Yesterday, both sides in the Ryan Frederick trial made their closing arguments. This morning, the jury will begin their deliberations.

Ryan Frederick is the 28-year-old Chesapeake, Virginia man facing murder charges for killing a police officer during a drug raid (see this wiki for more on Frederick’s case). Prior coverage of his trial here.

If you’ve been following the case, I’d encourage you read coverage from the Virginian-Pilot, and from the local Tidewater Liberty blog.

Some wrap-up odds and ends from the last few days of the trial:

• Last week, the defense called seven of Frederick’s neighbors, one of whom was outside the night of the raid. All said they heard no police announcement, though neighbors did testify about hearing the battering ram.

• There’s more significance to the neighbors’ testimony than merely whether or not Frederick should have heard an announcement, though that’s obviously important. The state made Frederick out to be a big-time drug dealer. Police informant Steven Wright said he bought marijuana from Frederick dozens of times over just a few months. That’s dozens of drug deals from just one guy. Yet the police affidavit notes that surveillance on Frederick’s home showed no unusual activity. And Frederick’s neighbors—people who you’d think would want a hardened, drug-dealing, cop-killing neighbor out of their community—have not only defended him in the media, they’ve testified in his defense at his trial.

• The Virginian-Pilot’s John Hopkins has done a splendid job covering this case. I’ve rarely seen a local reporter cover a botched raid so well. Hopkins refused to take police statements about the raid at face value. He did his own reporting, and uncovered some significant flaws in the case. At the start of the trial, Special Prosecutor Paul Ebert put Hopkins on his witness list, which effectively barred Hopkins from the courtroom, which meant he could no longer report on the case. But Ebert never called Hopkins to testify. Sneaky way to get a good reporter off your butt.

• The person who could shed the most light on the truth in this case never testified. That would be Renaldo Turnbull, the informant/burglar that Hopkins and I interviewed. That he didn’t testify isn’t surprising. He wouldn’t have been helpful to either side. The state would have to deal with his revelations to Hopkins and I that the police were encouraging their informants to illegally break into homes to collect probable cause. Once the judge ruled before the trial that the search warrant for Frederick’s home was valid, Frederikc’s attorneys no longer had much of a reason to bring up Turnbull’s allegations. They would have had to deal with a guy who’s still facing a host of his own criminal charges, and is at the mercy of the state. There’s also obviously a huge risk to the defense in going after the integrity of the police, particularly the integrity of the cop your client admits to shooting.

If there’s ever an outside investigation of the issues that have surfaced in this case (and there really should be), Turnbull ought to be the first person investigators speak to, and the first to whom they grant immunity.

• Frederick’s biggest problem is that in the interviews he gave with police shortly after the raid, he misled them about growing marijuana. I could be mistaken, but from what I can tell, he didn’t out and out lie—he said there were no marijuana plants in his home at the time fo the raid, and there weren’t. But he neglected to say he had plants before the break-in by the police informant three nights earlier.

It’s not difficult to believe that Frederick both legitimately feared for his life the night of the raid (fearing, perhaps, that informant Steven Wright and friends had come to harm him), and realized that if he admitted in those interrogations to both killing a cop and growing marijuana, his days were numbered.

Of course, Frederick wasn’t obligated to talk to the police at all that night. And he certainly wasn’t obligated to implicate himself. But that he did talk but then wasn’t forthcoming about growing marijuana will almost certainly hurt his credibility with the jury.

• Oddly, at the same time, the recordings of those police interrogations could also save Frederick. They clearly show a frightened, nervous, confused man, who weeps and vomits when he contemplates that he’s just taken another life. They don’t depict the enraged, calculating cop killer prosecutors tried to make Frederick out to be.

• Yesterday, the judge decided to allow the jury to consider lesser charges for Frederick, including first and second degree murder, and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. The prosecution consented to adding the lesser charges.

On the one hand, this would seem to show that the prosecution isn’t all that confident in its case (which, if true, would be one of the few signs of intelligence they’ve shown in two weeks). On the other hand, allowing for lesser charges also gives the jury the option of holding Frederick culpable for (a) growing marijuana, and (b) killing a law enforcement officer who had come to his home because of that marijuana, while at the same time giving them the sense that they’re punishing the police for poor procedure, and the prosecutors for their insulting performance in court.

