I did an interview for Cato’s daily podcast today on how video technology is helping to hold the police more accountable. You can have a listen below.

Earlier today, I posted about Josh Wexler, the New Orleans pianist and Agitator reader who stood up to a bullying cop last January. Wexler posted an updated in the comments section that’s worth its own post:

After the incident, my attorney and I wrote a letter to the DA, Leon Cannizaro, asking him to investigate the matter. His office wrote back declining to investigate, saying the matter would more appropriately be handled by the Public Integrity Bureau (which investigates police misconduct, but is run by the NOPD, not an independent commission).

I was strongly dissuaded from filing a complaint with the PIB by my attorney, Sam Dalton. Sam, who is the most experienced civil rights lawyer in Louisiana, told me that there was no way the PIB would discipline the officer and that they often treated complainants very shabbily.

However, Rich Webster of City Business Journal wrote the above article which led to the PIB very politely taking my complaint. I was told that the investigation would take up to a month to complete. In the intervening time, my seat belt ticket was thrown out before trial (the ADA issued a “nole prosequi”). But, after a month I did not receive the promised report on the outcome of the investigation.

I spent several days on the phone, getting the run around from various PIB and NOPD members. However, at one point I got to speak with the officer who actually performed the investigation. He told me that the cop (Torres) told a different story than mine and that his recommendation was to find the complaint “false” (or some thing equivalent to “false”- he could have recommended a finding of “unsupported” which would have meant there just wasn’t enough evidence to find the claim “supported). The investigator also told me that if he were the officer in question, he might well have arrested me for interfering with investigation/arrest of the pedestrian (I want to say here that I never got closer than 7 or 8 ft from the officer when he was holding the pedestrian).

I still haven’t received a report on the final PIB police findings, so I don’t know what the final outcome was. I think it’s safe to assume that—if they bothered to finish processing it at all—they dismissed the complaint.

Thanks to Mr. Balko for the thoughtful post and to the commentators for the overwhelming support here. And, thanks for the many nice comments about my testicles. However, it really wasn’t as “ballsy” as you might think. It happened in broad daylight with plenty of potential witnesses around. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have gotten out of my car. And when the cop started threatening me, I shut up and handed over my license and registration instead of risking going to jail (and worse) with any further provocation.

I have added the Qik application to my phone, after Balko alluded to it in a recent post. I wish I had it that day to make a record of the officer’s misconduct. Hopefully, apps like Qik will allow folks to better protect themselves and others from police abuse in the future.

If your cell phone takes video, Qik is a great ap to have handy.

In the late 1990s, Harris County, Texas, medical examiner Patricia Moore was repeatedly reprimanded by her superiors for pro-prosecution bias. Yet she was still able to keep her position doing official autopsies for the county until 2002. In 2004, a statistical analysis showed Moore diagnosed shaken baby syndrome (already a controversial diagnosis) in infant deaths at a rate several times higher than the national average. Roger Koppl and I noted her case in recommending statistical analysis as one way of checking the integrity of state forensic specialists.

One woman convicted of killing her own child because of Moore’s testimony was freed in 2005 after serving six years in prison. Another woman was cleared in 2004 after being accused because of Moore’s autopsy results. In 2001, babysitter Trenda Kemmerer was sentenced to 55 years in prison after being convicted of shaking a baby to death based largely on Moore’s testimony. The prosecutor in that case told the Houston Chronicle in 2004 that she had “no concerns” about Moore’s work. Even though Moore’s diagnosis in that case has since been revised to “undetermined,” and Moore was again reprimanded for her lack of objectivity in the case, Kemmerer remains in prison.

Now another innocence claim has been filed in a case where Moore diagnosed shaken baby syndrome. According to the Chronicle, the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office has “quietly rewritten” the results of a 1998 autopsy performed by Moore that was used to convict a nurse of killing a child in her care. The revision downgraded Moore’s homicide conclusion to an “undetermined” cause of death. So far, the prosecutors in that case are standing by their conviction.

According to the Chronicle, Moore today works for a private firm that performs official autopsies for six Texas counties.

I’ve been waiting to link to this great piece by my colleague Jesse Walker since I proofed it a couple of months ago. Here’s his conclusion:

Eliminationist rhetoric may flower in some of the fringes, but the violence that sometimes follows is usually petty stuff. The most formidable eliminationists have always been in the American center, not on the margins. They aim to preserve or extend the existing social order, not to subvert it. And they have the most guns.

The eradication of the Indians would have been impossible without the support of the federal government. When the second Ku Klux Klan was at its most powerful, in the early 1920s, it controlled the governments of Colorado, Indiana, and Oregon. In the South, lynch mobs and night riders served as a sort of para-state: A man who wore a policeman’s badge by day could don a Klansman’s hood by night. In the 1960s it was possible for urban cops to engage in extralegal violence in one moment and to call for “law and order” in the next. You could view that as a contradiction. Or you could view it as an especially ugly idea of what law entails.

