My crime column this week is about Jordan Miles, a music student severely beaten by three Pittsburgh police officers a year ago this month. The cops allegedly mistook a Mountain Dew bottle in Miles’ coat for a gun.

The story just gets worse from there.

• No one will sell sodium thiopental to U.S. executioners. Irony: Faced with a de facto prohibition on a drug they think they need, some U.S. states are looking to obtain it illicitly.
• Speaking of the death penalty, both Illinois state houses have now voted to abolish it.
• Minneapolis man severely beaten during drug raid. Another man claims police planted drugs on him during the raid. So far, no drug charges.
• Florida college student arrested for recording police. When his friend tried to record that arrest, they confiscated his phone as well.
• Citizen-shot photos show Kenyan police killing suspects, spur national outrage. It’s the sort of incident that illustrates why these third world countries should really institute some formal protections for citizens with cameras who take photos depicting government abuse.

How come no one told me that Karl Pilkington now has his own show? This looks very, very funny. Although I’m not sure what it’s doing on the Science Channel.

The New York Times reports on the Illinois eavesdropping law, which allows for a felony charge and up to 15 years of prison for people who record police officers on the job. In addition to artist Christopher Drew—whom I’ve written about before and who goes to trial in April—the article finds another person currently being charged under the law. Tiawanda Moore, 20, goes to trial next month. She too could face 15 years in prison, in her case for using her Blackberry to record her conversation with internal affairs officers at Chicago PD about an alleged sexual assault by a police officer. Moore recorded her interview after feeling her initial attempt to report the incident wasn’t taken seriously.

On Aug. 18, Ms. Moore and her boyfriend went to Police Headquarters to file a complaint with Internal Affairs about the officer who had talked to her alone. Ms. Moore said the officer had fondled her and left his personal telephone number, which she handed over to the investigators.

Ms. Moore said the investigators tried to talk her out of filing a complaint, saying the officer had a good record and that they could “guarantee” that he would not bother her again.

“They keep giving her the run-around, basically trying to discourage her from making a report,” Mr. Johnson said. “Finally, she decides to record them on her cellphone to show how they’re not helping her.”

The investigators discovered that she was recording them and she was arrested and charged with two counts of eavesdropping, Mr. Johnson said. But he added that the law contains a crucial exception. If citizens have “reasonable suspicion” that a crime is about to be committed against them, they may obtain evidence by recording it.

“I contend that the Internal Affairs investigators were committing the crime of official misconduct in preventing her from filing a complaint,” Mr. Johnson said. “She’s young. She had no idea what she was getting into when she went in there to make a simple complaint. It’s just a shame when the people watching the cops aren’t up to it.”

Days later, accompanied by Mr. Johnson, Ms. Moore returned to Internal Affairs and was able to file a full complaint. There is a continuing investigation of Ms. Moore’s charges against the officer, a Police Department spokesman said.

So five months later, they’re still investigating a possible sexual assault by a police officer. But they had no problem immediately arresting, charging, and jailing the woman who tried to report it. That would seem to send a pretty clear message about how seriously the city takes police misconduct.

There was another story in the news this week involving Chicago police. Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison for lying under oath. Burge was part of a Chicago police culture that tortured suspects in police custody for more than a decade. Burge and other officers who participated in the torture couldn’t be prosecuted for federal criminal civil rights violations because the statute of limitations has expired. The federal judge who sentenced Burge specifically criticized local officials for allowing the torture to continue long past the time they should have known about it, including Mayor Richard Daly for ignoring the problem during his time as a state’s attorney.

You’d think current Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez might take the time to learn something from history. There are still plenty of problems at Chicago PD that her office could be investigating. Instead, she wastes taxpayer resources prosecuting citizens for trying to protect themselves from cops, or for trying to hold cops accountable. Or, for that matter, trying to keep prosecutors accountable. Alvarez is also the one who has been harassing the journalism students at Northwestern University’s Innocence Project.