If I had to make a prediction, I’d say the jury convicts on both the drug and gun charge, and convicts Frederick of some sort of manslaughter. The state didn’t prove distribution (their only evidence that Frederick grew the marijuana for anything other than personal use was testimony from their lying informant), but I could see the jury wanting to punish Frederick for lying to the police. A murder charge in Virginia requires proof of malice, and the only evidence the state offered of malice, again, came from informants with criminal records who were shown at trial to be repeated liars. Frederick’s taped interrogations, on the other hand, clearly show remorse.

Whatever the jury decides, this is an ugly tragedy all around. And entirely preventable. Amazing how paternalism can so quickly manifest itself as bloodshed. The last couple of weeks have embodied so many of the insidious elements of the drug war, from the home invasions to the informant tips and shoddy police investigations to the jailhouse snitch testimony and the chilling, horrifying feeling that with one life ended and another effectively ruined, we’ve been through all of this before. And it’s just a matter of time before we go through it all again.

A few people have asked what I think of this critique of my work over at Patterico’s blog, by a guest blogger with the handle JRM.

Not much.

He’s taking aim at my article from last month on the drug war’s collateral damage, which he characterizes as “fact-free.” He gets one thing wrong right off the bat. He writes that the article was in Reason. It wasn’t. It was reprinted on Reason’s website. The piece was actually commissioned by Culture11, a (now defunct, unfortunately) conservative website co-founded by strident drug warrior William Bennett.

But let’s get to his criticisms. I’ll start with the crime rate. JRM writes:

Balko also cites the climbing murder rates:

If you look at a graph of the U.S. murder rate going back to about 1915, you’ll notice a few interesting patterns. There’s a spike at around 1919, just at the onset of alcohol prohibition. The graph then takes a dramatic dip in 1933, just after the repeal of prohibition. There’s then another spike in the late 1960s, just as Richard Nixon took office and fired the first shots of his war on drugs. That spike falls in the 1970s as President Carter took a less militant approach to drug prohibition, but then with Reagan’s reinvigorated war in the 1980s, it begins another upward ascent.

Balko cites this chart for his claim as to the murder chart going up. The chart stops in 1997.

Fortunately, I was able to locate this really neat thing on the internets called Google. You can use it to find data, like the fact that the murder rate in 1997 of 6.8 per 100,000 people was a dropoff from prior years, that Balko’s claim that Reagan’s anti-drug efforts led to more murders (the answer, by the way, is fewer) and even that they kept data past 1997 – when the murder rate continued to drop, stabilizing at 5.6 per 100,000 over the last few years. That’s the lowest rate since 1965.

JRM’s snark aside, he completely misses my point, which is odd because he actually excerpted it. I never claimed the murder rate continued to increase indefinitely after Reagan took office. I wrote that there a few landmark points in U.S. history where the federal government took a significantly more aggressive approach to limiting our access to intoxicating substances (alcohol prohibition, Nixon’s war on drugs, and Reagan’s escalation of the war on drugs), and that there’s a corresponding jump in homicide rates following each of those changes in policy (starting in 1919, 1973, and the mid-1980s, respectively). I also pointed out that there are two notable points where the government de-escalated its efforts to ban or limit access to intoxicating substances (the end of alcohol prohibition, and Carter’s detante from Nixon’s war on drugs), and both of these points were followed by a drop in national homicide rates.

I’m well aware about the dramatic drop in violent crime that began in about 1993. I’ve written about it. So have a lot of other people. Just about every economist, sociologist, and criminologist with a research grant has a theory. I might have missed it, but one theory I haven’t seen is that violent crime began dropping in 1993 because the Clinton administration started taking an exceptionally aggressive approach to the drug war. On the contrary. Most law-and-order conservatives criticized Clinton for not pursuing prohibition with enough vigor and righteous might.

My point is that there are some notable dips and peaks in the U.S. homicide rate that correspond to changes in federal drug policy. Economists (most notably Harvard’s Jeff Miron) have pretty conclusively hammered down the link—to the point where I’m not even sure it’s even all that controversial anymore.

