For several months, I’ve been working with the producers of Penn & Teller’s Showtime show Bullshit! on an episode about the criminal justice system. It’ll air in Season 8, which kicks off this summer. I’ll let you know when I know the specific date my episode airs.

Anyway, I was reminded of all of this by the following Tweet from Penn Jillette’s feed:

Bullshit Season 8: Offering viewers the job of rubbing oil all over big naked tits while Teller rides a real pony around.

Strangely, I don’t recall any of this when I taped my interview. Seems like something I would have remembered.

So you should get Showtime. Not just to see me. Or oiled-up boobs. Though both are fine reasons in and of themselves. But also to support the network that puts these brilliant libertarian showmen on the air. And if you’re ever in Vegas, be sure to catch their show at the Rio. It’s fantastic.

If you’re trying to bring a friend around to think like a libertarian, I’ve been convinced for a while that you just need to have them read the “News of the Weird” column in your local alternative weekly. From this week’s installment:

In March, juries in Smith County and Matagorda County sentenced Henry Wooten and Melvin Johnson III to 35 years and 60 years in prison, respectively, for possessing small amounts of drugs (but enough under Texas law to allow jurors to infer an intent to distribute). Wooten, 54, had 4.6 ounces of marijuana (same penalty as for 5 pounds), and Johnson had 1.3 grams of crack cocaine (about half the weight of a U.S. dime). (Wooten’s prosecutor actually had asked the jury for a sentence of 99 years.)

And…

Alan Rosenfeld, 64, a New York City lawyer and real estate entrepreneur, is also a full-time schoolteacher, although he has been prohibited from teaching since 2002 because of accusations of leering at female students. He is thus a “rubber room” teacher whose union contract requires full salary and benefits even though the Schools Chancellor has barred him from the classroom as a “danger” to students. The Department of Education pays him $100,000 a year plus health care (plus retirement benefits worth at least $82,000 a year). The New York Post reported that Rosenfeld reports to “the room” each day but works exclusively on his business affairs.

And your winner….

In March, on duty on opening day of the jail at the new Adair County judicial center in Columbia, Ky., sheriff’s deputy Charles Wright accidentally locked himself in a cell and was fired after he tried to shoot open the lock.

Amanda Marcotte does some intrepid reporting and discovers that . . . some men like to look at the pictures their attractive female friends post on Facebook.

Meanwhile, CNN runs two stories about a Japanese board video game involving rape that has been out of print for two years.

• Federal ATF agent arrested, charged with working with an informant to fabricate a drug buy. A local narcotics cop in Tulsa has also been implicated.
• Joe Arpaio’s goons (basically) kill a man for trespassing.
• The 9/14 presidency, or why Obama is no better than Bush on civil liberties and the war on terrorism.
• A rather unserious article about “getting serious about pornography.” (I’ve responded to these tired arguments before. Read here.)
• More Obama hagiography.
• Reading the Pentagon’s report on the Wikileaks video.

Last Christmas, my sister got me the Pet’s Eye View camera. It’s a digital camera you attach to your dog or cat’s collar. You then set the photo interval at 1, 5, or 15 minutes. The camera takes 40 digital photos. Daisy and I took it to the park today to try it out.

Click through to see the results.

(more…)

My friend Caleb Brown put together the bit below as part of the U.S. Chamber’s “I Am Free Enterprise” video competition.

Grape + Bean is one of my favorite spots in Old Town, Alexandria, and between its Clover machine and brewing Counter Culture Coffee, the place makes the best cup of coffee in the D.C. area.

The advocacy group Flex Your Rights has posted its latest video 10 Rules for Dealing With Police on YouTube in four 10-minute installments. Part one is below. Click through to the YouTube page for parts two, three, and four.

Here’s more nice coverage of the new video from Roll Call.

As part of its new campaign against abusive asset forfeiture policies, the Institute for Justice has filed a lawsuit in Texas, home to some of the worst forfeiture laws in the country. From the press release:

…law enforcement agencies in Texas and many other states get to keep the cash and other assets that they seize giving them a direct financial incentive to abuse this power and the rights of property owners.  In Texas, forfeiture funds can even go to pay police salaries.  This establishes a perverse incentive structure under which the more property police seize, the nicer their facilities, equipment and automobiles—and the bigger their personal paychecks.

And the better their office margaritas.

