• Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Here’s my favorite MLK essay, a defense of ignoring unjust laws and unrepentant extremism—nonviolent extremism, of course—in the face of government violence.
• Iowa State isn’t fond of grass. But not in the way you’re thinking.
• She should have told them there was some marijuana in the house.
• For political nerds: fun but unlikely constitutional crises.
• Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslem’s first act upon taking office? An executive order nullifying transparency laws requiring he and his aides to disclose their income. Great start!

The DEA has apologized for the wrong door raid in the Hudson Valley that I blogged about last week. Sort of.

John P. Gilbride, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration, issued a statement Friday clearing Spring Valley resident David McKay and his family of anything to do with the series of drug raids that took place early Thursday in Westchester and Rockland counties.

“We sincerely regret that while attempting to execute an arrest warrant for a member of this drug trafficking organization, the innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation,” Gilbride said.

“Though we take many precautions to prevent this type of incident from happening, drug investigations are very complex and involve many fluid factors,” Gilbride said. “DEA will continue to pursue these criminal organizations to protect the public from the scourge of drug trafficking.”

So . . . sorry McKay family. You’re just more collateral damage. Gilbride’s statement is also another wonderfully elusive use of the passive voice. (The DEA originally said the McKay family invited them in.) And to think we libertarians say government has a hard time admitting when it’s wrong. The apology was also issued not to the McKay family themselves, but through a press release.

A few other items of note:

First, Journal News reporter Jane Lerner actually looked into some of those precautions the DEA claims to take before launching these drug raids. For example, she was able to determine that David McKay actually works for the local government, and that the McKay family is listed in property records as owners of the home. They’ve owned the place since 1998. She also found that the McKays are foster parents, which required them to complete an application process that included fingerprinting and a background check. These would be the sorts of easily findable, publicly-available clues that should have tipped the DEA off to their pending mistake, and that you’d think a federal agency would have taken the time to look for before going ahead with a volatile, violent drug raid.

Second, there’s still the matter of threatening to kill the McKay family’s dogs. According to McKay, the threat was because the dogs were barking, after the house was secured. Which means this wasn’t even a case of cops dubiously claiming the poodle presented a mortal threat. The threat to shoot the family pets was pure intimidation. Again, this isn’t how you treat citizens with rights. It’s how you treat enemy combatants in a war zone. You terrify them, intimidate them, put the fear of God into them. You threaten to kill their pets right in front of them. That attitude also explains why, even after it was clear they had made a mistake, the police rebuffed David McKay when he asked for an explanation, telling him, “You’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow.”

Third, if there’s a bright spot in all of this, it’s the way local media is starting to cover these raids. Lerner did some more research, and was able to find documentation for a number of other mistaken raids in the area. (As often as I write about these raids here, I don’t believe I’ve written about any of the other incidents that Lerner found.)

I now get a phone call every few weeks from a local reporter covering a botched raid. (I’m quoted in the story linked above.) They’re seeking out critics, and they’re starting to view the cops’ after-the-fact excuses and explanations with more skepticism. That’s a start.

• One of the victims of the Tucson shootings issues death threat to a Tea Party leader. I don’t really know what to make of this. Other than that it’s sad.
• Sorry your infant daughter lived only an hour after birth. But you owe the government a $50 “death tax”.
• Mississippi’s autopsy system: still a mess.
• Fox responsible for another shooting.
• Bring back the woolly mammoth!
• Maryland man says he was pepper sprayed, arrested after trying to videotape a police officer on public property.

Righty blogger Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit mistakes closed captioning of Obama’s Tucson speech for authoritarian audience instructions. Ed Driscoll of Pajamas Media and conservative blogger Doug Ross then triumphantly run with the error.

It’s one thing when your biases cause you to overlook the obvious and post something silly. I’ve certainly done that. But all three have now been made aware of Hoft’s mistake. They’re refusing to correct their posts.

And so the public discourse gets a little bit dumber.

I don’t know any more than what was reported by the local paper. But this editorial sounds familiar:

[M]any of us know Kim Rotchford and his family. Rotchford is known as the physician who has taken into his care people with chronic pain or addictions for which others may have no good answer. He takes cases that others would choose not to take.

He is also the local physician who has put his time and his expertise into the service of our homeless and dispossessed through the founding and volunteer staffing of the JC MASH free medical clinic. Other docs help out, but everyone knows that clinic is the product of Rotchford’s calling to help the down and out.

We know that Rotchford and his family have been good citizens and good volunteers in this community for many years. Without pre-judging the investigative findings, we believe that Rotchford deserves the benefit of doubt from the justice system and from us as he proceeds into the legal ordeal ahead.

Unfortunately, taking cases that others choose not to take is often enough in itself to get yourself investigated. And of course all of Rotchford’s pain patients are now out of luck.

