TheAgitator.com
More on John Preston’s Miracle Police Dogs
Friday, July 10th, 2009Last month, I blogged on a series of DNA exonerations of men convicted of rapes in the early 1980s due to the extraordinary claims of Florida police dog handler John Preston, now deceased. Now a fourth conviction has been called into question.
Questions about Preston’s miracle dogs have persisted for two decades. See, for example, the jaw-dropping Geraldo Rivera 20/20 segment below. One state’s attorney even resigned in protest, stating he wouldn’t be a part of his colleagues "manufacturing evidence."
Yet prosecutors continued using Preston. And still today, even after the exonerations, Florida’s governor, attorney general, and the state’s attorney for Brevard County (where Preston mostly testified) refuse to open an investigation to see if any other convictions may have been tainted by his testimony.
Is this crap contagious? If so then did Mississippi catch it from Florida or the opposite?
I blame this kind of second guessing on the appeals process. Scrap the appeals process and these exonerations would cease and the accuracy rate of the justice system would be considered perfect.
Problem solved.
A canine Clever Hans
Like the owner of the famous horse, Preston may actually have believed in his dog’s abilities.
There is no fool more dangerous than a self-deluded fool with power – in this case, the literal power to send people to jail
the infuriating piece is that the state is aware that they have known bad (ludicrous) evidence, but then put the burden of proof on the convicted rather than double checking their own questionable work.
Only good thing I can think of to say….
He’s dead, Jim. :)
Still, if he was alive he would still believe that he was correct in EVERY case. Pretty easy to claim 100% accuracy when you never admit an error even with the facts staring you in the face.
I wonder how many people today will have their 4th Amendment tossed aside because a dog was said to detect something by a jack booted, clown suited, gansta in blue lying his ass off.
Seems like training a dog to act like EVERYBODY’S stuff has drugs or explosives in it would be a fantastic method of subverting the 4th amendment.
There was a case where Sandra Anderson actually planted evidence so her cadaver-sniffing dog would get results.
I remember watching an episode of Forensic Files positively profiling her work. A couple of years later, CourtTV was exposing her as a fraud. It was one of the rare cases where a cop was the one who initially reported the fraud.
Just another example of the best justice system in the world.
Cause, you know, the provision of law and order could never be managed privately.
Attention law enforcement officials and prosecutors.
Through rare scientific and pseudoscientific procedures, I have created a powerful magic rock which will determine guilt or innocence.
Simply place my Justice Stone in the hand of the alleged perpetrator and ask them if the stone feels heavy.
If the stone feels heavy, it is the weight of their conscious giving the rock mass. They are guilty.
If the stone does not feel heavy, they are obviously liars and are likely lying about not doing whatever it is you think they did. They are also guilty.
If they refuse to answer, they are non-cooperative and may be tazed until they answer.
I am willing to sell these rocks to your department for the low, low cost of $100,000 per unit.
Act now!
I took a boat the Cayman Islands once and one of the deckhands was smoking a joint when customs pulls up with a drug sniffing dog. Neither the dog nor the customs people noticed the strong smell of marijuana but got on the boat and then the dog promptly got seasick and threw up on the back deck. Never had whole lot of faith in drug sniffing dogs after that.
Yet another reason to abolish the use of dogs in law enforcement. To use them as an investigative tool is inviting corruption and are of little actual utility other than for giving dubious pretext for further snooping. To use them in their attack capacity smacks of Nazi Germany, goose stepping East German border guards and Bull Conner and isn’t something that a Republic of Free Men should tolerate.
Other than the marginal and limited utility of bloodhounds for tracking escaped convicts and such police should be prohibited from using them in any capacity.
Comrade Dread
You missed the part about “If the stone gets damp from sweat, there is probable cause for a full search of the suspect’s body/car/house.”
I live in Brevard County and am amazed at the lack of any kind of response. Everyone here knows everything is corrupt and the only thing that can be done is to try and not get caught it it.
Well, there was one editorial in the Florida Today newspaper
.
On and Michael Vick did what?
Where has he been for the last two years?
What the phuk is wrong with our country? Really, can we make an attempt to pinpoint such and remove it?
JS: I’m not rootin’ for police dogs or anything, but your story sums up as ‘I once encountered a seasick police dog on the high seas and it didn’t do a very good job, and that leads me to believe that police dogs suck generally’
How well do you perform when you’re ‘throwing-up sick’? How’s your sense of smell when you’re just vomitted?
#18
Well, for me I don’t have any problems with sea-sickness, thus I would be a good choice to serve in a job that had me spending lots of time on boats.
Well, I was born and raised in Kansas, and I’ve never lived any closer to the ocean than I was when I lived in Atlanta, so I couldn’t tell you whether or not I get seasick. I understand that most people (and animals) can get accustomed to the motion of watercraft eventually.
That said, perhaps JS has some info he’s not sharing about how long this particular dog had been serving on boats, but I doubt it. Maybe one of the customs agents said “Seems like that dog is never going to get over these continuous bouts of seasickness” or maybe ’seasick’ is just JS’s personal diagnosis of the dog’s problem. Neither you nor I have any such info yet, because JS didn’t elaborate. It’s still illogical to reach the conclusion that JS reached given the story he told.
http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/SE/20090711/NEWS/907110333
“Allen County Sheriff Ken Fries recalls a traffic stop years ago that plays a big part in all his K-9 graduation ceremony addresses, in which he always says an officer will never have a better partner than a K-9.
“Fries had pulled up behind a broken-down vehicle believed to have been stolen, and the suspect immediately began walking away from the car. As Fries got out of his cruiser, his K-9 partner, still inside the car, barked. The man froze, and Fries promptly placed him into custody.
“’I asked him, ‘So why didn’t you run?’ Fries said. ‘He said, ‘I heard that dog barking.’
“‘Just having the presence of the dog barking in the car changes people attitudes.’
“The intimidation factor, along with a nose that is reportedly thousands of times more sensitive than a human’s, can turn a suspicious traffic stop into a search with probable cause and a drug bust.”
…
“So far in 2009, state K-9s have located over 712 pounds of marijuana and 49 pounds of cocaine. They’ve been involved in 696 arrests and helped seize $697,815.
“Indiana’s state K-9s are successful 35 percent of the time, well over the national average of 7 percent to 15 percent.
“Local statistics were not available. But because trainer Bob Compton handles K-9 training for much of the state as well as the region, similar figures are possible.”
…
Intimidation and a possible 35% “success” rate (given the lack of context and the admitted guessing, I don’t think this number even means anything). Awesome.
MattJ #18 We were not at sea we were tied to the dock. It was actually hilarious. The poor dog didn’t want to be on that boat and was scared to death. I was glad when the customs people finally saw how ridiculous this was getting and put him back on the dock.