• Phil Mocek acquitted on charges related to him refusing to show ID, videotaping at a TSA checkpoint.
• Buy your bath salts now. Looks like the drug warriors may ban them.
• Hickey causes stroke.
• Jesse Bering writes an article on research looking at possible female evolutionary adaptations to rape. People go nuts. It’s not criticism of individual studies, or criticism of Bering’s summary of them, that’s disturbing. It’s the suggestion (see Emily Yoffe here) that this kind of research shouldn’t be happening at all.
• Bob Barr gives libertarian critics more material. Disappointing.

• That map of the world island project in Dubai is sinking back into the sea. Never seemed like a good idea.
• Well-written commentary on the Sal Culosi case.
• Good shot.
• Puppycide. Woman calls cops to report a burglar. Cops shoot her dog six times. Then again with a shotgun.
• Small reprieve in the Amanda Knox case, as forensic experts are given 90 days to reexamine evidence.

USA Today reports:

Police have seized a Boston-area comic book dealer’s arsenal and suspended his gun license over a blog post that suggested other members of Congress and their aides should be targeted in the wake of the shooting of Arizona Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

In a post titled “1 down, 534 to go,” Travis Corcoran of Arlington, Mass., wrote: “It is absolutely, absolutelyunacceptable to shoot ‘indiscriminately’. Target only politicians and their staff, and leave regular citizens alone.” The blog,TJICistan, is no longer accessible, but affiliates have emerged.

“We certainly take this as a credible threat, and credible until we prove otherwise,” said Arlington Police Capt. Robert Bongiorno. Officers confiscated a “large amount” of weapons and ammunition, he said, without offering specifics. A source told WBZ-TV 11 guns were taken.

Corcoran, 39, who runs the online comic site HeavyInk and calls himself an “anarcho-capitalist,” has not been arrested or charged with any crime. Local and federal authorities are investigating.

I don’t know how specific his threats became. Personally, I don’t think what Corcoran wrote above should be criminal, but it’s certainly stupid, ill-advised and, frankly, immoral.

Corcoran calls himself an anarcho-capitalist. Which is fine I guess. I’ll leave it to anarcho-capitalists to figure out if they want him. But he isn’t remotely libertarian, an ideology where the non-initiation of force is a pretty fundamental principle.

That said, someone under the handle “TJIC” has posted comments here numerous times. I vaguely remember deleting some comments under that handle in months past, and I know I ultimately banned the user “TJIC” last month after an inflammatory comment he made to this post. (I deleted that comment, too, although you can see it referenced by someone else in the thread.)

But I will say this case is illustrative of the dangers of trying to draw connections from idiots like Corcoran to the people they read, follow, or claim as an influence. Cue this post about Corcoran by Alex Seitz-Wald at the lefty site ThinkProgress. I obviously join Seitz-Wald in condemning Corcoran’s stupidity. But Seitz-Wald goes further. He also notes that on his Twitter account, Corcoran once re-tweeted another Twitter user’s comment about Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and civil liberties.

He also appears to be a fan of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), re-tweeting a positive message about him in May: “Lefties: Before you start fringe-baiting Rand Paul, note that he’s better on civil liberties than most Democratic senators. And Obama.”

As it turns out, I’m the one who wrote that original tweet. It was a reference to Paul’s positions on the drug war, torture, indefinite detention, and a number of other issues–issues where Paul at the time was closer to leftists like those who work at ThinkProgress than Obama was. (Unfortunately, Paul has since walked back or abandoned his libertarian inclinations on many of those issues.)

So I’ll ask Seitz-Wald straight up: What exactly was your point in including that retweet in your post about Corcoran? Do you believe my praise of Paul for what I thought at the time were admirable positions on civil liberties was “dangerous rhetoric”? Do you think the positions I take on civil liberties are extremist, and prone to incite people to assassinate politicians? Do you think I should stop writing about and documenting government abuses of civil liberties, lest like Corcoran get angry and commit an act of violence? Do you hold me personally responsible for the fact that Corcoran followed my Twitter feed, once reposted something I wrote, then later called for the assassination of elected officials?

If your answer to all of those questions is no (and Jesus, I would hope it is), then I don’t see how to interpret your mention of Corcoran’s retweet as anything other than a cheap, partisan, and groundless attempt to link an idiot who endorses political assassinations to a prominent Republican politician.

Here’s an eloquent bit of editorializing on government, violence, and coercion from Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist A. Barton Hinkle.