Those of you who think we need more government healthcare might keep in mind that when the feds can’t prove a case for drug distributionthey often fall back on Medicare fraud, which appears to be the impetus for this investigation. That is, they argue that billing Medicare for pain scripts DEA cops don’t think patients need becomes a criminal offense. That kind of intimidation will only get worse with more government oversight.

• The George Bluth budget plan.
• Sixth graders charged with “terroristic threats” for what appears to be a fake bomb map based on a video game.
• Cliff Kincaid: still an idiot.
• Former U.S. Attorney calls for civil rights investigation of Seattle police department.
• Here are two baby platypi.
• Oh, Michael Ramirez. You were so close to getting it right.
• Strange. Here’s another rape-y typo.
• Gift idea for that hard-to-buy-for Mississippi governor in your life.
• And you thought libertarians were being hypberpolic when we said the same logic behind the Four Loko ban would soon have regulators and Nanny Statists gunning for Irish coffee. Well . . . away we go.

Yesterday, my colleague Jacob Sullum posted a response to the pundits and politicians who say the Tucson murders make a strong case for involuntarily committing people who are “detached from reality” to mental institutions for treatment. Here’s what a society more inclined to commit offbeat people to mental institutions might look like in practice:

Chinemerem Eze, a Nigerian national attending Brooklyn College, believed that her landlord had hidden a camera in her apartment. When she asked school officials for help, they shipped her off to a psychiatric ward. Then she found the camera.

Eze is suing Brooklyn College for false imprisonment, among other things, over a 2008 episode in which she approached school administrators for help in dealing with issues she was having with her roommates and landlord at her Brooklyn apartment. According to the complaint, Eze believed that she was being “defamed on the internet” by her former roommates and that “her landlord at the time had installed a hidden camera in her bedroom.” Sounds nuts!

That’s what school psychologist Sally Robles thought. When Eze went to Brooklyn College’s Office of Campus and Community Safety Services to ask for help, security officers called Robles, who proceeded to ask Eze about her mental health history and whether she ever heard voices. When Eze protested that she was simply an international student asking the school’s security staff for help on dealing with a housing issue, Robles called an ambulance.

Eze was “forced” into the ambulance by school officials, and ended up being committed to Kings County Psychiatric Hospital for two weeks, where in addition to being made “physically and emotionally ill and subject to great humiliation,” she missed her final exams and was “terminated” by the school.

See also the stories of David Pyles and Adrian Schoolcraft.

Related: Apparently, our post-Tucson attention to political rhetoric now means that bloggers who criticize politicians get visits from the FBI.

In response to my post about yet another mistaken drug raid, in which police pointed their guns at a 13-year-old girl, threatened to shoot the family dogs, then, when they asked what had happened, told the victims to “read about it in the paper tomorrow,” Dave Kruger writes:

In this post, there is none of that vitriolic language that’s been in the headlines since the Arizona shooting. There is no name calling. Nothing about distrusting the government. No talk of targeting anyone. No finger pointing by one party about how the other party is wrecking the country. Nothing about a “Second Amendment solution”. No “Don’t Tread on Me” symbolism. Nothing about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants. Just a simple news item reporting an increasingly common event in an ordinary American city involving ordinary American citizens in their own ordinary American homes.

So, would someone please explain to me why jaw is tensely locked, my fists clenched tight, and my heart pounding in my chest?

It’s about a month old, but this Wall Street Journal article about Jabbar Collins, wrongly convicted for killing Rabbi Abraham Pollack in New York City in 1994, is equal parts inspiring, jaw-dropping, and infuriating. After his conviction, Collins spent his 15 years in prison teaching himself law in the prison library; then filing, re-filing, and appealing requests for information about his case; then finally breaking his case open by getting a witness to admit he had lied . . . while Collins posed as an investigator for the prosecution. Collins’ tenacity, resourcefulness, and determination in the face of long odds are inspiring. But the dark side of the article is the sheer mendacity of prosecutor Michael Vecchione (who of course has since been promoted to the appropriate-sounding title of the Brooklyn DA’s “chief of the rackets division”), the obstinacy of trial judge Robert Holdman, and the general indifference of the criminal justice system that put Collins away.

Excerpts don’t do the article justice, but here a few bullet points from the story worth emphasizing:

• Vecchione said at trial that none of the eyewitnesses who testified agaisnt Collins at trial received any reward for their testimony. As it turns out, all of them did.
• The man the prosecution claimed called 911 to report Pollack’s death, a “24 hour” drug user who later identified Collins at trial, tried to recant just before trial. That, he says, is when Vecchione began “yelling at me and telling me he was going to hit me over the head with some coffee table.” The Journal reports that the man was “threatened with prosecution, then locked up for a week as a material witness. When he agreed to testify, he said, he was taken from jail to a Holiday Inn, which he described as ‘paradise.’”
• When Collins’ information requests hit a dead end, he posed as a DA investigator and managed to get a witness to divulge that he had been rewarded for his testimony. Instead of focusing on the perjury and prosecutorial misconduct, