The “kid gets wrongly arrested due to PATRIOT Act” story is getting more and more dubious.
Why I like the ACLU, even though I disagree with them a good percentage of the time. Reminds me of this classic piece from The Onion.
This seems like a bad idea. Pretty sure there’s no way in hell my dogs would go for it.
http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/
I am shocked, shocked to hear that former Drug Czar John Walters is full of crap.
Great movie mustaches.
Ryan Frederick was formally sentenced last week to 10 years in prison.
Bush officials trying to alter legal ethics report on torture from behind the scenes.
CNN covers the asset forfeiture shakedowns in Tenaha, Texas.
This entry was posted
on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 9:37 am by Radley Balko
and is filed under General Criminal Justice, General Drug War, Police Informants, Police Militarization.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
TheAgitator.com
Honestly, that Colorado douche walked into that one from nothing short of a mile away.
But it’s also informative: most people (especially dumbass government bureaucrats) just don’t get free speech. OF COURSE the ACLU would not shrink in defending an ACLUSUX license plate (or otherwise find their cause or arguments undermined) they’ve stood on this principle for decades, and they understand fully all of its dimentions. this guy is just coming to grips with the fact that it’s a *principle* at all.
Radley, just curious, where do you disagree with the ACLU other than on 2nd Amendment issues?
Regarding the CNN story: every time I saw the word “Exclusive” displayed on screen, I wanted to choke. They’re HOW many months behind covering this story?
All that reporting and Ryan Frederick winds up as a blurb in a Morning Links section… another poor schmuck having (only part of, luckily) his life taken away by the state for having the audacity to defend his life… from the state.
Too bad the ACLU’s opinion of the 2nd Amendment isn’t as liberty oriented as their opinion of the 1st.
Edwin – are you still exclusively watching it on CNN months later? ;)
As the economic situation gets tighter, expect tens of thousands of Tenahas to spring up to try to replace lost tax-based revenues (gotta have employed taxpayers, first). All thanks to the (fiscally addictive to LEOs) DrugWar’s breaches of the 4th Amendment and civil forfeiture laws.
One more aspect of the DrugWar that will eventually be its’ undoing, when enough people get tired of being shaken down by ‘their’ police.
I can’t even finish watching the John Waters piece. He’s such a blowhard idiot. He’s on par with Westboro Baptist Church, in my opinion.
How does that dog-washer work without getting soap in the dog’s eyes? Poor thing looks like he wants out.
I’ve always hated tom selleck and sam elliot because I CANNOT grow a cool moustache.
John Waters and John Yoo will be douchebags their entire lives. These guys are modern day Anslingers. the damage they’ve done will live on long after they’re dead.
has ryan frederick lost his house? is his family able to hold his affairs together? is there a fund to help? reading the comments in the article, I see the same arguments from both sides, but I also see more people in the middle calling for a review of departmental drug policy. Hopefully, the people in the middle win out.
#7,
I didn’t watch the video. I got distracted by the sidebar story involving naked pics of rihanna…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/08/rihanna-nude-photos-hit-w_n_200438.html
best news story of the week…maybe month.
Marty, what do you have against John Waters? Is it that you can’t grow a cool pencil-thin mustache either?
Leave it to FixedNews to defend the arrest of a teenager.
If the teen is part of 4chan as has been claimed, then it practically goes without saying that he is guilty as charged.
Marty,
Do you hates John Waters because you didn’t like Hairspray or Pecker? I mean, those are classic movies.
If an actual legalization debate ever gets underway, you can basically count on the Drug Warriors to trot out the same arguments used by Walters again and again and again, no matter how many times they are debunked and refuted.
There will be legions of police chiefs appearing to say legalization is bad because it will “promote crime.”
The prison contractors and liquor companies will quietly make big donations to religiously based prohibition groups.
Just keep telling the truth. It is the only way to beat them.
Nando,
Wired has a better story. They’ve got this teen dead to rights, it would seem. There is a whole money trail going back to him (he was stupid enough to set up a paypal account to receive money for doing this) and his own mother has admitted that she knew about his prank calls, even some bomb-related ones and that he took money for some of it.
