Salmon fisher in Homer, Alaska.

(Drop me an email if you’re interested in a print.)

The local paper prints the following response:

According to Jones County Sheriff Alex Hodge, Peter Eyre and Jason Talley of New Hampshire and Adam Mueller of Laurel were arrested during a routine traffic stop on Interstate 59. He said deputies gave the suspects numerous opportunities to identify themselves, but they refused to do so.

Uncertain of who or what they were dealing with, Hodge said deputies arrested the suspects and subsequent investigation revealed the individuals had an agenda which included not complying with orders given by authorities. They were discovered to be motorhomediaries.com activists…

“We have a job to do and we will do it,” explained Hodge. “We are not here to promote or condemn anyone’s agenda.

“Our job is to provide protection and service to our citizens. When our deputy was confronted with these men who refused to identify themselves; he had no idea what their plans were.”

Eyre, 28, was arrested for possession of beer in a dry county and an unknown offense; Mueller, 26, was arrested for disorderly conduct and disobeying a police officer; and Talley, 34, was arrested for disorderly conduct, disobeying a police officer, and resisting arrest. All three suspects were transported to the Jones County Adult Detention Center.

“I am proud of our deputies handling of this traffic stop,” said Hodge. “I have demonstrated my willingness to admit when we are wrong. However, in this case, they handled themselves in a proper and professional manner.”

The three were detained, cuffed, arrested, and jailed. Talley was pepper-sprayed. And it still isn’t clear exactly what actual crimes any of them committed.

You can read Jason, Pete, and Adam’s account of the incident here.

Another photo from the Voodoo Lounge, atop the roof of the Rio hotel in Las Vegas. Click the picture to enlarge.

In the last two weeks I’ve spoken at two Libertarian Party events–at a meeting of the Clark County, Nevada party last week, and at the Indiana/Kentucky state party convention this past weekend. Both events went well, and I met some great people.

At both events, my own speech was preceded by a speech from Wayne Allyn Root, the party’s candidate for vice president in 2008, and who has apparently already made himself a candidate for the 2012 nomination.

I won’t comment on the bulk of Root’s speeches, because I was invited to both events as a speaker, not as a journalist or a blogger. But I will comment on one thing Root mentioned in both speeches, because it’s essentially public information. In touting his ability to win high-profile media coverage, Root mentioned in both speeches that he is now a weekly commentator on Michael Savage’s weekly radio show.

I’m not a member of the Libertarian Party, so perhaps my advice doesn’t mean much to them. But I’m going to give it, anyway:

Stop this, now. Either persuade Root to stop going on Savage’s show, or show Root the door. I’m all about building coalitions where appropriate. But there’s nothing remotely appropriate about Michael Savage.

Michael Savage is a raving bigot. He regularly uses phrases like “turd-world countries” and “ghetto slime.” He once wished rape on a group of high school girls who make trips into San Francisco to feed the homeless. He’s a blood-thirsty warmonger, and a feverish culture warrior. He once said on the air that, “”When I hear someone’s in the civil rights business, I oil up my AR-15!” On social issues, he’s far to the right of just about every elected Republican official I can think of. He has wished AIDS and death on homosexuals. He regularly denigrates drug users. He is virulently anti-immigration. In short, there’s nothing remotely libertarian about him.

If Root’s aim is to take the LP in the direction of Michael Savage, the LP should distance themselves from Root right now.

There’s nothing honorable to be gained from this.

MORE: It’s worth noting that Root features his Savage commentaries at the very top of his website. I don’t really care how many listeners Savage has. He’s vile, and hostile to any reasonable conception of libertarianism.

After Sen. Lindsey Graham got into a shouting match with some libertarians at the South Carolina GOP convention this weekend, here’s how Gov. Mark Sanford responded:

There was almost a pejorative comment a moment ago. Sen. Graham spoke and said “I’m not a libertarian,” whatever, whatever, as if that’s an evil word. Liberty is the hallmark of the American experiment … People say, you know, “Mark, you’re kind of libertarian,” you know, and they say it as if it’s an evil word, like you’re a communist or something. I’m like: Throw me in that briar patch … I’ve been accused of being a libertarian and I wear it as a badge of honor.

I’ve said it before, but the GOP has a choice to make in the coming years. They can become the party of Mark Sanford, or the party of Sarah Palin. Which path they chose will likely determine how long they stay in the minority.

Good editorial from the Washington Times:

The nation’s capital is recovering from a week of cops running wild. Every year on May 15, National Peace Officers Memorial Day is celebrated in Washington…

For years, local residents have whispered to one another to stay off the roads at night during National Police Week because of all the police cars swerving wildly after the bars close. This year, the Metropolitan Police took the unusual step of ticketing cruisers because so many were parked illegally. Roll Call ran two photos last week of out-of-state police cars parked in a handicap spot and a space reserved for Zipcars. Emergency fire lanes across the city were blocked by police cars.