It’s comforting to imagine that violence and paranoia belong only to the far left and right, and that we can protect ourselves from their effects by quarantining the extremists and vigilantly expelling anyone who seems to be bringing their ideas into the mainstream. But the center has its own varieties of violence and paranoia. And it’s far more dangerous than anyone on the fringe, even the armed fringe, will ever be.

That’s true whether it’s today’s leftists calling out anti-government sentiment on the right, or the pro-Bush crowd attempting to marginalize anti-war protesters on the left back in 2003. The people with the guns and the monopoly on force will always be exponentially more dangerous than the fringe protesters, no matter what their aspirations. Timothy McVeigh was the exception. The total body count isn’t even close.

Jesse’s entire piece is well worth a read.

Agitator reader Josh Wexler sends along this story about, well, Josh Wexler.

Josh Wexler, a 30-year-old piano player, said he saw a New Orleans police officer run a stop sign and strike a pedestrian with his car in the French Quarter at 12:45 p.m. Jan. 29.

When the pedestrian raised his hands as if to say, “What are you doing?” the officer rushed out of his vehicle and “angrily” grabbed the startled man, Wexler said.

The officer in question, William Torres, reportedly forced the pedestrian to place his hands on the hood of his squad car and reached for his handcuffs as if to arrest him.

Wexler, who was driving behind the police officer, decided to intervene.

He got out of his vehicle and told the officer he saw him run the stop sign and hit the pedestrian. Wexler told Torres he had no right to arrest the man.

At this point, Torres reportedly allowed the pedestrian to go free, directed his attention to Wexler and asked, “Do you want a ticket?”

“A ticket for what?” Wexler said. “I didn’t do anything.”

“It’s a simple question. Yes or no. Do you want a ticket?” Torres reportedly responded.

Wexler said he told the officer he had nothing more to say and walked back to his car where he wrote down Torres’ name and badge number.

Torres followed him.

“You want to write down my name? I’ll show you I can write too. Give me your license, insurance, and registration. I know who to harass,” Torres reportedly said.

Wexler provided Torres with the information but refused to answer further questions.

“If you don’t answer my questions, you are going to jail,” Torres reportedly threatened.

Eventually, Torres wrote Wexler a ticket for failure to wear a seat belt and left the scene.

A woman who works in the area at the time of the incident verified Wexler’s account to CityBusiness but refused to provide her name for fear of police retaliation.

Wexler has since filed a complaint and sent an accompanying letter to the DA’s office.

Good on him. Took some guts.

Pittsburgh.

That’s the headline to this A.P. article highlighting a new, what-could-possibly-go-wrong tactic police are using in Texas and Idaho.

When police officer Darryll Dowell is on patrol in the southwestern Idaho city of Nampa, he’ll pull up at a stoplight and usually start casing the vehicle. Nowadays, his eyes will also focus on the driver’s arms, as he tries to search for a plump, bouncy vein.

“I was looking at people’s arms and hands, thinking, ‘I could draw from that,’” Dowell said.

It’s all part of training he and a select cadre of officers in Idaho and Texas have received in recent months to draw blood from those suspected of drunken or drugged driving. The federal program’s aim is to determine if blood draws by cops can be an effective tool against drunk drivers and aid in their prosecution.

If the results seem promising after a year or two, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will encourage police nationwide to undergo similar training.

This is all perfectly legal, by the way, courtesy of a 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision. I guess it’s surprising it’s taken this long for it to be implemented on a broader scale.

My crime column this week looks at a hunting accident in Vermont in which a father was charged with a felony after shooting and killing his son by mistake. The case shows how public choice theory may prod prosecutors to seek criminal charges even in cases when doing so serves no real purpose.

The three members of the Motorhome Diaries crew who were arrested a few months ago in Jones County, Mississippi recently had their first court appearance. Tom Schornhorst, a Fourth Amendment expert and professor emeritus at the Indiana University School of Law is representing them pro bono, and has an interesting write-up of what happened. In short, the case against them looks pretty thin.

Here’s a bit of an odd coincidence: Schornhorst found out about the case via my personal blog, The Agitator. One of the other lawyers helping out with their case is former Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Dale Danks. Danks also happens to be the private attorney of embattled Mississippi medical examiner Steven Hayne.

Reason.tv interviewed the Motorhome Diaries guys twice, once before they began their cross-country trek, and again about midway through their adventures.

New Orleans.

Norman Borlaug has died.

He justly lived a long life. But his death won’t get a thousandth of the coverage, say, Michael Jackson’s did. And it won’t get a tenth of the coverage someone like Paul Ehrlich’s will.

All Borlaug did was invent modern high-yield agriculture, then teach it to the world. He likely saved a billion people from starving to death in India and Pakistan alone.

He was a great man. If one way of measuring a life is by the number of other lives a man saved or bettered, Borlaug was certainly one of the greatest human beings who ever lived.

Rest in peace.

