Award-winning photojournalist gets arrested in West Virginia for photographing a mall Santa, then attempting to photograph a police officer who harassed him about it. An overly protective parent complained that his kid was included in one of the photos. Given that all of this transpired in a public space, photographing the Santa, the kids, and the cop are all perfectly legal, by the way.

Which is probably why the photographer was charged with battering the arresting officer and resisting arrest, not for taking the photos that caused the confrontation in the first place.

(Hat tip to the Injustice Everywhere Twitter feed.)

Friend of TheAgitator.com and libertarian newsman (in order of importance, of course) John Stossel’s new show on the Fox Business Channel premieres tonight at 8pm. Be sure to watch, or set your DVR accordingly.

Stossel was kind enough to do a live chat with you, Agitator readers, last June.

Yep. Trying to get my search engine referrals up. But my headline doesn’t lie!

This cracked me up:

My 7 year old son was on the computer last night, as I worked on dinner.  When he quit and went upstairs,  I jumped on to finish an article I had started earlier.  I clicked on my history and I see:

“Google search….Big Boobs”

He checked out a few pages. Then I see:

“Google search….Really Big Boobs”

I was a seven-year-old boy once. That progression totally makes sense. Click here to read about the subsequent Big Talk.

The good news is, the kid’s probably headed for a long, healthy life.

An Indianapolis attorney has filed a class action lawsuit against the city, claiming that traffic court judges are penalizing motorists who challenge traffic tickets by slapping them with additional fines ranging from $500 to $2,500. The fines are meant to discourage people who try to game the system by winning default judgments on legitimate tickets when the police officer who wrote it can’t make it into court. But it’s also a pretty strong incentive for people with legitimate complaints not to bother.

The fines are part of a broader campaign by the city to bring in more revenue from traffic fines, particularly parking tickets.

It’s gotten so surreal out in Arizona, I’m a little lost in the details. But as I understand it, here’s what’s happened since our last update:

That’s fun to type, if only to picture the faces of the people who I’m sure would find it wildly inappropriate.

Anyway, Kegs for Kids is actually a registered charity run by my friend Javad Khazaeli. It’s an annual fundraiser for the D.C. (and St. Louis) area Toys for Tots.

D.C. people, I’ll be at the Town Tavern this Saturday evening for this year’s event. For $25, you get all the beer you can drink, and you can justify your inebriation by knowing you’re getting schnookered for a good cause.

Come on out!

From Slate’s pretty clever list of magazine-themed restaurants:

Reason Restaurant
This no-frills spot encourages diners to bring their own food or buy meals off other patrons. If you do use the menu, take care not to order the same thing as your friend—the brusque waiters may dismiss you as a “second-hander.” The kitchen’s philosophy is appealing if ultimately incoherent, relying heavily on absinthe, hemp, and foie gras. Desserts are a specialty: Order one of the famous gingerbread houses “eminent-domain style” and a waiter dressed as Uncle Sam will whisk it away just as your children start to dig in. They’ll go home crying, but they’ll have learned a valuable lesson about tyranny. Smokers welcome.

I don’t think an Agitator.com restaurant would stay in business long. Most customers would lose their appetites after reading the depressing, sometimes infuriating menu. On the other hand, we’d serve lots of bacon. And bourbon. And bacon-infused bourbon. And health codes be damned, there would be a lovable dog sleeping under every table.

Jonathan Turley has the awful story of Sherry Sherret Robinson, a Canadian woman wrongly convicted in 1996 of killing her infant son due to the bogus testimony of a disgraced pathologist named Charles Smith. Robinson served a year in prison and was forced to give up custody of her other child.

Smith has since been exposed as a fraud. Robinson was finally exonerated this week by a court in Ontario. Her other son was given up to a foster family after her conviction, who has raised him for the last 13 years. She won’t get him back. She has asked only that he be told the truth about her.

Read Robinson’s blog here. Former Toronto Star reporter Harry Levy has been covering Charles Smith scandal on a blog devoted to Smith and other forensic nightmares.

Smith was a frequent witness in Canadian courts, commonly testifying for prosecutors in child death cases, where his testimony proved crucial in making homicides of deaths that could just as easily have been accidents. A disreputable pathologist can do incredible damage in these cases, since it’s usually his testimony that makes or breaks the case. Because the question isn’t who killed the child but whether the child was killed at all, there will never be DNA testing or new evidence to exonerate the suspect (of, for that matter, confirm his guilt). In U.S. courts at least, it’s extremely difficult to get a new trial without new evidence. Simply noting that an expert you had the opportunity to cross examine has since been shown to have given questionable testimony in other cases usually isn’t enough.