Civil asset forfeiture policies rest on the legal absurdity that property can be guilty of a crime. IJ’s client in the case is Zaher El-Ali, an immigrant and 30-year resident of Houston who makes his living restoring and reselling homes and cars. Here’s his story:

In 2004, Ali sold a 2004 Chevrolet Silverado truck to a man who paid him $500 down and agreed to pay the rest on credit.  As with all cars bought on credit, Ali held the title to the car until he was paid in full and also registered the car in his name.  In July 2009, the buyer was driving the Silverado and was pursued by a police officer on suspicion of drunk driving.  When stopped by the police, he was arrested for DWI.  Because this was his third DWI arrest, he was imprisoned, pled guilty and was sentenced to six years in prison.

After the man’s arrest, the Silverado was seized for civil forfeiture.  It has been sitting in the Harris County impound lot ever since.  In July 2009, Ali wrote to the district attorney, telling him of his interest in the truck and attaching copies of the title and registration naming Ali as the owner and asking for its return.  The driver has been in jail since July and had stopped making payments.  The government responded by filing a civil forfeiture action against the truck:  State of Texas v. One 2004 Chevrolet Silverado.  Through the filing of counterclaims in the case, Ali wants not only to get his truck back but also to stop the state from abusing forfeiture law against all Texas citizens.

My Reason feature on asset foreiture here. Here’s video of IJ attorneys announcing the lawsuit:

In January 2008, police in Chesapeake, Virginia raided the home of 28-year-old Ryan Frederick. Days earlier, an informant had broken into Frederick’s house, spotted several marijuana plants, stole some of them, then gave police the probable cause they needed to conduct the raid. During the raid, police put a battering ram through part of Frederick’s door. By Frederick’s account he awoke, saw someone breaking into his home, panicked (given that he’d been burglarized days earlier), and fired his gun through the broken door. His bullet struck and killed one of the police officers, Det. Jarrod Shivers.

Though depicted by the prosecution as a cold-blooded cop killer, Frederick’s taped interviews shortly after the raid clearly showed a man who feared for his safety, and showed immense remorse upon learning that he’d killed a law enforcement officer. Frederick was convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to ten years in prison. The state had sought to convict him of capital murder. (See a roundup of my coverage of the case here.)

More than two years later, the Chesapeake Police Department has announced a change in how it will conduct drug raids. But the department won’t be reconsidering its policy of sending cops on volatile, forced entry raids into the homes of suspected, low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. Nor will it be changing the questionable way its narcotics officers deal with drug informants.

So what’s the new drug raid policy? Henceforth, Chesapeake narcotics officers will be using a new and improved battering ram.

“Sweet Suzanne,” by the Buzzin’ Cousins, off the wonderful Falling From Grace soundtrack.

If you’re a fan of country/Americana music, see how many of the voices in the song you can identify.

• Google search tips.
• Men vs. women.
• They’re lying.
• Creepy “behavior placement” messages infiltrating TV entertainment.
• There goes my plan for sunscreen-flavored cupcakes.
• Colorado judge is fired after issuing arrest warrant for an overdue DVD.

I suppose we all suspected this on some level. But it’s still nauseating.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”…

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent … If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”…

Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.

To borrow from Walt Kelly, we have met the enemy, and he is us.

Reason contributors Glen Whitman and Roger Koppl have an article in the journal Law, Probability & Risk on rational bias in forensic analysis. The outright frauds and charlatans in the forensics field are bad enough. But Koppl and Whitman focus on the structural biases inherent in the way forensic analysis is often performed, biases that likely afflict even well-intentioned analysts. From the abstract:

Specifically, forensic examiners’ conclusions are affected not just by objective test results but also by two subjective factors: their prior beliefs about a suspect’s likely guilt or innocence and the relative importance they attach to convicting the guilty rather than the innocent. The authorities—police and prosecutors—implicitly convey information to forensic examiners by their very decision to submit samples for testing. This information induces the examiners to update their prior beliefs in a manner that results in a greater tendency to provide testimony that incriminates the defendant. Forensic results are in a sense ‘contaminated’ by the prosecution and thus do not provide jurors with an independent source of information. Structural reforms to address such problems of rational bias include independence from law enforcement, blind proficiency testing and separation of test from interpretation.

Koppl and I co-wrote a piece for Slate a couple of years ago laying out some of those structural reforms.

