Tiny victories:

Police in San Carlos who heard that a man had been in a minor traffic accident and may have been drinking can’t justify charging into his home with guns drawn by claiming they feared he was in a diabetic coma, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

Ya’ think?

(Thanks to longtime reader Angie for the link.)

Matthew Yglesias wants to make menu labeling mandatory at all restaurants, not just chains. Conor Freidersdorf explains how that will benefit big restaurant chains, and kill variety and innovation at one-off shops and mom-n-pop spots.

This is the same lesson Yglesias and Ezra Klein failed to learn from Walmart signing on to the employer health care mandate. The behemoth companies love regulation, because the compliance costs tend to kill off upstarts and smaller competitors.

It’s only a matter of time before we’re going to see one or more big restaurant chains join the menu labeling crusade. In fact, I’m surprised we haven’t seen it already. It makes good business sense. A federal law seems inevitable now. Jump on board early, and you’ll have a say in how the regulations are written–specifically, exactly who will be required to abide by it.

It’s amusing how the people who so eagerly embrace heavy-handed regulation tend to be the same people who decry the Gap-ification of America. They don’t seem to realize the connection between the two.

A few people have asked about ordering photos.

Basically, just drop me an email if you’re interested in one. I’ll charge twice what it costs me to print and frame it. I guess if you’re interested, I can also send you a print minus the frame. Same deal–twice my costs.

Older photos may not be as enlargeable as newer ones. I got my big boy camera about a year ago, so older photos won’t have as high a resolution. But if a photo catches your eye, just send me an email and I’ll let you know the details.

One of the dirty little secrets in politics is just how terribly labor activist groups treat their own labor. The latest example, reported by The Daily Beast, is Ralph Nader’s Fund for the Public Interest. Nader’s groups have been guilty of this for years.

Several years ago, I ran a short-lived blog to catalog the silliness of Morgan Spurlock. One of those posts looked at how everybody’s favorite lefty whipping boy ACORN actually went to court in California to exempt itself from the minimum wage. What’s particularly amusing is that to make their point, they actually used free market arguments against the minimum wage. Oh, and they were doing all of this so they could employ more workers to campaign in cities across the state for a proposal to higher, city-wide minimum wages.

A pretty awesome exercise in cognitive dissonance.

My crime column on Monday will look at just how little criminal justice factored into the Sotomayor hearings.

For today, criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield has a really terrific post about the unsettling prospect of Sotomayor as the Supreme Court’s “voice of experience” on criminal justice issues.

Mountain obscured by clouds in Alaska.

A few weks ago, I posted on the Supreme Court’s decision in the Melendez-Diaz case, in which the Court found that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause gives criminal defendants the right to cross examine forensic experts who issue lab reports that the state admits into evidence.

The Washington Post reports this week that the decision will have broad-reaching rammifications:

The predictions are dire. In New York, murderers could walk free. In Fairfax County, drunken driving cases could be dismissed. And nationwide, thousands of drug cases might have to be thrown out of court annually.

Legal experts and prosecutors are concerned about the results of last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that requires lab analysts to be in court to testify about their tests. Lab sheets that identify a substance as a narcotic or breath-test printouts describing a suspect’s blood-alcohol level are no longer sufficient evidence, the court ruled. A person must be in court to talk about the test results…

Crime labs that test drug and DNA samples face huge backlogs even when scientists and analysts do not have to testify. If the workers are taken out of the labs to appear in court, those backlogs will grow.

In drug cases, more than 1.5 million samples are analyzed by state and local labs each year, resulting in more than 350,000 felony convictions, national statistics show. “Even if only 5 percent of drug cases culminate in trials, the burden on the states is oppressive,” a group of state attorneys general wrote in a brief for the case.

The percentage of cases going to trial could well go up if defense lawyers think that bringing lab analysts to court will help their cases. Lawyers also could go to trial with the hope of a dismissal if the analyst cannot be there.

Note that the objections here are logistical, not legal. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s sharply-worded dissent in the case took a similar line, arguing that the decision “threatens to disrupt forensic investigations across the country and to put prosecutions nationwide at risk of dismissal . . . when a particular laboratory technician . . . simply does not or cannot appear.”