The point is not that federal drug policy is the only thing that drives the homicide rate. We also saw some pretty stellar economic growth that began in about 1993. I’d imagine that played a sizeable role in the drop in violent crime that began at the same time.

Let’s move on to JRM’s next criticism:

…Balko cites a 2006 WSJ editorial, which says in part:

Police in large cities formerly carried revolvers holding six .38-caliber rounds. Nowadays, police carry semi-automatic pistols with 16 high-caliber rounds, shotguns and military assault rifles, weapons once relegated to SWAT teams facing extraordinary circumstances. Concern about such firepower in densely populated areas hitting innocent citizens has given way to an attitude that the police are fighting a war against drugs and crime and must be heavily armed.

If only we had police shooting and fatality statistics from some large police force.

Oh, wait! We do! Fox News reported on a massive decline in total shootings. Accidental shootings were way down since 1996. Police shootings involved about the same number of shots per event.

Did I say Fox News? I meant the New York Times. Sorry. I get them confused a lot.

So, we have fewer shootings, fewer cops killed on the street, and fewer accidental shootings. One might suspect that this would lead an observer to conclude that police forces are getting better, if one looked at the actual data, rather than making it up.

First, the author of that Wall Street Journal op-ed is Joseph McNamara, who served as police chief of both Kansas City, Missouri and San Jose, California. He started his career as a beat cop for NYPD, where he also later served as a deputy inspector of crime analysis. He now has a doctorate in criminology and is a scholar at the Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank (Ed Meese and Thomas Sowell are also fellows there). I don’t know JRM’s background, but I’d submit that McNamara can’t exactly be characterized as a left-wing loon, and in fact is pretty darned qualified to write about police issues.

Second, JRM leaves out the rest of my discussion of police militarization in the piece, which includes the very real, not-made-up statistic based on police department surveys done by Peter Kraska showing the number of SWAT deployments in the U.S. jumping from a few hundred per year in the 1970s to 50,000 or more per year today. Most of these SWAT deployments are to serve drug warrants. JRM can disagree, but my point is that even if these raids don’t produce a single gun shot (though we know that’s far from the case), that’s a disturbing trend. The image of state agents dressed in black, kicking down doors, and wresting people out of bed at gunpoint in order to police nonviolent crimes just isn’t one I associated with a free society (oddly enough, some prominent conservatives agree, at least when other countries do it).

Third, JRM bases his theory that “police forces are getting better” all over the country on a New York Times article about a study of officer-related gunfire in New York City. That would be one force, not “forces.” Of course, if violent crime across the country has dropped since about 1993, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see a corresponding drop in police gunfire since 1996, at NYPD or any other police department. That doesn’t mean the police aren’t becoming increasingly militarized. Nor does it mean that the decline wouldn’t be even greater were it not for the drug war. Police militarization and the rise of SWAT teams has been a gradual process.  It began in the early 1980s. Over that time, the homicide rate has dropped, risen, dropped dramatically, then slightly ticked upward again. You can’t just point only to what’s happend since 1996 and say, “See, that proves that militarizing our police departments has given us only goodness and light!”

I mean, I guess you can. It’s just not terribly convincing.

Fourth, most police departments don’t actually keep track of officer-involved shootings, even though they’re required to by the Justice Department. The truth is, we really don’t know whether such shootings are going up or down nationally. I wish they would keep better track. But as I’ve discovered with the repeated rejections of my open records requests regarding botched drug raids, police departments tend to be lax when it comes to keeping track of their own mistakes. My guess is that officer-involved shootings generally have followed the violent crime rate, and so probably dropped for about 15 years starting in the 1990s, then levelled off or inched upward over the last three. (The introduction of the Taser has probably also had a downward impact on police shootings.)

That doesn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t be concerned about police militarization. Even if the police are shooting fewer people, there’s still plenty of reason to worry about the increasing willingness to use violent, confrontational tactics to police consensual crimes, as well as the disregard for constitutional and civil liberties that comes with a militaristic, us-versus-them mindset. I’ve talked to plenty of older and retired cops who are quite worried about the trend toward more military-like gear, tactics, training, and the effects it may be having on many officers’ state of mind and approach to the job.

