The latest from Reason.tv: Thank you, President Carter!

The video below aired a couple of weeks ago, but it’s a pretty good look at the drinking age debate, with lots of camera time for Amethyst Initiative founder John McCardell.

(Note: If video isn’t working below, you can watch it here.)

One quibble: At one point in the segment, Lesley Stahl suggests that the “conundrum” for policymakers is that raising the drinking age has reduced alcohol-related traffic fatalities, but may be contributing to fatalities associated with underage binge drinking.

But there may not be a conundrum at all. When I interviewed McCardell for the February issue of Reason, he explained why the argument that raising the drinking age is responsible for the 20-year drop in highway deaths doesn’t hold water:

There has been a decline in traffic fatalities. But it began in 1982, two years before the law changed. It has basically been flat or inching upward for the last decade.

More interestingly, the decline has come in every age group, not just people between 18 and 21. And if you look at Canada, where the minimum drinking age is 18 or 19 [depending on the province], the trend in highway fatalities has almost exactly paralleled ours. It’s far more likely that the reduction in deaths is due to seat belt use, airbags, and safer cars.

Not to mention the enormously successful public awareness campaign Mothers Against Drunk Driving began in the early 1980s. MADD today has veered off into neoprohibition. But there’s no question their PR campaign changed attitudes about drunk driving.

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Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but it seems that in this column, weathered culture warrior Pat Buchanan nearly calls for an end to the war on drugs:

How does one win a drug war when millions of Americans who use recreational drugs are financing the cartels bribing, murdering and beheading to win the war and keep self-indulgent Americans supplied with drugs?

There are two sure ways to end this war swiftly: Milton’s way and Mao’s way. Mao Zedong’s communists killed users and suppliers alike, as social parasites. Milton Friedman’s way is to decriminalize drugs and call off the war.

When Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1972, Milton, writing in Newsweek, objected on ethical grounds:

“On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.”

“Am I my brother’s keeper?’” asked Milton, answering, “No.”

Americans are never going to adopt the Maoist solution. For the users of drugs are all too often classmates, colleagues, friends, even family. Indeed, our last three presidents did not deny using drugs.

Once, a Christian America outlawed and punished homosexuality, abortion, alcohol, loan-sharking and gambling, all as criminal vice. Now, homosexuality and abortion are constitutional rights. Gambling and booze are a rich source of government revenue. And loan-sharking is done by credit-card companies, and not just the Corleones.

Will we raise the white flag in the drug war, as well?

Which is the greater evil? Legalized narcotics for America’s young or a failed state of 110,000 million on our southern border?

Some choice. Some country we’ve become.

Pat’s dour assessment of the country’s sunken values aside, it’s remarkable to see him not only recognizing and appreciating the drug war’s futility and collateral damage, but even favorably quoting Milton Friedman on the individual rights argument for legalization.

God help me for daring to embrace a tiny bit of optimism, here, but I’m starting to sense the first inklings of a sea change in drug policy, not just here, but all around the world. The mounting pile of evidence of the drug war’s failure and catastrophic consequences is getting too big for reasonable people to ignore.

So when the cops kill your dog, even when you’ve done nothing wrong, even if the pup was harmless, it’s “sorry–the officer felt threatened,” and there’s little you can do about it. It’s just an animal, after all.

But put a badge on a dog?

During an elaborate memorial, Ringo the police dog received a final send-off Friday befitting canine aristocracy.

A motorcade of 30 police cruisers rolled slowly beneath a giant American flag stretched between fire department ladder trucks.

A floral arrangement spelling out the dog’s name was put across the windshield of the cruiser in which the Belgian Malinois traveled with his human partner, Anderson County Deputy Rick Coley.

Taps played softly outside the Clinton Community Center, where more than 100 people gathered to pay their respects.

Among the mourners: some 50 law enforcement officers – Clinton police, Anderson, Scott and Campbell County deputies, state troopers and Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officers.

A multimedia slide show with pictures of Ringo in action, training and posing with his master or just cavorting, was flashed on the center’s Great Room wall.

Poster-sized photos of Ringo and awards he had won flanked the urn holding Ringo’s cremated remains.

More than one griever dabbed tears with tissues or fingers as Rio Diamond’s song “I Believe” played.