These objections seem awfully utilitarian. We’re supposed to ignore a fundamental component of a fair trial that’s explicitly protected in the Constitution—the right to confront one’s accusers—because doing so would prove inconvenient to the state? (Note too that the main reason for the backlog at state crime labs is the drug war.)

Just given my own reporting on forensics over the last few years, I find it mind-boggling that there are people who feel a court should be able to deny a defendant the opportunity to cross-examine, for example, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy in a murder case, or the lab technician who claims to have made a fingerprint match.

Unfortunately, the decision my already be in peril. Before its most recent recess, the Court agreed to hear Briscoe, et al., v. Virginia (PDF) a case that raises many of the same issues as Melendez-Diaz. Justice Souter voted with the unconventional majority in the 5-4 decision. His likely replacement, Sonia Sotomayor, is a former prosecutor whose record suggests she’ll be quite a bit more law-and-order than Souter. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog speculates that the minority in Melendez-Diaz may have agreed to hear the Virginia case knowing that they’d have an ally in Sotomayor, suggesting a limitation or even reversal of the decision.

Suprisingly, the case did come up yesterday while Sotomayor was questioned by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), also a former prosecutor. Klobuchar was critical of Melendez-Diaz, and invited Sotomayor to respond. Not surprisingly, Sotomayor’s response was vague:

It’s always difficult to deal with people’s disappointments about cases, particularly when they have personal experiences and have their own sense of the impact of a case.

I was a former prosecutor. And it’s difficult proving cases as it is. Calling more witnesses adds some burdens to the process.

But, at the end, that case is a decided case. And so its holding now is its holding, and that’s what guides the court in the future on similar issues to the extent there can be some.

As I said, I do recognize that there can be problems, as a former prosecutor, but that also can’t compel a result. And all of those issues have to be looked at in the context of the court’s evaluation of the case and the judge’s view of what the law permits and doesn’t permit.

The American Spectator‘s John Tabin suggests Sotomayor’s answer hints that she would not use the Virginia case to overturn Melendez-Diaz. I agree, although I don’t think an outright reversal was in the cards in the first place. A reversal of a decision issued in the preceding term would be unseemly. The more likley possibility is that the Virginia case will limit the scope of Melendez-Diaz. Given how far apart the majority and minority were in the case, and that without Souter the Court stands 4-4 on this issue, the severity of that limitation may be entirely up to Sotomayor.

Business district, San Francisco.

In his introductory comments at Monday’s hearing on prospective Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotamayor, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) boasted that over the course of her career, the nominee “ruled for the government in 83% of immigration cases, in 92% of criminal cases.” This apparently is a plus.

The anti-drug prohibition blog Aid and Comfort points out that in addition to Vice President Biden’s promise to several law enforcement organizations last month that Sotomayor has “got your back,” her confirmation has also been endorsed by law enforcement groups like the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the National Sheriff’s Association, the National Association of Police Organizations, the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Association of District Attorneys.

Yesterday’s hearing didn’t delve too much into criminal justice issues, but where it did, it consisted of Democrats like Schumer going out of their way to tout Sotomayor’s pro-state, anti-defense credentials, and Sotomayor applying Obama’s “empathy” standard not to the rights of the accused but to victims of crime. This isn’t to say that crime victims don’t deserve empathy, of course. But the Supreme Court rarely has occasion to rule on issues related to the victims of crime. It rules on how far to extend the constitutional protections of those accused of committing crimes. Putting the focus on victims instead of the civil rights of criminal defendants is a popular tactic among the law and order crowd. Which is to say that Sotomayor knew exactly what message she was sending.

Mother Jones correspondent Stephanie Mencimer’s summary of the hearings thus far is a bit over the top, but not by much:

Republicans would accuse Sotomayor of being a soft-hearted minority, and she would parry with examples from her 17-year judicial career where she’d been as mean or meaner than any white guy on the bench.

I think it’s safe to say that on criminal justice issues, Sotomayor has given a pretty strong indication that she’ll be quite a bit more conservative than the justice she’s replacing (though that opinion isn’t unanimous). Even if that it isn’t the case, she at least realizes that projecting that image will only benefit her in the confirmation process.