(I should note here that I blame the politicians and policymakers for this, not the cops. The people who set the incentives and bad policies deserve scorn, not the people who respond to them in the very ways we would expect them to.)

Finally, JRM writes:

Balko claims that the current Mexico drug issues are caused by America’s unwillingness to import delicious drugs and its funding of drug interdiction efforts. I can’t help but notice that in those countries where hard drugs are either de facto or de jure legal, crime seems to be worse. Mexico’s lack of enforcement of the drug laws (primarily due to widespread corruption) hasn’t led to peaceful drug lords. It’s led to drug lords killing each other and everyone else.

Here, JRM is badly misinformed. Hard drugs are not “de facto” or “de jure” legal in Mexico, any more than they are in the United States. Yes, it’s pretty easy to get high in Mexico.  Same as it is in America. But to say that there’s a “lack of enforcement of the drug laws” in Mexico is absurd. The violence we’ve seen in Mexico over the last few years is a direct consequence of President Felipe Calderon’s aggressive, bloody, militarized war on drugs (which has been encouraged by the U.S. government, and funded in part by U.S. taxpayers).

From the New York Times:

Since coming to office in December 2006, Mr. Calderón has sought to revamp and professionalize the federal police force, using it, with the army, to mount huge interventions in cities and states once controlled by drug traffickers.

The result has been mayhem: a street war in which no target has been too big, no attack too brazen for the gangs…

The violence between drug cartels that Mr. Calderón has sought to end has only worsened over the past year and a half. The death toll has jumped 47 percent to 1,378 this year, prosecutors say. All told, 4,125 people have been killed in drug violence since Mr. Calderón took office.

From USA Today:

Calderón’s offensive began in December 2006, just days after he took office. Prompted by a series of murders, the former economist surprised the country by dispatching 10,000 troops to patrol the streets of Morelia and other cities in his home state of Michoacán — a major producer of crystal meth, marijuana and heroin.

Within weeks, troops were also sent to Tijuana, Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey and other drug-trafficking corridors. Stunned police officers were forced to hand over their weapons to the soldiers. Residents saw convoys of Humvees rolling past their houses.

Thousands of suspects were arrested in raids and at highway checkpoints. Dozens were extradited to the U.S. Calderón also asked the United States for help, a historic move in a country that is especially sensitive about U.S. meddling. The Bush administration pledged $1.1 billion in police and military aid.

The result?

Drug-related murders are soaring — 3,004 this year as of Sept. 3, compared to 2,673 in all of 2007, according to a tally by El Universal newspaper. In 2006 there were 1,410 drug-related killings.

And mass killings are commonplace. Twelve decapitated bodies were found Aug. 28 outside the Yucatán Peninsula city of Mérida. Police found 24 bodies bound and shot in a rural area outside Mexico City on Sept. 13. And on Aug. 16, gunmen shot and killed 13 people, including a baby, at a party in the northern town of Creel.

Many Mexicans fear that Calderón’s battle is turning into a quagmire, says Francisco García Cordero, editor of Criminalia, a criminal-justice journal. When the crackdown began, 53% of Mexicans approved of Calderón’s anti-crime efforts, according to a poll commissioned by the Reforma newspaper. By Sept. 1, only 34% approved…

Back in Morelia, at the Miguel Silva General Hospital, medical director María Soledad Castro says doctors now treat about 15 gunshot victims a month. “Before this all started, we rarely got even one gunshot a month,” she says.

None of this is surprising. You create black markets, you get crime. Step up enforcement and knock off a couple of big-time dealers, and their rivals are going to fight over the portion of the market that you’ve just opened up. When the liquor store down the street goes out of buisness, the other neighborhood liquor stores compete for its customers with ads, and maybe some sales or specials. When the main drug supplier in town goes out of business, competing suppliers compete for his customers by killing one other, and anyone who happens to get caught in the crossfire.

Those were JRM’s three criticisms, from a 3,500-word article that apparently was “fact-free.”

Now, I think I’ll head to bed.

Last March, USA Today reported that Marquette University dentist Dr. L. Thomas Johnson and a colleague are developing computer software they hope will “legitimize” bite mark analysis. The problem, as outlined in the article, is that…

…critics say human skin changes and distorts imprints until they are nearly unrecognizable. As a result, courtroom experts end up offering competing opinions.