The dangerous activity is not limited to automobiles. Drinking while carrying sidearms is an annual part of the celebrations. A few years back, one inebriated officer tripped out of a bar in Chinatown and unloaded his pistol on the bell tower of nearby St. Mary, Mother of God Catholic Church.

At Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium two years ago, four officers from Signal Hill, Calif., made a public spectacle of themselves at a Nationals-Braves baseball game. With little regard for safety and even less concern for their appearance, these law enforcement officers were chugging down beers while in full uniform with their pistols on their hips and spare bullet clips on their utility belts. One concerned spectator asked them if it was against police regulations to be drinking alcohol while carrying weapons. In response, one of the officers teetered over, spilled his beer, put his finger to his lips and slurred, “shhhhh” – giggling uncontrollably.

Talk to people around D.C. You’d be surprised how many have personal stories about caddish off-duty cops during Police Week.

Here’s another long exposure shot I took from atop the Rio. You can click the photo for a larger view.

I didn’t really use my camera much in Vegas save for my trip to the rooftop lounge. But it was really an amazing view all around. Have a few more I’ll post this week.

The New York Times reports that prosecutors are too often blocking access to DNA tests that could exonerate the innocent, even in states where legislatures have specifically passed laws allowing access to testing.

In some cases, they’re saying the tests are unnecessary because jurors reached their verdict based on other evidence, even though that other evidence—eyewitness testimony, for example—is much less reliable than DNA. In others, they’re arguing that the possibility of multiple DNA samples or the fact that there are multiple defendants means a DNA test would prove inconclusive, even though technological advances in testing would in many cases be able to sort all of that out.

Continued resistance by prosecutors is causing years of delay and, in some cases, eliminating the chance to try other suspects because the statute of limitations has passed by the time the test is granted.

Mr. Reed has been seeking a DNA test for three years, saying it will prove his innocence. But prosecutors have refused, saying he was identified by witnesses, making his identification by DNA unnecessary.

A recent analysis of 225 DNA exonerations by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, found that prosecutors opposed DNA testing in almost one out of five cases. In many of the others, they initially opposed testing but ultimately agreed to it. In 98 of those 225 cases, the DNA test identified the real culprit.

In Illinois, prosecutors have opposed a DNA test for Johnnie Lee Savory, convicted of committing a double murder when he was 14, on the grounds that a jury was convinced of his guilt without DNA and that the 175 convicts already exonerated by DNA were “statistically insignificant.”

The other argument prosecutors often give is “finality,” meaning that for the sake of the victim and the system, sometimes it’s best to just declare a case closed, even if there remains doubt about the verdict.

“It’s definitely a matter of drawing the line somewhere,” said Peter Carr, the assistant district attorney who handled the case of Mr. Wright, who was accused of raping and killing a 77-year-old woman. The defendant did not request testing until 2005, three years after the statute was passed, Mr. Carr said, and in his view there was no possibility that the test would show innocence.

“There’s also the idea that you want finality for the victim’s sake,” Mr. Carr said. “If someone else’s semen was found at the crime scene, we’d have to talk to the victim’s family about whether the victim was sexually active.”

This argument rings hollow. If they didn’t look into whether or not the victim was sexually active before the initial trial, that’s some pretty poor police work. An innocent person shouldn’t have to rot behind bars to spare a victim’s family uncomfortable questions that should have been asked a long time ago.

Meanwhile, there have been two more exonerations in the last couple of weeks, one in Virginia, and one in Tennessee. The man in Tennessee spent 22 years on death row. The man in Virginia was exonerated for one of three rapes for which he was convicted. His attorneys believe the same man, a serial rapist, committed all three crimes. They’re now trying to reopen the other two cases as well.

I wrote about new research casting doubt on eyewitness testimony here. I wrote about a case currently under Supreme Court review that could establish a right to post-conviction DNA testing here.

Delayed exposure shot from the Voodoo Lounge, atop the Rio hotel in Las Vegas.

I guess by now it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that the top brass in the Bush administration would have seen the post-9/11 fight against terrorism as a holy war. But GQ has obtained copies of the cover sheets to the intelligence reports Donald Rumsfeld was sending to President Bush during the Iraq War, and the unabashed (and creepily amateurish) blend of Bible verses, Christian imagery, and war imagery is pretty damned disturbing.

They’ll do this to their own kids. One can only imagine what they’d have been willing to do to inmates.