All of which says quite a bit about the lack of real national debate on criminal justice issues. Given the flaws in the criminal justice system revealed by DNA testing in recent years, it’s unfortunate that liberal interest groups have mostly fallen in line, and avoided raising questions about Sotomayor’s record on these issues. The Democrats’ party leadership and judiciary committee members aren’t interested in defending the idea of protecting the rights of the accused so much as showing that their president’s nominee (a former prosecutor, we’ve been repeatedly reminded) will be just as “tough on crime” as any Republican appointee.

If you missed the live stream, you can now watch archived video of the oral arguments for Cory Maye’s hearing before the Mississippi Court of Appeals last month.

Check it out here.

The NY Times on last night’s All-Star Game:

The NL scored all its runs in the second inning, and 22 of its last 24 batters made out.

Rio Hotel, Las Vegas.

This will be it for the blogging today. Feeling a little under the weather.

Familia Zuccardi Windery. Mendoza, Argentina.

That’s the topic of my crime column this week over at Reason.

Philadelphia.

Just wanted to post a note of thanks for the tip jar contributions, monthly subscriptions, and wish list gifts over the last few weeks.

I do appreciate it.

More pics of Daisy, my new pup.

Harper is slowly warming up to her—probably 60 percent annoyed, and 40 percent happy to have a playmate around again. I’m determined to make Daisy a Frisbee dog, so she tried out her first Frisbee at a neighborhood cookout yesterday. First step: Figuring out how to pick it up when it’s lip-side down. She found this quite frustrating. Everyone at the cookout found it ridiculously entertaining.

Lovely how the government tells us how it’s been misbehaving at a time when the fewest number of people are likely to be paying attention.

First, there’s this:

The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they’re still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to “unprecedented collection activities” by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks…

They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.

Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the “President’s Surveillance Program” did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the “mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile.”…

The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was “read into” — allowed access to — the classified program…

The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.

The report says Yoo’s analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government’s authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo’s memos later presented “a serious impediment” to recertifying the program.

Yoo insisted that the president’s wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.

Seems to me that there are only one of two conclusions one can draw about Yoo in all of this. Either he was corrupt and was criminally inventing bogus legal excuses for law-breaking, or he genuinely believes what he wrote, in which case he’s essentially incompetent. At the very least, both scenarios argue in favor of him no longer being permitted to practice law.

And then there’s this, also released on Friday:

The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday…

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

So what was the function of this secret program? The NY Times doesn’t speculate. But the Washington Times Eli Lake got a tip:

The exact nature of the program remains a mystery. This official hinted that the secret program involved assassinations overseas but declined to provide further details.

Assassinations. Huh. So maybe Sy Hersh was right?

Maybe another celebrity will die tomorrow so cable news won’t have to get into all of this.

Following up on my story about El Paso’s large immigrant population and low rate of violent crime, the Immigration Policy Center points to a study I missed by the America’s Majority Foundation. The study looks at overall social indicators in states with high immigration rates versus the rest of the country during the immigration boom between 1999-2006. On the subject of crime, the study finds….

• While the overall crime rate in the U.S. dropped 10.9 percent, the crime rate in the 19 states that saw the largest influx of immigrants dropped 13.6 percent.

• In 1999, the 19 states that would settle the largest number of immigrants over the next seven years had a crime rate higher than the national average. By 2006, their crime rate was lower.

• Violent crime in the 19 high-immigration states dropped 15.0 percent over seven-year period. Violent crime in the other 32 states (the study included D.C.) dropped just 1.2 percent.

The authors are careful to explain that lots of variables contribute to a state’s crime rate, and they warn that one should not conclude from their study alone that immigration reduces crime. But it does present a pretty strong refutation of the argument that immigrants are creating more crime in the states where they settle.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Bud Kennedy also kindly mentioned my article today, and added an interesting statistic of his own: “Illegal immigrants generated an extra $17.7 billion in the Texas economy when the state comptroller checked in 2006. That was after subtracting the cost of emergency healthcare and their American-born children’s education.”