In the Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on dubious sex abuse cases, lays out Martha Coakley’s role in the notorious Fells Acres convictions.

Rabinowitz concludes:

Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was “formidable” and that she was entirely convinced “those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants.”

What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley’s concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.

If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.

Lefty criminal justice blogger Jeralyn Merritt chimes in here, and states in an earlier post of Coakley, “I wouldn’t vote for her for dog catcher.”

My article on Coakley’s record as a prosecutor here.

I did a segment for Judge Napolitano’s show today.

Think I did pretty well. But my eyes are shifty. Need to work on that.

An independent audit of 548 fingerprint analyses done by the Houston crime lab found “irregularities” in more than half of them. Two analysts have been put on leave, one has resigned. The three had worked cases in the lab for a combined 84 years.

This is the third forensics scandal to hit Houston in the last several years. In 2006, another independent audit found that…

Houston crime lab analysts skewed reports to fit police theories in several cases, ignoring results that conflicted with police expectations because of a lack of confidence in their own skills or a conscious effort to secure convictions, an independent investigator says in his latest report on the scandal.

In more than 20 cases reviewed in this stage of the ongoing probe, the investigative team concluded that analysts at the Houston Police Department crime lab failed to report the results of blood-typing and DNA tests that did not implicate the suspects police had identified.

That came a few years after local media exposed other problems with the credibility of the lab’s experts and its shoddy handling of forensic evidence. In 2004, the Houston Chronicle reported a number a number of questionable autopsies done by Harris County Medical Examiner Patricia Moore, who colleagues accused of tailoring her findings to please prosecutors.

Seems like a good time to note another forensics-related story this week: On Monday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Briscoe v. Virginia, a case many court watchers say could undo or limit last term’s decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, which established the right of criminal defendants to cross-examine crime lab experts (as opposed to having experts submit signed lab reports).

The court’s membership has changed since the 5-to-4 decision in June in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, which said that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause, which gives a criminal defendant the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him,” does not allow the mere presentation of a lab report to prove, say, that white powder found with a defendant was cocaine.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in Melendez-Diaz, said there was only one reason to revisit the issue so quickly.

“Why is this case here except as an opportunity to upset Melendez-Diaz?” he asked. After a lawyer tried to answer what was a rhetorical question, Justice Scalia made his meaning plain: “I’m criticizing us for taking the case.”

I wrote about Melendez-Diaz last August. Ideas on how to reform the forensics system here.

CORRECTION: A spokesman from Houston PD called to say that the while fingerprint unit is part of the Houston Police Department, it is separate from the Houston Crime Lab. Apologies for the error.

I have an article up at Politico today looking at the unsettling criminal justice record of the Democratic nominee to replace Ted Kennedy.

Been waiting for this excellent piece by Steven Greenhut from the latest issue of Reason to go online.

It’s on the continuing waste, excess, and sense of entitlement in the ever-expanding public sector. The examples are infuriating. Of course, the best example of public sector arrogance and entitlement is the coming pension crisis.

At least when greedy capitalists steal, the damage is limited to the people who chose to do business with them. And they’re usually punished for it. The theft described in the two articles above is all sanctioned by law.

The Boston Globe reports that police n Massachusetts are using the state’s wiretapping laws to arrest people who record cops on the job. Massachusetts is one of 12 two party consent states, which cops are interpreting to mean you can’t record them without their permission.

The state’s supreme court upheld such a conviction in 2001, finding that “Secret tape recording by private individuals has been unequivocally banned, and, unless and until the Legislature changes the statute, what was done here cannot be done lawfully.” I’d think you could make a strong case that a public employee entrusted with the power to forcibly detain and kill falls outside the scope of a “private individual.”

According to the Globe, subsequent cases have turned on whether the recording was done secretly (in which case convictions are usually upheld), or openly (in which case the charges are usually dropped).

Boston police are claiming that recording them while on duty violates their privacy rights and may interfere with their ability to make arrests.

Harvey Silverglate wrote about one Massachusetts case for the Boston Phoenix in 2008. My argument for ensuring that it’s always legal to record on-duty cops here.

Atrios has this exactly right.