Children held hands so 50,000 volts could pass through their fingers. Other children were dangerously close to breathing tear gas.

A total of 43 children were directly and indirectly shocked by electric stun guns during simultaneous Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day events at three Florida state prisons last month. One was a warden’s daughter.

The growing numbers, and the descriptions of kids being exposed to tear-gas and shocked while holding hands in circles, were revealed during a news conference today by the surprised chief of the Florida Department of Corrections chief.

I explore the possibility in a piece up today at The Daily Beast.

It’s up now at Reason.

This ought to prove once and for all that this guy is a complete fraud, and every case he has ever testified in demands a review.

I note this in the article, but I was really struck watching the video how convincing West actually sounds. You know before the video starts that the photo and the dental mold have nothing to do with one another. But if unless they might have forensics, scientific, or dental training, it isn’t at all difficult to see how he could have swayed judges and juries into buying his bullshit.

Since I’m headed back to the Hoosier state this weekend, we’ll take a brief hiatus from the Dylan countdown for a little nostalgia. “Okay Tito, you got it!”

They’re still facing charges, though.

Jason Talley says on Twitter that he was pepper sprayed and choked for refusing to show ID.

A few odds and ends related to this site that I’ve been meaning to throw your way:

Tomorrow, I’ll have another investigative piece here at Reason about self-proclaimed Mississippi bite mark expert, Dr. Michael West. This latest article details a sting an attorney set up on West that pretty conclusively shows West to be a fraud.

It’s good timing, because earlier this month, West gave an interview to the A.P. in which he defended his court testimony over the years. The interview came in response to  recent lawsuit filed by Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, two men convicted of separate rapes and murders almost entirely thanks to West’s bite mark expertise. The two were later exonerated by DNA evidence. A third man has since confessed to both crimes.

Much of the interview consists of West’s usual defense—that someone else must have raped and killed the victims while the men West helped convict bit them. It’s absurd. It would require two boyfriends, on occasions two years apart, who lived within miles of one another, to have each bitten the young daughters of their girlfriends while a third man, the same man, raped and killed the girls.

But there are a couple of parts of the article that are worth addressing. First:

“What did I testify to that was incorrect? If they knew that they didn’t kill this child and I never testified that they killed this child, where have I torted them?” West said.

He “torted” them by giving testimony unsupported by any scientific literature (other than journal articles written by West himself), knowing full well that his testimony would be used to help convict them. West’s behavior in the Jimmie Duncan case, which occurred at about the same time as the Brooks and Brewer cases, and which I wrote about last April, suggests that at the very least he at the time was employing a method of analysis that has been thoroughly discredited, even by other experts in the already suspect field of forensic odontology. That’s at best. At worst, he was manufacturing evidence.

West, in court documents filed this week, also says his testimony wasn’t the basis of Brewer’s conviction, saying it wasn’t the “the centerpiece of the prosecution.”

This is false. The bite marks were the only physical evidence linking either Brooks or Brewer to either crime. Moreover, when DNA testing on the semen found in the victim initially cleared Kennedy Brewer back in 2002, District Attorney Forrest Allgood refused to exonerate Brewer, citing West’s bite mark testimony as proof that even if Brewer didn’t rape and kill the little girl, the bite marks West was able to match up showed Brewer must have had something to do with her death. Allgood’s clinging to West’s testimony kept Brewer in prison an extra five years.

Speaking of Allgood:

“I told Dr. West years ago that we were not going to use him anymore because, quite frankly, he carries too much baggage,” said District Attorney Forrest Allgood in Columbus. “You spent your whole trial defending him as opposed to trying the defendant.”

I don’t know what Allgood means by “years ago,” but again, he was relying on West’s testimony as late as 2007 to keep Kennedy Brewer in jail. Allgood also continued using West well after West was suspended by the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 1994. And note that Allgood doesn’t say he stopped using West because West is unscientific. Only because it made it harder to win and protect convictions.

“I don’t want to do any more death information. I don’t want public office,” West said. “I’ve lost faith in the system.”

Tragic. Reminds me of the old Groucho Marx line, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

District Attorney Ronnie Harper of Lauderdale County said West was once accepted as an expert by courts all over the South.

“This is not some witch doctor that people were calling because they didn’t have any other evidence. People thought the guy knew what he was talking about,” Harper said.

This is partially true. West was accepted as an expert by courts all over the south. But he was also getting calls because prosecutors didn’t have any other evidence, or at least not enough to ensure a conviction. And because prosecutors were so eager to win convictions, they didn’t bother to look at West’s ridiculous claims with any skepticism. Any scientist who claims he has developed a test that only he can perform, and that can’t be duplicated or photographed—as West did with his black light and yellow goggles method of identifying bite marks—isn’t a scientist. And his test isn’t science. Plenty of people in the forensics community were sending out red flags about West dating back to the early 1990s. Prosecutors refused to heed those warnings out of self-interest. The “everyone else was doing it” defense doesn’t fly.