The big difference between the Charles Smith scandal and the Steven Hayne/Michael West forensic disaster I’ve been reporting on in Mississippi is that once questions arose about Smith’s competence, Ontario’s coroner launched an inquiry into Smith’s practices. That led to a wider inquiry ordered by Ontario’s government. The results of that inquiry are now being used to revisit cases where Smith’s testimony may have led to a wrongful conviction, like Robinson’s.

Mississippi state officials have ordered no such investigation. On the contrary, they’ve repeatedly insisted that any such inquiry isn’t necessary, and there’s no reason to question the prior work of the two doctors, despite their role in at least two wrongful convictions and the considerable and still accumulating evidence of their incompetence. The state did buckle to public pressure and finally fire Hayne last year, but as I reported earlier this year, now faces an effort by the state’s coroners, assisted by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, to bring him back. There are also two men currently on death row in Mississippi for murdering children in their care where, like Smith’s, Hayne’s testimony was critical to securing their convictions. In both cases, Hayne’s trial testimony has since been questioned by more reputable pathologists. Mississippi’s courts don’t seem to care. They’ve rejected appeals and post-conviction petitions from both men.

The integrity of the criminal justice system isn’t necessarily undermined by the fact that fraudulent experts and bad testimony occasionally creep into criminal trials. That’s going to happen. But when the courts and government learn of these problems and not only do nothing to address them, but actively engage in trying to cover them up, it’s time to start questioning the legitimacy of the entire system.

The civil liberties advocacy organization Flex Your Rights has a new video coming out next month called 10 Rules for Dealing with Police. Here’s a trailer:

My crime column this week looks at Mike Huckabee’s pardon of Maurice Clemmons, then jumps off into a broader discussion of the pardon and clemency power.

The gist: The most important use of these powers are as a check against possible injustices. Unfortunately they’re more commonly handed down as gifts used to show mercy, or to declare convicted criminals rehabilitated. What ought to be an important a check or balance on the judiciary has instead become a kind of God-like power to confer redemption.

The Obama administration is sponsoring a workshop on government transparency . . . that will be closed to the public.

Obama has approved startup money for a new office taking part in Monday’s closed conference, the Office of Government Information Services. It was created to resolve disputes involving people who ask for records and government agencies. But as evidenced by the open-records event behind closed doors, there is a long way to go.

“We’d like to know, when they’re training agencies, are they telling them the same thing they’re saying in public, that they’re committed to making the Freedom of Information Act work well and make sure that agencies are releasing information whenever possible while protecting important issues like individual privacy and national security,” said Rick Blum, coordinator of the Sunshine in Government Initiative, of which The Associated Press is a member.

The closed conference will provide tips for FOIA public liaisons on communicating and negotiating with people who make requests, and introduce the new Office of Government Information Services to them, said Melanie Ann Pustay, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information Policy, which takes the lead on government openness issues.

Pustay said she planned to say the same things at the private workshop that she would say publicly. She offered these reasons to explain why it was closed: She wanted government employees to be able to speak candidly, and the conference would be in an auditorium at the Commerce Department, where she said a government ID was required to be admitted. The AP and other news organizations routinely enter government buildings to cover the government.

Pustay said she is looking for ways to improve how the government responds to information requests, which costs roughly $400 million each year.

The director of the new Office of Government Information Services, Miriam Nisbet, said the event was closed to make sure there would be room for all the government employees attending.

“I can understand skepticism anytime a meeting for government people is not necessarily open to the public,” Nisbet said. “However, everything that is discussed there is absolutely available for the public to know about.”

Evening laughs with Matt Braunger. Gotta’ respect a man who can squeeze a solid bit out of owls.

As you can see, I have a strict “no dogs on the bed” policy.

The Ad Council finally takes on a campaign I can get behind: The Shelter Pet Project.

But under the color of law, of course. All thanks to the wonderful world of asset forfeiture.

The way Krista Vaughn sees it, Wayne County fined her $1,400 even though police and prosecutors admit she broke no laws.

Vaughn, who has no criminal record, was required to pay for the return of her car, which was seized by police after they mistook Vaughn’s co-worker for a prostitute. Even though prosecutors later dropped the case, Vaughn still had to pay.

Her story is not unusual. In Wayne County, law enforcement officials regularly seize vehicles without levying charges — even in cases in which they later concede no law was broken. The agency provides perhaps the most prolific and egregious example of what critics contend is the wrongful use of laws allowing the seizure of private property.

It’s a practice that’s paying off. The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.

The article is part of a Detroit News series on an explosion in forfeiture cases in and around the crumbling city. From an earlier article in the series:

“We’re trying to fight crime,” said Police Chief Mike Pachla of Roseville, where the money raised from forfeitures jumped more than tenfold, from $33,890 to $393,014.