If only the media had as much contempt for lying, thieving, corrupt politicians as they do for sports stars who use steroids.

My crime column this week looks at the deaths of Tarika Wilson, Jonathan Ayers, and Gonzalo Guizan.

All three are drug war collateral damage.

Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Peyton Thomas has emerged as Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s book-learnin’ alter-ego, working with Arpaio to criminally investigate, indict, and otherwise legally intimidate anyone who dares to question the fearless lawman (as well as, now, anyone who dares to question Thomas). Thomas has gone after members of the Maricopa county council, journalists, even judges. Last month, after two prosecutors in neighboring counties publicly criticized Thomas and Arpaio’s surreal, bumbling attempt at tyranny, Thomas threatened to criminally investigate them, too, calling their comments part of “an orchestrated campaign to pressure law enforcement in Maricopa County to drop charges against influential criminal defendants and suspects.”

As it turns out, before running for county attorney, Thomas was an author and pundit, penning clenched-fist screeds on a variety of hot-button culture war squabbles for the usual roster of conservative outlets, including National Review, AEI, the Weekly Standard, and The Wall Street Journal. My favorite: Thomas once called parents who put their children in daycare “more respectable, less violent versions of Susan Smith.” Smith, you may remember, was the woman who drowned her two sons in a lake in North South Carolina in 1995 . . . then told everyone a black guy did it.

Thomas has also written a couple books, one of which lays out his plan for restoring order to lawless America. Among Thomas’s ideas: conscripted snitches. Per the Phoenix New Times:

“All able-bodied men without a criminal record should once again be subject to obligatory service for community crime surveillance.”

Those men, he said, should patrol neighborhoods, armed with walkie-talkies. “Their sole duty would be to inform police of crimes in progress,” he went on. “Women should not be subject to such conscription for the same reasons that they have traditionally been spared combat duty.”

Then came the kicker: “Properly strong criminal penalties would deter those who might be tempted to dodge this draft [to patrol the neighborhoods] by committing a crime and acquiring a criminal record.”

But Thomas saves the brunt of his ire for . . . well . . . you, Agitator readers. Back in 1997, legal guru Walter Olson wrote a piece for Reason dissecting a particularly smirk-inducing article Thomas published in the Weekly Standard in which Thomas explained why libertarianism keeps him up in a cold sweat at night. Here’s Olson:

The root cause of everything from street muggings and gang delinquency to rudeness at traffic lights to excessive lawsuit filing has finally been found, and it’s…libertarianism. At least that’s the view of Andrew Peyton Thomas, an attorney with the state of Arizona and a frequent contributor to conservative magazines. Writing in the August 26, 1996, Weekly Standard, Mr. Thomas referred to the above woes as “the libertarian-created problems of Southern California and elsewhere.” Readers who hadn’t known that libertarians got to run things in Los Angeles may rub their eyes, but Mr. Thomas isn’t kidding one bit. He blames crime, rudeness, and litigiousness on the “live-and-let-live urban lifestyle” as spawned by “the moral laissez-faire disorder of libertarianism.” Mr. Thomas, author of Crime and the Roots of Order, has made a momentous discovery: “The root of our crime problem,” as he informed Standard readers on March 17 of this year, “is a rights-happy radical individualism.”

Thomas is right. God help us if libertarians ever get any power in this country. Imagine, for example, the irreparable damage to the rule of law if a libertarian were ever elected Maricopa County prosecutor.

Here’s a real-time feed of the most recent images uploaded to Twitter.

The Dems’ new and improved congressional ethics committee still can’t seem to find a single ethical problem with any member of Congress. Just like prior ethics committees. Congress must be, like, the most ethical place in America!

Someone should send him a copy of Overkill.

Reminds me of the time Michael Ledeen attempted to illustrate how evil the ruling government in Iran is because, holy crap!, their narco cops wear masks when they conduct drug raids. Imagine!

Alexandria, Virginia.

Soldotna, Alaska.

Ryan Frederick’s appeal has been denied.

That’s sad for Frederick. It also seems likely now that we’ll never get that investigation into whether Chesapeake police were sending drug informants to break into private homes to get probable cause for search warrants.

How in the hell did Morgan Spurlock end up directing the Freakonomics movie?

Indiana.