, made up 21% of metro Washington’s annual economic output, even more than the 20% made up by government itself, according to a BusinessWeek estimate based on government data. The financial crisis “creates opportunities for companies like ours” to provide expert assistance, says David Booth, Computer Sciences Corp.’s president of global sales and marketing…

According to George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, metro Washington leads the nation in the share of jobs that are in high-tech and the share of workers with advanced degrees.

The problem of course is that all of that money and talent isn’t being harnessed to produce goods and services consumers actually want.  It’s being used to fulfill the wish lists of the politicians who hand out the checks.

D.C.-area libertarians, come on out to the Big Hunt this Wednesday night at 6:30pm.

Reason’s hosting a happy hour to roll out our new issue, which has your humble Agitator’s creepy autopsy video story on the cover.

New era of transparency, my butt.

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush’s eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort. They expressed disappointment that Obama’s Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration’s bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.

During its first term, the Bush White House failed to install electronic record-keeping for e-mail when it switched to a new system, resulting in millions of messages that could not be found.

The Bush White House discovered the problem in 2005 and rejected a proposed solution…

om Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, noted that President Barack Obama on his first full day in office called for greater transparency in government.

The Justice Department “apparently never got the message” from Obama, Blanton said.

Oh, I think they got the message.

Because it’s all about protecting the children.

A 32-year-old Waverly woman was cited on suspicion of child abuse and marijuana possession for allegedly smoking marijuana in front of her 15-year-old daughter. The girl told the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office, and authorities executed a search warrant of her mother’s home on Wednesday, according to a sheriff’s report.

Miscellaneous drug paraphernalia and one gram of marijuana were found where the daughter had described. The woman has two additional children in the home.

Berwyn Heights, Marlyand Mayor Cheye Calvo has kindly agreed to do a life chat with you, Agitator readers, next week.

Calvo of course was the victim of a particularly violent no-knock raid on his home by a SWAT team from Prince George’s County, Maryland. He’s now pushing for legislation in Maryland that would require police departments across the state to submit reports detailing how often they use their SWAT teams, for what purpose, and what happened before, during, and after the raid.

Log on this Thursday at 8pm to ask him your questions.

This is encouraging:

Mississippi Chief Justice Bill L. Waller Jr. said on Wednesday he hopes to restore public trust in Mississippi’s judicial system by promoting “a fair and efficient administration” in the state’s Supreme Court.

Waller, who was elected as chief justice in January, said the high court plans to boost public confidence by providing better access to state courts and court records…

Waller commended state officials for their efforts to restore confidence in the state’s judicial system.For example, state Public Safety Commissioner Stephen B. Simpson removed controversial pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne from the state’s designated list of pathologists.

Hayne’s credibility and credentials came under scrutiny after his testimony helped to wrongfully convict two Mississippi men of capital murder charges. Due to legal assistance from the state’s Innocence Project, the men’s convictions were overturned last year.

Waller said cases involving Hayne’s testimony that have been appealed also are being reviewed “very closely” by the state’s Supreme Court.

“We’re going to evaluate the cases one at a time. I applaud Commissioner Simpson’s decision to go a different direction from Dr. Hayne,” he said. “We must follow appropriate standards. I think we’re moving in a better direction.”

Given that Hayne has likely testified in tens of thousands of cases, civil and criminal, I don’t know that a one-by-one, as-they-come review by the state’s supreme court will be sufficient. But it’s good to see that the new chief justice at least recognizes that Hayne is a problem. The court has been enabling Hayne for 20 years.

Meanwhile, Hayne testified in another Mississippi murder trial yesterday.

My prior reporting on Hayne here.

A bill introduced in the Tennessee legislature would mandate drug and alcohol testing for any pregnant woman who meets one or more of the following criteria:

(1) No prenatal care;
(2) Late prenatal care after twenty-four (24) weeks gestation;
(3) Incomplete prenatal care;
(4) Abruptio placentae;
(5) Intrauterine fetal death;
(6) Preterm labor of no obvious cause;
(7) Intrauterine growth retardation of no obvious cause;
(8) Previously known alcohol or drug abuse; or
(9) Unexplained congenital anomalies.

Any woman who tests positive for alcohol or drugs would then be referred to a mandatory treatment program. If she refuses to be tested, tests positive and refuses treatment, or misses two appointments at treatment, she gets referred to child protective services.

This would be constitutionaly dubious and fairly horrifying if it were only limited to illicit drugs. But I’m fairly certain that isn’t actually illegal to consume alcohol while you’re pregnant. In fact, the “not a drop” approach to alcohol and pregnancy is overblown hysteria.

I have no idea if this bill has a chance of passing. Let’s hope not.

Just a little follow-up.

The bite mark evidence was the only physical evidence the prosecution presented that purportedly linked him to Haley Oliveaux. But they did present other evidence, including jailhouse snitch testimony (a guy who said Duncan confessed to him), and some lacerations on the young girl’s rectum.