The debate over the size and scope of government, then, is an argument over when to use violence to change things and circumstances consensual activity cannot. Liberals (broadly speaking) find inequality odious and think the government should use force in the economic arena by redistributing wealth but leave individuals alone in matters of personal morality, such as whom they have sex with. Conservatives (broadly speaking) are less troubled by inequality and disdain the redistributive uses of government power. But social conservatives are outraged by immorality, as they define it, and therefore think the state should use the threat of violence to enforce personal moral codes by banning prostitution, homosexual sodomy, and the like.

Then there are a small minority of diehard libertarians who would like to minimize government involvement in both arenas, and a small minority of diehard communitarians who think government should dictate behavior of every stripe…

Force is sometimes necessary. We must have police and courts and national defense and environmental protection and so on. But government at all levels does much more nowadays than is strictly necessary, because both liberals and conservatives delight in using it to make other people do what they would not do through mutual consent.

In the wake of the butchery in Tucson, it has been nice to hear many people say we should not speak so well of violence. It would be even nicer to hear more say we should not vote for it quite so often, either.

Today’s Five-Star Friday post is over at my Nashville Byline blog, where I’ve posted video of Nashville singer, songwriter, and poet Tom House playing a few songs from my couch. I also did an interview with House, which you can read at the link.

I’m hoping this “Songs From My Couch” idea will become a “thing”. That would be pretty great. Already have a couple more artists who have expressed interest, so keep watching.

As for House, I love his line about waking up in the morning to see what the whiskey fairy left him. Of course Tom’s whiskey fairy leaves acclaimed poetry and evocative song lyrics. Mine just leaves headaches and the consequences of bad decisions. Maybe there’s more than one.

• New Jersey town to start randomly drug testing middle school kids. Stay away from the poppy seed bagels.
• I’m quoted in this very good Washingtonian article on Cheye Calvo’s civil rights lawsuit against Prince George’s County, Maryland.
• I can’t think of a more damnable critique of a state’s tax policy than anti-sandwich.
• Twitter posts nab cop who left the scene after backing into someone’s car.
• Every bad NY Times trend piece crammed into one beautiful article.

Earlier this month, police in Oakland County, Michigan raided a medical marijuana dispensary in the town of Oak Park. The deputies came in with guns drawn and bulletproof vests, with at least one wearing a mask.

They made no arrests, but they did clean the place out. The confiscated all of the dispensary’s cash on hand and—in a particularly thuggish touch—also took all of the cash from the wallets and purses of employees and patients. In this update, police officials say the raid was the result of street dealers telling police they were buying marijuana from the dispensary. I suppose we’ll see in time if that’s true, and if it is, if the dispensary was actually aware that it was selling to dealers. But at first blush, the claim sounds like a pretty good way for street dealers to put a legitimate competitor out of business.

Under Michigan’s asset forfeiture law, 80 percent of the cash the deputies seized will go directly to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department. The other 20 percent goes to the local prosecutor. Medical marijuana is legal under Michigan law but is of course still illegal under federal law. And apparently there’s some debate about the legality of dispensaries. All of which means this particular dispensary will have a hard time proving it earned the seized cash legitimately. I doubt the patients and employees will get their cash back, either. The cost of challenging the seizure is likely several times more than the amount of money most people carry on their person.

There’s been some talk in the Michigan legislature about reforming the state’s asset forfeiture laws, but there’s been no action so far. Last February, a former prosecutor described the Michigan forfeiture law to the Detroit News this way:

“It’s a money grab, pure and simple; a sneaky way of getting a penalty on something prosecutors can’t prove. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

• What happened to the anti-war movement?
• Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels moves for sentencing reform. The state’s prosecutors plan to fight him.
• Dumb Obama criticism of the week.
• A more realistic way of classifying illegal drugs.
• Good overview of the law when it comes to cell phone searches.
• Photos of an abandoned Soviet space shuttle project.
• Michigan Supreme Court to decide case involving Eminem, Dr. Dre about recording police officers.

More here.

