“Combat fishing.” Homer, Alaska.

Some new developments in the story of Eric Williamson, the Virginia man arrested after a neighbor spotted him nude in his own home yesterday morning.

The woman who called the police says the time of the incident was 8:40 am, not 5:30 am as Williamson says. She also says Williamson was first standing in an open doorway, then moved in front of a window, still in her view. Given that she was apparently on his property (that part of the story hasn’t yet been disputed), and he was in his home the entire time, I’m not sure his exact position in his own home matters, unless he was otherwise in plain view of someone using the public sidewalk. Even then, it seems more like tacky behavior than behavior that should be criminal. And you’d think the guy would get a warning before you arrest him for nudity in his own house.

Williamson told Fox News today (auto video play and browser resize warning) that after the report, 5-6 police officers came into his home unannounced, entered his bedroom, and arrested him.

The guy does seem strange. A roommate says he was acting oddly, walking around all morning wearing nothing but a construction hat. But again, strange behavior needn’t be a crime punishable by a year in jail (if the roommate had reported unwanted nudity, that might be a different matter). Seems like a sensible policy would be that once you walk into someone’s yard and look inside their home, you can’t claim to be victimized by what you might see.

I’m sure more will come out in the coming days. In the meantime, enjoy the weird “random naked torso” graphic D.C.’s NBC affiliiate chose to run with the story.

Let’s get this part out of the way, first: I loathe the BCS. I don’t have a favorite college football team (my alma mater, Indiana University), is rarely competitive. So I always end up rooting for the clusterfuckiest of possible outcomes. In my idea scenario, at the end of the year the top 15 teams would all be 10-2.

Wait. That’s not true. My ideal scenario would be for some billionaire (Mark Cuban?) to pay the top four teams some obscene amount of money to have a playoff after the conclusion of all the BCS games, thus undermining the legitimacy of it all.

Also, “BCS Championship” is redundant.

All of that said, Orin Hatch is an idiot.

Springfield, Virginia resident Eric Williamson was arrested and charged with indecent exposure yesterday for failing to put on any clothes after getting up at 5:30 am to make some coffee. A woman and her 7-year-old daughter had cut across Williamson’s front yard and saw him through his kitchen window.

If convicted, Williamson could be fined $2,000 and spend a year in jail.

Fairfax police say Williamson wanted to be seen naked. Which I guess means Williamson’s front yard is a pretty popular spot at 5:30 in the morning.

Jonathan Turley’s op-ed ed in USA Today casts some deserved scorn on the Obama administration for helping push through a UN resolution that lends support to theocratic governments who punish people for criticizing religion.

While attracting surprisingly little attention, the Obama administration supported the effort of largely Muslim nations in the U.N. Human Rights Council to recognize exceptions to free speech for any “negative racial and religious stereotyping.”…

The Egyptian ambassador to the U.N., Hisham Badr, wasted no time in heralding the new consensus with the U.S. that “freedom of expression has been sometimes misused” and showing that the “true nature of this right” must yield government limitations. His U.S. counterpart, Douglas Griffiths, heralded “this joint project with Egypt” and supported the resolution to achieve “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” While not expressly endorsing blasphemy prosecutions, the administration departed from other Western allies in supporting efforts to balance free speech against the protecting of religious groups. Thinly disguised blasphemy laws are often defended as necessary to protect the ideals of tolerance and pluralism. They ignore the fact that the laws achieve tolerance through the ultimate act of intolerance: criminalizing the ability of some individuals to denounce sacred or sensitive values. We do not need free speech to protect popular thoughts or popular people. It is designed to protect those who challenge the majority and its institutions. Criticism of religion is the very measure of the guarantee of free speech — the literal sacred institution of society.

Turley then ticks off a litany of recent blasphemy prosecutions the resolution would ostensibly support, including a British teen charged for insulting Scientology, an Italian comedian prosecuted for insulting the Pope, and prosecutions in Austria, India, and Finland for calling Mohammed a pedophile. As Turley explains, the UN resolution is only symbolic. But the Obama administration deserves condemnation for aligning itself with religious sensitivity and religious extremists over free expression.

Chicago.

So you’re a prosecutor in a county that has seen well more than its fair share of wrongful convictions over the years, including in several capital cases. Many of those innocence cases were uncovered by a journalism class at a nearby university. That class has just uncovered yet another possible wrongful conviction. What do you do?

If you’re Cook County, Illinois State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, you start harrassing the journalism students.

After spending three years investigating the conviction of a Harvey man accused of killing a security guard with a shotgun blast in 1978, journalism students at Northwestern University say they have uncovered new evidence that proves his innocence.