This evidence was all flawed, too (to put it mildly). I don’t want to give too much away, because as I noted, this is also the cover story for our April issue, and I go into the rest of the state’s case there. It should hit newsstands in a couple of weeks.

The point of the online piece was to introduce the video and give it some context, with respect to both West’s and Hayne’s broader legacy, and to the role the video and bite mark testimony played in Duncan’s case. But we wanted to keep the focus on the video, and not distract from it by getting into a drawn-out discussion of Duncan’s case.

But I do want to clarify that the bite marks weren’t the state’s only evidence against Duncan. But they were the only physical evidence. There was no semen, blood, DNA, hair fibers, or any other biological evidence on Duncan’s clothes, in the bathtub, or on or in Haley Oliveaux.

The only person who knows for certain if Jimmie Duncan is innocent is Jimmie Duncan. He and Oliveaux were alone together when she died. This case is in some ways similar to the Jeffrey Havard and Devin Bennett cases in that the incident in question was either a murder or an accident (Duncan all but admitted negligence in leaving the girl alone in the tub). So there will never be a DNA test–either to exonerate Duncan or to confirm his guilt. What is abundantly clear, however, is that he didn’t get anything approximating a fair trial. That, and it’s the most damning piece of evidence yet showing that Mississippi and Louisiana courts have been frighteningly deficient in allowing Hayne and West to testify for the last 20 years.

Speaking of which, Hayne testified in a murder case again today.

Because the story on Hayne and West I posted today doesn’t easily fit into a soundbite, it may be a bit of a challenge getting people to commit the time to read it.

I don’t usually ask this, but if you think promoting the story is worth some of your time, please vote it up at Digg and Reddit, send it to a few people (particularly any bloggers or journalists you know), and post it at whatever relevant bulletin boards and discussion groups you might frequent.

My story is up.

Short summary: Several months ago, I was able to obtain a pretty shocking video of one of Dr. Michael West’s infamous post-mortem “bite mark examinations.” This particular exam was performed on a 23-month-old Louisiana girl named Haley Oliveaux. As with most cases, Dr. Steven Hayne performed the initial examination on Oliveaux, claimed to have seen bite marks no other doctors saw, then called in West to perform his quackery bite mark analysis. West claimed to have traced the bite marks to Jimmie Duncan, the boyfriend of Oliveaux’s mother, and the man police suspected of murdering the girl. Duncan was convicted of capital murder, and has spent the last 10 years on death row.

The smoking gun video damns West and Hayne in two ways. First, as it opens, West is performing his initial examination. The video clearly shows that when the body of Haley Oliveaux was handed over to West and Hayne, her face was free of any abrasions or bite marks. Her cheek is clean.

The second portion of the video, taken the following day, then shows a striking abrasion. That abrasion could only have been inflicted by someone in Hayne’s office. The video also shows that Hayne must have been lying when he testified at trial that he found bite marks on the Oliveaux’s cheek, then called West in to do an analysis. The first portion of the video, taken after Hayne’s initial exam, shows no such bite marks.

The more obvious thing the video shows is Michael West repeatedly jamming, scraping, and pushing a mold of Jimmie Duncan’s teeth into Haley Oliveaux’s body, actions experts to whom I’ve shown the video say amount to criminal evidence tampering. The excerpt posted at Reason is only 30 seconds long. But the full video spans 24 minutes, during which West uses the mold to desecrate Oliveaux’s body at least 50 times.

The results of West’s “analysis” were then used to help convict Jimmie Duncan of raping and murdering Haley Oliveaux.

I’m getting the impression that the Obama administration doesn’t fully grasp the meaning of the word “voluntary.”

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told consumer groups, farm groups and meat industry leaders Tuesday that he will ask the meat industry to voluntarily follow stricter guidelines for new package labels designed to specify a food’s country of origin…

If the industry does not comply with the stricter guidelines, the administration will write new rules, according to those who spoke with Vilsack on Tuesday.

His message to Chinese youngsters: “Do the right thing.”

Which I guess means submit to the state’s authority, even when the law you’ve broken is an immoral one, and the means the state has used to enforce it are wholly disproportionate to the alleged crime.

So let’s stop with the rabble rousing. No more questioning the legitimacy of bad laws. No more questioning the state’s power, or it’s willingness to flex its authority when it gets embarrassed by its citizenry. No more staring down tanks, whether they belong to Deng Xiaoping….or Sheriff Leon Lott.

The big forensics fraud story I’ve been teasing the last few weeks goes live tomorrow at noon.

Stay tuned.