Ringo, described as fun-loving and hard-working, died Feb. 20 of kidney failure.

The highly trained police dog was 10 years old.

I’m as big a dog lover as you’ll find. But this is just embarrassing.

This Gene Weingarten piece from today’s Washington Post is one of the most moving, heartbreaking stories I’ve ever read.

Weingarten is an incredible writer, and this is just a devastatingly sad story.

Thanks to Lou W. in the comments section for the link.

I have a piece up at The Daily Beast in which I try to figure out why the Obama administration argued against allowing post-conviction defendants the right to access possibly exonerating DNA evidence in the Osborne Supreme Court case last week.

The most likely explanation is, alas, pretty darned disappointing.

Incidentally, this is my first contribution to The Daily Beast in what could be a more regular arrangement. The site is a project by former New Yorker editor and bestselling author Tina Brown. It’s great exposure to a new audience.

It certainly couldn’t hurt if they were to get noticeable rush of traffic to my article on a Saturday.

“History of Lovers,” by Iron & Wine with Calexico.

What a great song. Heard it for the first time the other day, and was surprised to learn that the collaborative album it’s from came out back in 2005. Somehow I missed it.

Get yours here. I just did.

“Guilty Before Proven Innocent,” my article from last May on the wrongful prosecution of the Colomb family, is a finalist for a Western Publications Association “Maggie” Award.

Reason’s a finalist in three other categories, too.

Austan Goolsbee is a free market economist who Obama would like to put on his Council of Economic Advisers.

He would be an unabashedly free market voice in Obama’s ear. Let me repeat that: He would be a free market economist, giving Obama advice as Obama sets about nationalizing banks, socializing health care, and generally growing the size and scope of government. Would make a difference? Who knows. But he certainly couldn’t hurt.

And you’re blocking his confirmation because . . . the Democrats did the same thing to one of Bush’s nominees?

I just learned yesterday that on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit will consider whether or not to deport a longtime federal drug informant back to Mexico. If they decide to do so, the informant will almost certainly be killed. But Guillermo Ramirez Peyro isn’t just any informant. He’s the key witness in the “House of Death” scandal, in which U.S. federal agents turned their backs on a dozen murders in Juarez, Mexico.

Last fall, I interviewed Sandy Gonzalez, the 30-year DEA agent who blew the whistle on the case.

A brief summary: Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) received knowledge that Peyro (also known as “Lalo”) had participated in a murder in the course of infiltrating a faction of the Juarez drug cartel. The murder took place at what would later become known as the House of Death. Instead of calling off their investigation after learning of Lalo’s participation, ICE agents did nothing, choosing instead to preserve their drug and cigarette smuggling cases. There would be 11 more tortures and murders at the House of Death. Lalo would later admit to having participated in at least five of them. Thus far, the federal government has refused to conduct a thorough investigation. When Agent Gonzalez sent a letter calling for one, he was disciplined and scolded by officials at the DEA, Homeland Security, and the office of then-U.S. Attorney Johnny Sutton. Gonzalez was subsequently given the first negative performance review of his career, causing him to take an early retirement. He later won a $385,000 settlement.

If there ever were a thorough investigation, Lalo would be a key witness. Only he knows the extent to which ICE agents allowed these murders to happen. And that may be why the U.S. government wants to deport him, effectively a death sentence.

From my interview with Agent Gonzalez:

reason: The Department of Homeland Security is now trying to deport Lalo back to Mexico, where he’ll almost certainly be murdered. Two questions. First, what is their stated reason for deporting him? And the more obvious question—do you think they’re trying to deport him because he’s likely to be killed?

Gonzalez: There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re trying to deport him because they know he’ll be killed. It gets rid of the main witness against the government should someone ever look into this.

I don’t know the stated or official reason they’re trying to deport him. I would guess that it’s because he’s an illegal alien, or something like that.

I mean, they want him dead. There’s no question about it.

reason: He has asked that if he is deported, it be to someplace other than Mexico. The government is arguing against that, too.

Gonzalez: I wasn’t aware of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. All I know is that they are trying to get rid of him so he can get killed. Once he’s out of the picture, there’s no way this case can be revived, because all the other witnesses are government agents.