In short, he’s screwed.
Fixed.
Ryan Frederick was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Just 18 meager comments for this blog post. This comment is the only one so far regarding Ryan Frederick.
My, how the interest in this American tragedy has waned. Not too long ago, a Frederick update would garner 100 comments. It seems the Agitator readership is part-and-parcel of the American “short attention span” society at large.
My thoughts are with you Mr. Frederick. You are a martyr of American injustice. May some good come from your suffering.
Apologies to Nathan and Marty, missed your comments on the first go-round.
Drug czars are only lying when their lips are moving. They are like the habitual liar who is transparent to everyone around him except himself.
Drug war propaganda has become completely political and longer has any credibility as being objective (assuming it ever did). It’s destructive because kids see through it very early and they will then summarily dismiss cautionary advice about drugs from other more sincere authoritative sources, such as their parents.
Just more evidence that when government says “it’s for the children”, it almost certainly has nothing beneficial to do with children.
The drug war is mostly just a machine that grinds up citizens fed in at one end and spews money out at the beneficiaries at the other end. Ever seen the movie “Soylent Green”? Same thing.
When I worked in an animal hospital, I used to bath dogs on a daily basis. The dogs did not like it, but it was only way to remove filth from their sores and get rid of fleas.
We used to put drops of mineral oil in their eyes to protect them from soap.
–
And if you think dogs don’t like it, try bathing cats. :)
I want to know where the ACLU is on the Georgia Gadsden Flag false detention? Or are “right wing extremists” no longer covered?
Cynical — Unfortunately, we’ve known that Ryan was headed for this fate since the date of his conviction. The sentencing was little more than a formality. So the discussion really happened back when he got convicted.
Not to say we shouldn’t still talk about it, because we should, just like we should keep Cory Maye’s story alive.
Sorry, Louisiana not Georgia.
We’ve known since the cops busted down his door with guns that Ryan was fucked.
Good luck on appeal. Hopefully, the blue brotherhood of the badge won’t murder him.
Ryan Frederick was convicted because the prosecution was partially successful in its attempt to stack the jury. That they didn’t get a conviction for capital murder is proof that they were only partially successful.
The damage was done by the prosecutions question in the voir dir “Do yo believe that you need to identify your target and belive that your life was threatened.” or something to that effect. They selected jurors who already believed that you had to have someone actually have already broken in before you would be justified in believing that your life was in danger. I think they took the position that you had to be completely certain that your life was threatened rather than believe that it is probably treatened. I seen to recall plenty of cops being held to much lower standards than this. But that position is begging the question. You only need to have identified them as probably being a threat to your life. The battering ram poking through the door was surely such proof.
Cynical, I think we all know there’s little we can do now. Quite frankly, I think that getting the word out (as Hampton Roads, Radley, and others did) had a positive impact on Ryan’s case. Probably the best that could be reasonably hoped for.
[...] several hundred miles from home because of the Patriot act. There’s been some follow up (H/T) and it looks as though things are more complicated: [A] new report by Wired News suggests that, [...]
voir dire, or at the very least the modern usage of it, has got to be one of the most disgusting abuses by government by far.
A quick fix would seem to allow the defendant to dismiss a number of jurors from the pool, but the government has no say in the process.
#11 | ClubMedSux & #14 | Mattocracy … my John Water’s fan club membership has been terminated because of the typo.
John Walters, Walters, Walters!
Frank: “I want to know where the ACLU is on the Georgia Gadsden Flag false detention? Or are “right wing extremists” no longer covered”
As an ACLU board member in Illinois, I’m pretty sure ACLU does not support this action, and is very suspicious of the recent DHS info about the rise in “right wing extremism.” Considering the fact that ACLU has, among other things, defended the right of Neo-Nazis to march in Skokie (a Chicago suburb with a large Jewish population), I can’t see ACLU (national, state or local chapters) going along with too much of this hype.
Radley: Thanks for the half-hearted nod to ACLU. I don’t always agree with the organization’s priorities either (I’m a liberal with strong “classical liberal” leanings, unlike many fellow ACLU members who are “Progressives” across the board), but I still believe the work it does is very important.