“If the discipline lends itself to opposing experts, it’s not science,” said Peter Neufeld, co-director of the Innocence Project, which works to free wrongfully convicted inmates.

Since 2000, at least seven people in five states who were convicted largely on bite-mark identification have been exonerated, according to the Innocence Project.

Johnson’s effort to bring acceptance to his beloved art may have just hit another roadblock–a man his analysis helped convict was released last week.

Robert Lee Stinson walked out of a Wisconsin prison today after serving 23 years behind bars for a murder DNA shows he didn’t commit. Lawyers at the Wisconsin Innocence Project joined with the Milwaukee District Attorney’s office in asking a judge to throw out Stinson’s 1985 conviction today, based on new DNA evidence of his innocence and a new analysis showing that bite mark evidence used to convict Stinson was wrong…

Stinson was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide in 1985 based almost exclusively on evidence purporting to match bite marks found in the victim’s skin to his teeth. Since the time of Stinson’s trial, new evidence has come to light that strongly supports his claim of innocence. First, four nationally recognized forensic odontologists — David Senn, Gregory Golden, Denise Murmann, and Norman Sperber, who all volunteered their time — evaluated the dental evidence and conclusively excluded Stinson as the source of any of the bite marks found on the victim. Furthermore, DNA evidence corroborated these conclusions — male DNA found on the victim’s sweater also excluded Stinson.

I sorta’ felt bad at laughing at this, given the context. But it’s so out of the blue…

For its cover story this week, the Washington Post Sunday Magazine ran a terrific feature on the case of Cheye Calvo, the Berwyn Heights, Maryland mayor who’s home was raided and two black labs were slaughtered by Prince George’s County police during a botched drug raid last summer. Calvo and his wife unknowingly received a package of marijuana as part of a drug smuggling scheme. The SWAT team pounced shortly after Calvo’s mother-in-law brought the package in the house.

Calvo and his family have since been cleared of any wrongdoing, and Prince George’s County officials have at least apologized for wrongly raided their home, but the county and the police still adamantly insist they did nothing wrong, have refused to apologize for killing Calvo’s dogs, and have said they’d do nothing differently if they had the whole thing to do again.

The Post piece tugs at the heartstrings—more than a few people who sent it to me said it had them in tears. It also reads as strong critique of the drug war, or at least of this particular highly-militarized method of fighting it. The piece devotes quite a bit of copy to Overkill, the 2006 paper I wrote for the Cato Institute on the rise in the use of SWAT teams and paramilitary police tactics, and even inspired a stirring editorial in defense of the Fourth Amendment by the magazine’s editor, Tom Shroder.

The piece also uncovered some previously unreported information about the case.

This passage, for example, picks up shortly after the police had “secured” the house, and Calvo’s peering out his window.

At one point, Cheye recalled, he noticed a familiar uniform in the growing crowd on lawn. Berwyn Heights police officer Pvt. Amir Johnson had been patrolling the neighborhood when he passed the mayor’s house and saw officers dressed in tactical uniforms coming out the front door. He stopped. (Berwyn Heights and Prince George’s police have overlapping jurisdictions within town limits.)

“The guy in there is crazy,” Johnson remembered a Prince George’s County officer telling him when he arrived. “He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”

“That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights,” Johnson replied.

The detective looked very surprised, Johnson later recalled: “He had that ‘Oh, crap’ look on his face.”

In this passage, when the Berwyn Heights police chief (who wasn’t notified of the raid) calls the cops at the scene to find out what happened, Prince George’s narcotics detective David Martini flat-out lies to him:

At home in St. Mary’s, Murphy dialed the cellphone of his second-in-command, now standing on the mayor’s front lawn. Murphy’s officer handed the phone to a Prince George’s narcotics investigator, Det. Sgt. David Martini.

This is how Murphy later recalled their conversation:

“Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then tried to slam the door on them,” Murphy recalled. “And that at that point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took aggressive stances, and they were shot.”

“I later learned,” Murphy said in an interview, “that none of that is true.”