There are so many things wrong with this story, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Woods was arrested in 2006 on child molestation charges, his case put off nine times ultimately never making it to trial. Eventually, attorney Jennifer Hinkebein Culotta got the case last year, visited Woods in the Clark County jail and she had a lot of questions about the allegations.

“They alleged somebody had placed a 4-foot long weed-eater wire into the penis of a child,” said Culotta, of Culotta and Cullota LLP in Jeffersonville, Indiana…

Woods spent two years in jail before he met with a single defense attorney.

“I just thought medically that cannot be physically possible that a weed-eater wire that’s not sterilized would stay in a body eight years without any possible medical repercussions,” Culotta said of reviewing the case.

After she petitioned for the child’s medical reports last year, Culotta discovered an important piece of evidence that occurred one year before Woods was arrested. “In the medical reports, one year prior there had been a CT scan of the pelvis and it’s apparent that there was no weed-eater wire there,” Culotta said of the findings.

The news was enough to get Woods out of jail just in time for last Christmas. Still the case isn’t over yet.

“In this situation we had police officers, prosecuting officers, we had the court system we had defense attorneys, if all those people are not actively investigating the case and working the case properly then you end up like we have with Donald Woods,” Culotta said. “An innocent person sitting in jail for two plus years.”

Woods is suing.

#6: Night Ranger’s karaoke standard, “Sister Christian.”

#5: Slaughter’s “Fly to the Angels,” the song Adam Lambert should have sung to win American Idol.

What Will Wilkinson said.

Awful story from Texas, where elderly couple Michael and Jean Kidd were made wards of the state of Texas, then held against their will while the state took over their finances.

In November Michael fell and broke his hip. He was taken to a Plano hospital and into surgery. After a few days, the hospital called the state Adult Protective Services to report Jean had been in the waiting room for days and wasn’t eating…

A judge determined the Kidds were incapacitated and unable to care for themselves. The state took over the Kidds lives, sent them to the Countryside Nursing Home in Pilot Point, and is now burning through their money to pay for their care.

The state refuses to give the Kidds an accounting of how it is spending their money, the reason apparently being that because they were deemed mentally deficient, they lack standing to even ask for financial records. The couple was given a court-appointed attorney (paid for from the Kidds’ savings), but he looks to have worked all of 10 hours on their case. According to neighbors, the state has since allowed the Kidds’ home deteriorate, and didn’t even bother to lock the doors after taking the couple into custody. The local Fox affiliate reported at the end of last month that state officials were also planning to sell the couple’s home at auction. Media coverage seems to have pressured a local judge to put off the sale, at least for now.

The same station reports that the judge has clarified an earlier order barring the Kidds from talking to anyone about their case, and allowing them access to their own medical records. But they’re still being kept in the nursing home, and still can’t access any record of how the state is spending their money.

Peabody Hotel, Memphis.

After years of zoning sex offenders out of just about every part of public life, activists are now alarmed that the offenders are “clustering” in the few areas they’re still legally permitted to exist.

“It is not where they aren’t living that is the problem, it is where they are,” says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “If you put these guys together it will lead to a higher incidence of sex abuse as they talk about this stuff. I see it as a dangerous trend.”

Maybe we should just shoot them.

Look, I have no sympathy for child rapists. Or regular rapists, for that matter. But this is insane. If you don’t want these people getting out of prison, change the sentencing laws. But don’t let them out, then zone them out of civilization to the point where they’re forced to  live under bridges, then complain that they’re congregating under bridges.

Morning in Bariloche, Argentina.

Lovely. According to the cameraman, they erased the video. I guess that means he used something like Qik to send and archive it off-site in real time. Technology’s grand. Also, if the reason they confiscated the video in the first place is that it was “evidence,” and they then destroyed the video, doesn’t that mean the police department destroyed evidence in a criminal investigation?

Jacob Sullum has an update on Assistant U.S. Attorney Tonya Treadway’s efforts to silence pain patient advocate Siobhan Reynolds.

Spoiler: The bad guys are winning.

In 2007, Shreveport police officer Wiley Willis arrested 38-year-old Angela Garbarino on suspicion of drunken driving. While in custody, as captured on the video below, Garbarino began arguing with Willis about what she said was her right to make a phone call. About a minute later, Willis walked over and turned off the video camera. When the camera returns back on, Garbarino was lying on the floor in a pool of her own blood. She was later photographed with severe facial injuries that looked to have come from a beating. Willis’ attorney stated that she tripped and fell while the camera was off. After the video went viral, Willis was fired, but never criminally charged.

Last month, the Shreveport Municipal Fire and Police Civil Service Board voted to reinstate Willis on the police force. He’ll get full back pay and benefits for the year-and-a-half he was fired. The reason? During the internal investigation of Willis, a polygraph machine operator failed to record the results of his Q&A with Willis. This apparently is a violation of Louisiana’s “Police Officer’s Bill of Rights,” a set of guidelines every department must follow when investigating officer misconduct.

Garbarino won a $400,000 settlement from the city of Shreveport last year.