Alternate light imaging that West pioneered is still being used today, said Dr. Robert Barsley, a Louisiana State University dental professor and the secretary of the American Academy of Forensic Science.

“In fact, in dentistry today, it’s used to detect cancer,” said Barsley, a friend of West.
Barsley acknowledged the attention surrounding West hasn’t helped the use of bite mark evidence at trial.

“Certainly in some cases, not only Dr. West’s cases, people disagreed with the results of odontology. Anytime you have disagreements that lessens the impact of the evidence,” Barsley said.

Penalty flag on the A.P reporter, here. It would probably be helpful to know that the expert defending West in this passage is not only a friend, but was actually a co-author on many of West’s journal articles about the use of fluorescent light to identify bite marks. Barslay absolutely has an interest in defending West’s methods, given that he helped popularize them. That should have been included in the article.

I hadn’t heard that some form of West’s methods for bite mark identification are now being use to detect cancer. That may be. But I’m not sure how that’s relevant to their efficacy in identifying bite marks, and matching them to one suspect to the exclusion of everyone else.

Finally, Barsley’s understatement of what’s at stake here is laughable. This is not about “people” disagreeing with West’s testimony. And it’s not about the “impact” of odontological evidence. It’s about near unanimity among forensic scientists that West has for years been giving testimony based on forensic methods that have zero basis in science. And he’s been doing it to help put people in prison. Or send them to death row. West’s methods are pretty roundly condemned even within the field of forensic odontology, a field that itself was recently lambasted by a report published by the National Academy of Sciences.

More coming tomorrow.

Last month, Nick Gillespie interviewed Jason Talley and Pete Eyre for Reason.tv. The two libertarians had rented a mobile home, and planned to drive across the country to meet with fellow libertarians, interview figures in the libertarian movement (like Ron Paul, and Libertarian Party founder David Nolan), and report back on government abuses they encountered along the way. They were tracking their trip on the website motorhomediaries.com.

It looks like they’ve found one. It’s not clear why, but they were apparently pulled over yesterday in Jones County, Mississippi. Passenger Adam Mueller attempted to videotape the traffic stop, and was arrested for doing so. It isn’t clear what happened next, but Talley and Eyre were also eventually arrested, Eyre for possession of a beer in a dry county, and Talley for disorderly conduct, disobeying, and resisting arrest.

They’re due to be arraigned tomorrow. These guys are very well-connected in libertarian legal circles. They’re quite aware of their rights, and what they can and can’t do during a traffic stop and detainment. I suspect the authorities in Jones County are about to realize that they harassed the wrong motorists.

MORE: They may face firearms charges, too. And I don’t think the guys have a local attorney yet. If any defense attorney in the area is interested in helping out, email me.

MORE II: It looks like there was an initial inquiry into possible federal firearms charges, but the ATF passed. The three are being held on bond. Someone from the Campaign for Liberty has made her way to Jackson, and I’ve passed on the name of a good local defense attorney my contacts in Mississippi gave me. What’s most important is that we get them the hell out of that jail. From one of my trusted contacts down there:

The folks I know who’ve spent time in the Jones County jail say it’s bad. One had prior time in Angola and Orleans Parish Prison during Katrina and still said Jones County was bad; the other had spent time in Cook County jail and said Jones was worse.

Mississippi’s county jails are among the worst in the country. That this would be one of the worst in Mississippi is hard to imagine.

The Jones County people have been flooded with phone calls, so they’re probably aware by now that it would behoove them to treat these guys appropriately.

MORE III: Just noticed from the photo Jason Talley snapped during the first arrest that both the cops are black. Weird. Two black cops in rural Mississippi violate the civil rights of three white guys. There’s some perverse, post-racial symbolism there, no? You’d sure as hell have never seen a photo like that in the 1950s.

Of course, it isn’t exactly progress, either. That is, I’m pretty sure the 1960s civil rights activists weren’t fighting for the day when black police could harass white motorists. But that they can would probably have astounded someone like MLK. Maybe this is what equality in post-racial America will look like: Doesn’t matter what color you are, if you’re on the wrong side of the badge, your rights don’t matter.

Gillespie’s interview with Eyre and Talley:

I say this is encouraging, and shouldn’t be dismissed as mere symbolism.

My Reason colleague Jacob Sullum is more skeptical.

Saw this when it aired the other night. Pretty funny.