Federal District Court Judge Suzanne Conlon has dismissed (PDF) an ACLU challenge to the Illinois law that makes recording someone in a public space without their permission a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. As I’ve reported here, the law is used almost exclusively against people who attempt to record on-duty police officers. The ACLU was seeking declarative and injunctive relief to prevent the police from arresting workers and volunteers who planned to record police at an anti-war protest this spring.

As I wrote in my feature story, “The War on Cameras”, there’s a strong argument that this is a newsgathering function protected by the First Amendment. But Conlon doesn’t agree.

The ACLU has not alleged a cognizable First Amendment injury. The ACLU cites neither Supreme Court nor Seventh Circuit authority that the First Amendment includes a right to audio record. Cf. Potts v. City of Lafayette, Indiana, 121 F.3d 1106, 1111 (7th Cir.1997) (“there is nothing in the Constitution which guarantees the right to record a public event” ’). Amendment would therefore be futile….

The ACLU intends to audio record police officers speaking with one another or police officers speaking with civilians. The ACLU’s program only implicates conversations with police officers. The ACLU does not intend to seek the consent of either police officers or civilians interacting with police officers. Police officers and civilians may be willing speakers with one another, but the ACLU does not allege this willingness of the speakers extends to the ACLU, an independent third party audio recording conversations without the consent of the participants. The ACLU has not met its burden of showing standing to assert a First Amendment right or injury….

Amendment would be futile. The ACLU has not alleged a constitutional right or injury under the First Amendment. Rather, the ACLU proposes an unprecedented expansion of the First Amendment . . .

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, commenter “Jeff” makes a good point:

Why don’t we look at the issue from the other side? Is it within the state’s power to prohibit a citizen from recording a law enforcement officer in this way?

I know we tend to think of rational basis review as a rubber stamp, but these laws seem to be a stretch under any standard. Of course, it’s almost impossible to argue that this isn’t rationally related to some asserted purpose, but one could argue that the asserted purpose is merely pretextual, and that the real purpose is impermissible.

The government can certainly provide a rational basis for forbidding the recording of private conversations without the consent of all parties. But it would be interesting to hear the state’s rationality for requiring the consent of anyone whose voice might be picked up before making recording in a public space. What interest does that law serve? Certainly not privacy, given that there’s no expectation of privacy in public spaces.

I suspect we’ll be seeing more from this case, as well as more challenges to the Illinois law, particularly if/when Christopher Drew and Michael Allison become the first people convicted under it. To this point, the law has been used primarily to harass and arrest people who record police in public. The charges are inevitably dropped or downgraded to misdemeanors before the case gets to trial.

MORE: Just to clarify, the Illinois law only applies to audio recording. So security cameras, which generally don’t include audio, aren’t in violation of the law. If you used an application on your smart phone that only recorded video, you could also presumably record police without being arrested under this law, although they could always arrest you for interfering with a police officer or some other catch-all charge. The Illinois law also includes an exception for law enforcement, so police recordings without permission of the person being recorded are permissible.

• Good post from Glenn Greenwald on how Obama has essentially validated Dick Cheney. Particularly sad, given that you could make a strong argument that he was elected because of opposition and outrage over Cheney’s policies.
• The aging of the federal judiciary.
• Successful restaurateur blasts St. Louis business regulations. I spent a year and a half in St. Louis, and I still think it was the most poorly run city I’ve lived in. And I’ve also lived in Chicago and (more or less) D.C. My favorite example: While I was there (1999-2000), the city was trying to lure more young people downtown. But one weekend a cab driver was shot and killed. The city council responded with a law making it illegal to hail a cab from the street. You had to call from a land line.
• “I have memorized the torture. I wake up in the middle of the night screaming.”
• Unmanned spy drones coming to a police department near you. “Police could use the smaller planes to find lost children, hunt illegal marijuana crops and ease traffic jams in evacuations of cities before hurricanes or other natural disasters.” I bet I can guess which of those uses will be utilized most often.
• And this week’s award for most ridiculous reaction to the Tucson shootings goes to . . .

Went to a Gram Parsons tribute over the weekend. Photos, music, and an argument for why Parsons should be in both the country and rock halls of fame . . . all over at Nashville Byline.