Finally, this passage is so infuriating it’s almost comical:

It was about 7:45 p.m. when Trinity turned her 1997 Suburu Outback with the kayak rack on top onto Edmonston. The road was so jammed with police vehicles that she couldn’t reach her driveway. Assuming that the house had been robbed, Trinity abandoned her car and searched frantically for any sign of an ambulance.

“Is my husband okay?” she asked when Ken Antolik met her near her front gate. “Is my mom okay?

“Yes,” he told her. “They are in the house.

Then it struck her. It was too quiet. She didn’t hear dogs barking. She knew, even before she asked: “Payton and Chase?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Trinity collapsed against his chest. A female officer eventually came and led her gently around to the back door. Trinity started in to find her husband and mother, then saw blood. There was so much blood. There was blood pooled near the door. Officers were tracking her dead dogs’ blood all over the house. She backed outside.

“I remember sitting on the steps thinking, ‘I’m never going to be able to live here again,’ ” Trinity recalled.

“I found something,” Georgia heard a detective yell excitedly. The woman held a white envelope filled with cash. Inside, was $68. Across the front of the envelope were written two words: “yard sale.”

The detective seemed crestfallen, Georgia said. Georgia, who had been moved, still bound, into the downstairs bedroom, says she overheard the woman saying something like: “It’s my first raid, and we got the mayor’s house.”

Calvo and the article’s author, April Witt, just completed a live chat at the Washington Post’s website.

You download a free copy of Overkill here. My work on police militarization for reason here, and on cops killing dogs here. Prior post on the Calvo raid here.

Note that the question is what you think will happen, not what you think should happen.

Dear America,

I take it back. I don’t apologize.

Because you know what? It’s none of your goddamned business. I work my ass off 10 months per year. It’s that hard work that gave you all those gooey feelings of patriotism last summer. If during my brief window of down time I want to relax, enjoy myself, and partake of a substance that’s a hell of a lot less bad for me than alcohol, tobacco, or, frankly, most of the prescription drugs most of you are taking, well, you can spare me the lecture.

I put myself through hell. I make my body do things nature never really intended us to endure. All world-class athletes do. We do it because you love to watch us push ourselves as far as we can possibly go. Some of us get hurt. Sometimes permanently. You’re watching the Super Bowl tonight. You’re watching 300 pound men smash each while running at full speed, in full pads. You know what the average life expectancy of an NFL player is? Fifty-five. That’s about 20 years shorter than your average non-NFL player. Yet you watch. And cheer. And you jump up spill your beer when a linebacker lays out a wide receiver on a crossing route across the middle. The harder he gets hit, the louder and more enthusiastically you scream.

Yet you all get bent out of shape when Ricky Williams, or I, or Josh Howard smoke a little dope to relax. Why? Because the idiots you’ve elected to make your laws have have without a shred of evidence beat it into your head that smoking marijuana is something akin to drinking antifreeze, and done only by dirty hippies and sex offenders.

You’ll have to pardon my cynicism. But I call bullshit. You don’t give a damn about my health. You just get a voyeuristic thrill from watching an elite athlete fall from grace–all the better if you get to exercise a little moral righteousness in the process. And it’s hypocritical righteousness at that, given that 40 percent of you have tried pot at least once in your lives.

Here’s a crazy thought: If I can smoke a little dope and go on to win 14 Olympic gold medals, maybe pot smokers aren’t doomed to lives of couch surfing and video games, as our moronic government would have us believe. In fact, the list of successful pot smokers includes not just world class athletes like me, Howard, Williams, and others, it includes Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, the last three U.S. presidents, several Supreme Court justices, and luminaries and success stories from all sectors of business and the arts, sciences, and humanities.

So go ahead. Ban me from the next Olympics. Yank my endorsement deals. Stick your collective noses in the air and get all indignant on me. While you’re at it, keep arresting cancer and AIDS patients who dare to smoke the stuff because it deadens their pain, or enables them to eat. Keep sending in goon squads to kick down doors and shoot little old ladies, maim innocent toddlers, handcuff elderly post-polio patients to their beds at gunpoint, and slaughter the family pet.

Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll apologize for smoking pot when every politician who ever did drugs and then voted to uphold or strengthen the drug laws marches his ass off to the nearest federal prison to serve out the sentence he wants to impose on everyone else for committing the same crimes he committed. I’ll apologize when the sons, daughters, and nephews of powerful politicians who get caught possessing or dealing drugs in the frat house or prep school get the same treatment as the no-name, probably black kid caught on the corner or the front stoop doing the same thing.

Until then, I for one will have none of it. I smoked pot. I liked it. I’ll probably do it again. I refuse to apologize for it, because by apologizing I help perpetuate this stupid lie, this idea that what someone puts into his own body on his own time is any of the government’s damned business. Or any of yours. I’m not going to bend over and allow myself to be propaganda for this wasteful, ridiculous, immoral war.

Go ahead and tear me down if you like. But let’s see you rationalize in your next lame ONDCP commercial how the greatest motherfucking swimmer the world has ever seen . . . is also a proud pot smoker.

Yours,

Michael Phelps

Virginian-Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty (who has thus far proven to be a reliable (if not always accurate) defender of the Chesapeake Police Department) today outdoes herself, cracking jokes fat jokes because Ryan Frederick has gained 60 pounds while isolated in jail for the past year:

What’s cooking at the Chesapeake city jail?

Spectators couldn’t help but wonder about that last week as they gawked at Ryan Frederick during his capital murder trial.

I mean, how often does an inmate pack on about 60 pounds behind bars?

Comparing photos of the skinny soft-drink delivery guy who was arrested a year ago to the chipmunk-cheeked defendant in the too-small suit was a lot like looking at before-and-after photos from a Jenny Craig ad.

Ha! A dead cop, crappy police work, prosecutorial misconduct, and a likely innocent man putting on weight because he’s been confined to a small jail cell for more than a year while waiting to see if he’ll be spending the rest of his life in prison–that’s comedy gold!

There is apparently a point behind Dougherty’s fat jokes, though it’s a pretty ridiculous one.

On Thursday, prosecutors tried to focus attention on Frederick’s weight, hinting that the beefy 29-year-old might have kept thin in the past by abusing drugs that cause weight loss. The prosecution posed hypothetical questions to an expert witness about whether cessation of methamphetamines or cocaine might result in rapid weight gain.

You know what else could cause weight gain? Spending 23 hours per day in 9 by 12 foot cell–for more than a year.

Dougherty’s next sentence assumes her readers are absolute idiots:

He said his overeating is stress-related, yet conceded that stress on the night of the shooting caused him to vomit several times.

Yes, that’s quite the contradiction, Ms. Dougherty. Clearly, Frederick isn’t lying about gaining weight. And as we saw and heard in yesterday’s videos, he isn’t lying about vomiting during his police interrogations on the night of the raid. So I guess Dougherty’s implication here is that Frederick is lying about why he gained wait–that he wasn’t stressed about spending the rest of life in prison or remorse for ending Shivers’ life. Rather, he was just feasting on vending machine food in celebration and satisfaction at his kill. Oh, and he can’t help but himself now that his appetite is no longer suppressed by all the cocaine and/or meth he was taking (an accusation for which there is zero evidence, other than the preposterous link to Frederick’s weight gain).

I hate to waste words explaining the obvious, but Dougherty apparently requires it. We react differently to different stressors. It’s not at all difficult to see how the immediate stress and adrenalin rush that would come with having just having your home raided and realizing you’d just killed a cop might cause one to vomit while, later, the stress and monotony of wasting away in a jail cell for a year while awaiting your fate might cause one to seek comfort in food that tastes good.

I actually hadn’t read about this line of questioning from the prosecution in the trial coverage, but it’s typically galling and outrageous.

“You’re not exactly wasting away from regret and remorse now, are you?” snapped prosecutor James Willett, who then flashed an image of skinny Frederick in an orange jumpsuit on a screen. With the thin Frederick towering over the chubby one, Willett told Frederick to rise, open his jacket and turn sideways.

It’s not enough that they’re trying to railroad the guy, they have to embarrass and insult him, too.

I guess if there’s an upside to this insanity, it’s that if the law-and-order crowd has nothing left but fat jokes, they must be starting to realize just how shabby the state’s case against Frederick really is.

Here’s hoping the jury does, too.