Bruce Fein writes…

Mr. Obama invoked the state secrets privilege a second time last week to block litigation challenging the legality of the Bush-Cheney “Terrorist Surveillance Program” (TSP) that he had assailed as a senator. For five years, the TSP targeted American citizens on American soil for electronic surveillance on the president’s say-so alone to gather foreign intelligence in contravention of the warrant requirement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

And then there’s this potential calamity in the offing:

Then-Sen. Obama descried the Bush-Cheney invocation of executive privilege to prevent former White House officials Karl Rove and Harriet Miers from even responding to congressional subpoenas for testimony about the firings of nine United States attorneys. That extravagant and unprecedented claim would have enabled President Nixon to muzzle his Watergate nemesis, former White House counsel John Dean, from testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee about Oval Office conversations implicating the president in obstruction of justice. Mr. Obama, however, is now hedging over whether to defend Mr. Rove’s non-responsiveness to a new congressional subpoena.

If Obama allows Rove to claim executive privilege to duck that subpoena, it’s a pretty good sign that he has no intention whatsoever of walking back Bush’s executive power grabs. Allowing Rove to claim executive privilege well after he’s no longer in public office would make any future investigation of the Bush administration nearly impossible.

I guess the one positive that would come out of that is that we’d get to see who on the left was sincere when calling out the danger in Bush’s expansive view of executive power these last eight years, and who’s willing to let it all slide so long as their own guy is holding the reins.

Obama got off to an encouraging start. Unfortunately, it looks like it didn’t take him long at all to begin to realize that any serious effort to curb the excesses of the Bush administration—excesses he excoriated as a senator and candidate—would also limit his own power.

Yesterday, Cole County, Missouri Circuit Judge Richard Callahan issued a stunning opinion in the case of Joshua Kezer, a 34-year-old man who has been in prison for 17 years for the 1992 murder of 19-year-old college student Angela Mischelle Lawless.

Kezer was convicted despite no physical evidence, DNA, or fingerprints linking him to the crime scene; no murder weapon; and no eyewitnesses to the actual murder. The evidence against him consisted of a witness who claimed to have saw him near Lawless’ car (that witness later recanted) and testimony from jailhouse informants who say Kezer confessed to them. Two of those informants have since recanted, and one has since testified for Kezer’s defense. Another says he made up his story about Kezer’s confession, but went on to testify for the state, anyway.

Callahan ordered Kezer released within 10 days unless state prosecutors can come up with a good reason to retry him. Callahan’s opinion also included a stinging rebuke of Kezer’s prosecutor, who happens to be former congressman, Rep. Kenny Hulshof (R-Mo.). Hulshof served four terms representing Missouri’s Ninth District, often citing his record as a capital crimes prosecutor in his campaigns. He was also the state GOP’s nominee for governor in 2008, but lost.

Callahan chastised Hulshof for withholding several key pieces of exculpatory evidence from Kezer’s trial attorneys, including the witness recantations, witnesses who contradicted state’s witnesses, and police notes mentioning other possible suspects.

In his closing argument at Kezer’s trial, Hulshof told the jury, “We put [Kezer] at the scene, we put a gun in his hand, we put the victim with him, we have got blood on his clothes.”

In ordering Kezer freed, Callahan said this week, “none of what Mr. Hulshof said in that final summary was true. … Testimony putting (Kezer) at the scene is totally discredited. No gun was ever found, and there is no credible evidence that he ever had a gun.” There was also no blood on Kezer.

Callahan added, “There is little about this case which recommends our criminal justice system. The system failed in the investigative and charging stage, it failed at trial, it failed at post-trial review and it failed during the appellate process.”

Yesterday, Hulshof issued a mind-bogglingly tone-deaf statement that he remains “confident in the jury’s verdict.”

Then there’s this:

An AP investigation found that in four cases — excluding the latest Kezer decision — prosecutorial errors by Hulshof led to death sentence reversals.

Another accused murderer won acquittal by a new jury at a second trial after his Hulshof-prosecuted conviction was rejected on appeal. A seventh defendant sentenced to life in prison without parole briefly won his freedom when a federal judge tossed out the conviction, although it was later restored.

Hulshof parlayed his prosecutorial excesses into a seat in Congress and, after losing his race for governor, to land at a presumably lucrative gig at a Kansas City-based law firm. Kezer, his victim, has spent half of his 34 years in prison for a crime it now seems fair to say he didn’t commit. And of course there’s also the niggling problem that if Kezer didn’t commit the crime, then Angela Lawless’ murderer remains free.

And yet it’s unlikely Hulshof will suffer much at all from all of this, other than a few days of bad press. Kezer will certainly never see a dime from Hulshof, thanks to the absolute immunity afforded to prosecutors–even in cases where they knowingly withhold exculpatory evidence, as it appears happened in this one. As Hulshof’s own career trajectory shows, a string of high-profile convictions can launch a promising career in politics and, in Hulshof’s case, the lifetime lucre that comes with having once held federal office (he was at one time considered for president of the University of Missouri). Every incentive points to winning convictions at any cost, and there’s rarely any personal or professional sanction for cheating.

I found this comment left at the Southeast Missourian website particularly eloquent:

I am constantly amazed at how many people think we have a justice system. We don’t, we have a legal system. Any similarity between law and justice is purely coincidental.

That’s certainly true in this case. And, it appears, in a number of other cases Kenny Hulshof prosecuted.