Their efforts helped win a new day in court for Anthony McKinney, who has spent 31 years in prison for the slaying. But as they prepare for that crucial hearing, prosecutors seem to have focused on the students and teacher who led the investigation for the school’s internationally acclaimed Medill Innocence Project.

The Cook County state’s attorney subpoenaed the students’ grades, notes and recordings of witness interviews, the class syllabus and even e-mails they sent to each other and to professor David Protess of the university’s Medill School of Journalism.

Alvarez says she needs to know the students’ grades and snoop in their email in order to assess the credibility of the witnesses the students interviewed as part of their investigation. Her chief of staff defended the action by arguing Alvarez’s office needs to know if the students are biased in their work.

Given the number of wrongful convictions in Cook County over the years, Alvarez should probably be more concerned about policing bias among the county’s prosecutors.

Bariloche, Argentina.

A conversation, after my appearance last night on a local D.C. TV television station talking about Obama’s new policy on medical marijuana.

Me: Holding a parking garage ticket, after the live interview. I’m speaking to a security guard.

Can you validate me?

Security Guard: Pauses. Reflects.

….You did pretty good.

Me: Huh?

Could you . . .

Oh. Wait. I see what you did there.

Well played.

Security Guard: Thanks.

Me: So how often do you use that joke?

Security Guard: Couple times a week.

Me: It’s the lack of enthusiasm really sells it. Not, “Great!” or “Terrific!” Just a droll “pretty good.”

Security Guard: Or maybe you really were only “pretty good.”

Me: Damn.

Security Guard: You can turn your cell phone back on, now.

Me: Thanks.

As it turns out, they don’t validate parking tickets. Which kind of sucks. Eleven bucks!

I’ll be discussing Obama’s new medical marijuana policy on the program Federal News Tonight on Washington, D.C.’s News Channel 8.  The show starts at 7:30 pm ET.

In my column on the police crackdown at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, I noted that one video circulating around the Internet showed a police unit of about 20 officers decked out in paramilitary garb parading around what appears to be a handcuffed protester. The kid is then propped up in front of the cops, who then pose with him while another cop snaps a photo.

We now know the police unit was from Chicago. They’d taken vacation time to provide freelance security, paid for by the city of Pittsburgh. The protester is Kyle Kramer, who was charged with failure to disperse and disorderly conduct, although he says he has yet to be formally notified of the charges. Like many of those arrested, Kramer appears to have been observing, not rioting. Excerpts from his interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Shortly after being arrested at the intersection of Fifth and Tennyson avenues around 11:20 p.m. on Sept. 25, Mr. Kramer, an English and writing major who hopes to become a journalist one day, was asked by one officer what he was majoring in.

When he told them, he said “They laughed and someone joked, ‘We’re going to give you plenty to write about tonight.’”…

“Things were happening so fast, and I didn’t know how I was going to be treated. The atmosphere was edgy, ominous, a little spooky and pretty interesting.”

There was a “weird rapport” between him and his arresting officer, “a big dude. He was kind of up and down, angry and then friendly.” When the officer told him to pose for the photo, he said, “I kind of gave him a little bit of an argument, but I told him I would be in the picture. It’s kind of hard to say how they would have reacted if I had said no.” Indeed, he said, “the only time I was really mad was when I was made to kneel like that. That made me mad. It was kind of a natural response, I guess.” At one point, he found himself discussing Chicago jazz clubs with the officer. “I figured if you can have some friendly conversation it’s a lot less likely you’ll be charged with anything extra,” although when he asked for the police officers’ names, he said, they laughed.

Pittsburgh Police Chief Nate Harper said he had no intention of looking into the video, explaining he had “more important things” to investigate. He added that the photo could merely have been “the Chicago PD’s way of documenting the fact that they effected this arrest.”

Chicago Police Chief Jody Weiss appears more concerned. Last week, he announced that his department’s internal affairs division would investigate the incident.

My crime column this week looks at Gallup polling data showing that 3 in 4 Americans actually believe violent crime is increasing (it’s been in decline for 20 years), and how our fear of crime has, oddly enough, created a society where we’re all potential criminals.

Hollywood.

Over at Hit & Run, I have an update on the latest in the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, a possibly innocent man put to death by the state of Texas in 2004.

The story’s getting even weirder.

Nina Simone’s “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl.”

Philadelphia.

Um. Holy crap.

What year is this?

My compliments to my colleagues on this one. The contrast between union protesters and Whole Foods employees is beautiful.