The problem goes back to the fact that forensics isn’t really science. With the notable exception of DNA testing, most fields in forensics were invented and developed by police agencies, not scientists. So they have evolved over time not to better seek out the truth, but to help law enforcement personnel prove a hunch or theory. Hence the general absence in most forensics of critical components to the scientific process like peer review and blind testing. The forensic evidence is then still presented to juries with all the gloss, polish, and impressive-sounding vernacular of hard science.

The other problem is that while science might be described as a perpetual journey toward truth, once a jury hands down its verdict, the criminal justice system tends to put a premium on finality and closure. So even though science may later show us that the forensic evidence used to convict someone 10 or 20 years ago is flawed, overstated, or simply false, the courts have been reluctant to reopen those cases.

Funny.

• My former colleague Dave Weigel is now blogging for the Washington Post. Add him to your RSS readers.
• Gene Healy: Terrorism isn’t an existential threat. Always good to repeat that it’s our reaction to terrorist attacks that determines if they’re successful at spreading terror.
• No thanks. I don’t even particularly like tea.
• Product placement.
• Chicago overtakes New York as the most surveilled city in America.
• That Wikileaks video was horrifying. But let’s not forget that the day-to-day, more mundane atrocities of war are just as unconscionable. A damned good reason to avoid avoidable wars in the first place.
• Obamacare supporters then: Talk of rationing talk is just paranoia from “death panel” types. Obamacare supporters now: “Saying no” to medical care will be most important task of those who implement the new health care system.

Naked coffee guy has been acquitted.

So it turns out the rumors that Scrabble’s makers are going to change the game’s rules to allow proper nouns aren’t true.

Thank goodness. The idea that they’d ruin an institution just to attract a few more fans was disconcerting. It would be like if the NCAA suddenly got the stupid idea to expand its near-perfect men’s basketball tournament to 96 teams.

Todd Thrasher works at PX (where he’s making the cocktail below), a speakeasy right down the road from me, and one of my favorite spots in the D.C. area. It’s a supremely cool, unsigned, prohibition/deco-themed bar on top of a fish fry.

Another reason to like Thrasher: He mocked the area’s smoking bans by making a tobacco-infused cocktail. I’ve had it. It’s delicious.

Old Town. Alexandria, Virginia.

• If you don’t already, you should be reading the Injustice Everywhere site.
• Great site celebrating alcohol, glorious alcohol.
• Old photos of miners. Play some Woody Guthrie or Doc Boggs while you view them.
• You won’t read a story like this about a cat.
• Clearly this is only a warning shot in the coming Great Wombat Uprising of 2010.
• I was just wondering the other day when we were going to start to see stories like this one.
• Lede of the day.

That’s the subject of my crime column this week.

The comments from some of the public officials are pretty stunning, even for jaded readers of this site.

• The iPad: It Blends.
• The NY Times profiles David and Barbara Mikkelson, founders of Snopes.com.
• This is very funny.
• Supreme Court let’s 9th Circuit ruling stand that allows a lawsuit against police officers who broke into a man’s home and pointed their guns at him based on a tip that he had been driving drunk. That’s a plus. But remember, this only means the suit can go forward. It doesn’t mean they’ll be held liable. And even if they are, it’s likely the taxpayers will be paying the damages, not the officer themselves.
• If you had asked, I’d have envisioned Rush Limbaugh’s pad to be filled with hunting trophies, cigar smoke, and pinned leather couches. Turns out, it’s rather fey.
• Tea Party small government GOP candidate for Congress collecting $200K/year in cotton subsidies.

• Vatican official compares criticism of church officials for sex scandal to persecution of the Jews. Hmm. Centuries of pogroms, ghettos, and a holocaust that nearly exterminated European Jewry from the face of the earth vs. shaming church officials for covering up the sexual assault of thousands of minors. Yes. Totally the same!
• Missing man/apes link found in South Africa.
• Government officials take aim at unpaid internships. How dare these private companies exploit eager young people who volunteer to work without pay in exchange for valuable professional experience! Also, something tells me the thousands of unpaid interns who work on Capitol Hill and for federal agencies won’t be affected.
• Newsweek columnist looks at problems with forensic evidence.
• Just so I have this straight: 18 high school seniors showed up for for prom wearing clothes that school officials deemed too revealing, and as punishment, the principle paddled 17 of them?