“We would be just as aggressive even if there wasn’t any money involved.”

Roseville had among the most dramatic increases over the five-year period examined by The News. But several other agencies also more than doubled their takes, including Novi, Trenton, Farmington Hills, Southfield, the Michigan State Police, Shelby Township, Livonia, Warren and Romulus.

The increase in money coming in leads to a higher percentage of the police budget being covered by seizures. In Roseville, the share of the police budget raised from forfeitures went from 0.3 percent to 4.2 percent. In Romulus, it jumped from 4.5 percent to 11.2 percent from 2003-2007, the most recent years for which comparable records were available.

I have a feature on asset forfeiture coming in the February 2010 issue of Reason. Forfeiture critics I interviewed for the article say there’s good reason to think laws that send forfeiture proceeds back to prosecutor offices may be unconstitutional. Whereas police only make the initial seizure, prosecutors actually make the policy decision of determining which cases to take. Dicta in prior U.S. Supreme Court cases indicates the Court may find due process problems with those same offices then materially benefiting from those decisions.

The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 quelled a lot of the debate on this issue. But that law only applies to federal police agencies. Most of the more egregious forfeiture cases now happen at the state and local level.

In September I wrote a column on Alvarez v. Smith, the forfeiture case that will be decided early next year by the Supreme Court. That case is a challenge to a provision in the Illinois forfeiture laws that allow police to keep seized property a year or more before a claimant can have his day in court to get it back. This is particularly harsh on low-income people who may rely a seized car to get to work, or to shuttle kids around.

It’s worth noting that Obama’s Justice Department filed an amicus brief on behalf of the state in that case. They weren’t obligated to. Though the solicitor general’s office is charged with defending all federal laws, the law at issue in Alvarez is a state law, not a federal one. In fact, federal civil forfeiture laws are much friendlier to property owners. So you could make a decent case that the administration could have argued against the Illinois law. At the very least, it could have kept quiet. Instead, it argued that the state should retain the power to take property from people without ever charging a crime (and not necessarily kingpins—the Illinois law in question applies only to property valued at under $20,000), and keep that property for a year or more before affording the owner a chance to get it back.

Taking property from poor people without due process of law in order to enrich local police departments. Seems like the sort of thing Barack Obama might have fought to change in his days as a community organizer.

A week or so ago, I put up a morning link about Cody, a pooch in Clearwater, Florida who charmingly greeted convenience store customers donning a BP uniform.

The story made national news, so you can probably guess what happened next. Florida public health bureaucrats marched in to put a stop to the cuteness.* Can’t have a dog roaming around where food is sold. Even though all the food the store sells is pre-packaged.

(*Caveat: Generally speaking, I’m fervently anti-clothes on dogs.)

Feeling a little 70s today. So let’s go with Head East’s “Never Been Any Reason.”

Boston.

When last we left the standoff in Maricopa County, Arizona, Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe had given Dep. Adam Stoddard a deadline by which to apologize for swiping documents from a defense attorney’s file in open court last month. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio vowed that Stoddard would not apologize. Stoddard then called a press conference Monday night in which he essentially thumbed his nose at Donahoe and continued to defend his breech of attorney-client privilege.

And since then? Yes, it’s gotten even crazier.

• The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office announced on Tuesday that Stoddard would surrender to jail ahead of his midnight deadline to aplogize. But when Stoddard showed up, the jail refused to book him, citing a “clerical error.” Stoddard insisted on spending the night in jail anyway.
• Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced he has filed a federal lawsuit against the county and its judges, alleging a “widespread conspiracy” against Arpaio and his officers. Arpaio remarkably and apparently with no self-awareness whatsoever called the county a “good ole boys network,” and commented that he had “never seen these kinds of things occur in the justice system.” Arpaio also called Donahoe’s contempt finding against Stoddard a “vendetta,” and said, “For political reasons, [Stoddard's] been thrown to the wolves.”
• Yesterday, the day after Stoddard spent a night in jail, 19 sheriff’s deputies scheduled to work security at the courthouse called in sick, throwing the day’s court proceedings into disarray. The building also had to be evacuated after a phone-in bomb threat.
• As crowds returned after the bomb threat was cleared, the law enforcement unions commenced with a conveniently-timed rally in front of the courthouse, calling Stoddard a “victim” and demanding that he be released from jail.

Once again, here’s video of the “victimized” deputy’s actions that caused all of this:

MORE: Stoddard’s fellow officers will be holding nightly candlelight vigils for their comrade—who, by the way, is being paid while he’s in jail. Actually, as the linked New Times article explains, it’s not even a certainty that Stoddard is actually in jail. No one is saying where he’s being held, and there’s apparently no record of him being booked.