• Police misidentify man as possible accomplice to a murder, send out the SWAT team, which deploys a flashbang grenade, which burns the man’s house down, killing him. The article says they decided to arrest the guy even after they realized they had mistakenly identified him, but arrested him anyway because of two outstanding warrants. Doesn’t say what those warrants were for. More on flashbangs here.
• Dems admit health care bill could lead to exploding costs down the road.
• The dating site for sea captains. And those who want to date them.
• Hugo Chávez jails a judge for 30 years for ordering the release of a man who had been held three years without trial.
• Awesome. But I’m afraid I would try to eat it.
• Just a hunch, but I kinda’ get the impression that PZ Myers doesn’t like libertarians.
• Gideon at A Public Defender hosts the latest Blawg Review.
• So what does it take for a police officer to admit he was wrong, admit that he overreacted, and apologize for his actions? In this case, an altercation with another police officer.
• We have an early frontrunner for Tweet of the year.

You have to at least admire his chutzpah.

The former Wisconsin district attorney who resigned amid a sexting scandal says he’s immune from a lawsuit filed by a crime victim who claims she was sexually harassed by him.

Ken Kratz says he was a public official at the time of the alleged harassment and is claiming both absolute immunity and qualified immunity.

Those are legal doctrines that shield government officials in certain cases from being sued for a violation of a person’s constitutional rights.

Kratz’s argument was filed Friday in a response to a federal lawsuit filed by Stephanie Van Groll.

Kratz admitted sending suggestive text messages to Van Groll while he was prosecuting her ex-boyfriend. At least four other women have said Kratz made inappropriate sexual advances toward them.

Bonus points: Kratz was prosecuting the woman’s boyfriend for domestic abuse.

Even in the consequence-free world of absolute prosecutorial immunity, I don’t think this is going to fly. I would think that even a group like the National District Attorneys Association would concede that sending sexual come-ons to the girlfriend of a suspect falls outside the scope of a prosecutor’s official duties. Of course, under current law, manufacturing evidence in a case that results in the conviction of an innocent person does. So who knows.

Another gem from Kratz’s response:

…if any injuries were suffered by the Plaintiff, all such injuries and damages were caused by her own conduct, negligence and behavior…

You can read a sampling Kratz’s text messages here. He’s quite charming.

Last week, I was part of “the right”, “doubling down” to defend Sarah Palin in the wake of the Tucson shootings. This week I’m a partisan, “leftist libertarian” who “hates the right and dislikes tea partiers.”

The way I shift personalities, it’s a wonder no one has yet taken the precaution of having me involuntarily committed.

My column this week looks back at the Sal Culosi case. Culosi was killed by a Fairfax, Virginia SWAT team five years ago this month. Last week, his family settled with the county for $2 million. As I argue in the column, a settlement that large in a hard-to-win lawsuit against a police officer is an admission of guilt, no matter how county officials will try to spin it.

My building manager Garth Shaw snapped this last week. It’s our building’s Webb Pierce-designed guitar-shaped swimming pool after a snowfall. I’m not much of a pool person. But I love living in a building that has a guitar-shaped swimming pool. It’s kitchy and ostentatious. But in an awesome way. I’ve heard stories that Johnny Cash, who at some point lived nearby, hated the thing, and actually sued to have it removed under some eyesore/nuisance ordinance. I have no idea if those stories are true. I hope they are.

Last week, Framingham, Massachusetts, District Court Judge Douglas Stoddart imposed a seal on the search warrants and return sheets for the raid in which police shot and killed 68-year-old Eurie Stamps. Stamps wasn’t a suspect in the drug raid, and he was unarmed when he was shot.

By impounding the returns, any information collected during the drug and shooting investigation remains in the court clerk’s office and can’t be examined by the public or press.

Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone’s office yesterday released no new information about Wednesday’s fatal shooting of Eurie Stamps Sr.

Leone also says the name of the police officer who shot Stamps won’t be released until after the investigation has been completed.

In related news, 27-year-old Natasha Sams said Stamps’ shooting and the refusal of law enforcement authorities to release information has motivated her to run for the Framingham Board of Selectmen.

His monologue at the Golden Globes last night slagged some of the most (self) important people in Hollywood. And it was funny!