The federal government has paid Lalo more than $200,000 over the years. His tips have led to at least 50 convictions. He is without a doubt a shady character. He’s a former Mexican police officer turned drug dealer turned federal informant who participated in tortures and murders. But he’s also holding information about U.S. government complicity in a series of a dozen murders, including the murder of a legal U.S. resident.

Lalo was initially granted asylum by an immigration judge. But the government appealed that decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), which overruled the judge and ordered Lalo deported. He’s now appealing to the Eighth Circuit. The Obama administration has apparently decided to push ahead with his deportation.

It may be that Obama’s DOJ appointees aren’t aware of the story behind Lalo’s deportation. I have a phone call out requesting comment from the BIA.

Pretty cool how accurate these 1993 predictions turned out to be. Pretty scary that I remember seeing the commercials when they aired.

I guess the question is, did Bush and his top advisers really have an epiphany, or was the message here that only they could be trusted with such power?

In its final days, the George W. Bush administration issued a Justice Department opinion dramatically reversing most of the legal arguments that governed its war on terrorism – from interrogations to electronic surveillance.

On Monday, the Obama Justice Department declassified a Jan. 15 memo from Steven G. Bradbury, the outgoing principal deputy assistant attorney general, repudiating the interpretations of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003 regarding the president’s wartime authorities.

The memo upheld Congress’ right to make binding laws regarding the treatment of suspected terrorists and withdrew “doubtful interpretation” of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, questioning the obligation of the U.S. government to abide by international agreements on treatment of prisoners of war. In fact, the memo said, the president was obliged to follow international treaties, signed by the United States, prohibiting torture.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union national security project, said the “repudiation in this memo suggests a long-overdue recognition that the OLC’s legal analyses were indefensible.”

Under either scenario, it seems clear that Dick Cheney’s influence began to wane in the closing days of W’s second term (Cheney was at least consistent—he understood that the Democrats would one day wield the vast power he was trying to carve out for the president).

About seven years too late, unfortunately.

So do you think the headline writer knew what he was doing here?

This Reuters headline is still my all-time favorite.

In a piece about the Jimmie Duncan case, Monroe, Louisiana’s black newspaper the Free Press writes…

In 2000 there was another strange autopsy report in Ouachita Parish. Jeremy Burton tried to rob a motel on Louisville avenue and was cornered by the cops in a dark alley. Shots were fired and a police officer initially admitted shooting him.

There was a local outcry when the autopsy report returned with a very strange result. It said Burton, who was left handed, swung his arm around a pipe over which he was draped and shot himself in the back of the head…twice.

There was never a trial of the officer. The case was swept under the rug, completing [sic] relying on the integrity of the autopsy report.

This another problem Hayne presents: The 20 years worth of cases where he may have altered autopsy results to clear police or people who were well-connected. In my 2007 piece on Hayne, I quoted from a public letter to the Jackson Advocate written by Dr. Lloyd White, one of the last two people to hold the position of state medical examiner in Mississippi, and who, like his successor, eventually left the job in frustration after getting badgered by the state’s coroners and DAs for trying to rein Hayne in. From the article:

Before leaving, [White] wrote a blistering public letter to Charles Tisdale, editor and publisher of the Jackson Advocate, a hard-hitting black paper sometimes called “the most firebombed newspaper in America.” Tisdale’s paper had been doggedly pursuing a series of suspicious suicides in Mississippi’s jails that many civil rights leaders believed to be homicides.

White himself suspected the deaths really were suicides. But he didn’t believe they were being properly investigated. In particular, he was troubled that the bodies were being sent to examiners like Hayne, who, experience taught him, couldn’t be trusted to give an unbiased conclusion. White’s letter called Hayne out by name, noting that despite his lack of credentials and poor practices, “Hayne continues to autopsy jail and prison deaths, as well as persons killed by police or sheriff’s deputies, and to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal income as a result of his extremely cozy relations with…state employees and officials.”

Last Thursday, we posted my report about a video of a bite mark examination in Louisiana that showed possible criminal evidence tampering by Mississippi dentist and self-proclaimed bite mark expert Dr. Michael West. The evidence was used to help convict Jimmie Duncan of raping and murdering 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux. West responded a few days later in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. A few comments on his response:

“I’ve exonerated three or four times as many people as I’ve convicted,” he said. “I’m a little old dentist from Hattiesburg, and I’ve got the top lawyers in the country coming after me. The New York Times wrote an editorial on me. Why? They can’t stand the evidence.”

I’ve already put up a post addressing West’s comment about “They can’t stand the evidence.”

I don’t know what West means by “I’ve exonerated three or four times as many people as I’ve convicted.” Certainly he doesn’t mean he testifies for the defense more than he testified for prosecutors. I consulted with some defense attorneys in Mississippi with knowledge of West’s history, and they couldn’t think of a single time he has testified for the defense. That isn’t to say it’s never happened. But it is to say it wasn’t that often, and certainly not three or four more times than he has testified for prosecutors.

One defense attorney theorized that West is referring here to the fact that in some of these cases, police or prosecutors will bring him four or five dental molds, and from these he’ll pick one that matches whatever bite mark he has allegedly found. In his mind, this may mean he has “exonerated” the others. It’s too bad the reporter didn’t ask him to elaborate (West won’t talk to me at all). But he clearly isn’t using the word “exonerate” in the way it’s commonly understood.

West responded that the accusations he made up or falsified evidence “is a damn lie.”

“You can’t make an inflammatory response on a dead person,” he said.

I asked Michael Bowers about this. Bowers is the dentist I first showed the video to, and who was so incensed by what he saw that he offered to submit an affidavit for Jimmie Duncan’s defense. Bowers is a widely respected forensic odontologist. He is dismissive of bite mark analysis as a means of positively identifying someone because, he says, that sort of analysis has no basis in science (a position emphatically hammered home by the National Academy of Sciences report a couple of weeks ago).

In any case, Bowers says West is correct on the obvious point that you can’t induce an inflammation in a dead person. But Bowers says that what West is doing in the video isn’t causing an inflammation, but scraping away layers of skin with the mold of Duncan’s teeth. Likewise, the abrasion that appears after a break in the video that wasn’t there as the video opens is an abrasion caused by some sort of trauma to the cheek. It is not an inflammation.

More from West:

He defended pressing the mold against Haley’s cheek, saying he was following protocol Bowers laid out in his manual that says bite-mark comparisons can be made from “working study model to impression of wound.”

I asked Bowers about this statement, too. Bowers says West is lying. Bowers says that this is the technique West is referring to:

1. Photograph the injury using a ruler or scale.

2. Use dental impression material to make a mold of the skin.

3. Take this impression and pour dental plaster into it. This makes a model of the skin.

4. Use the suspect’s dental models to place onto the MODEL of the skin.

West said he doesn’t understand why he’s drawing criticism when another bite-mark expert testified for the prosecution at the capital murder trial of Jimmie Duncan, now on death row.

Of course that expert, Dr. Neal Riesner, performed his analysis based on photos of the bite marks West took after he had repeatedly jammed Jimmie Duncan’s dental mold into Haley Oliveaux’s body. Even here, Bowers and the NAS study would say Riesner was out of bounds. There’s simply no science to back up the notion that you can affirmatively match bite marks left on skin to a single individual. And to do so from photos of bite marks left on skin is even more problematic.

The fun starts at about the two minute mark. I don’t know if Louis C.K. has libertarian sympathies, but this rant is pretty righteous. We tend to lose sight of just how damned far capitalism has gotten us.

Yet another defense of the drug war bloodshed in Mexico.

To his credit, yesterday President Obama made public a series of memos Office of Legal Council official John Yoo wrote in the months and years after September 11. I haven’t read through them all, but the excerpts I’ve seen don’t reveal much more than we already know about Yoo’s deluded opinions on detainment, executive power, habeas, etc.

But I hadn’t yet heard about this passage, from an A.P. writeup:

Yoo also suggested that the government could put new restrictions on the press and speech, without spelling out what those might be.

“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” Yoo wrote, adding later: “The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

Your humble Agitator is quoted.

I have a piece up at Reason looking at the Osborne case that was argued before the Supreme Court yesterday.

At issue is whether the government has the power to deny post-conviction defendants the right to test DNA evidence that could definitively establish their innocence.

The oral arguments (which happened after I wrote the piece) were quite odd. More on that later.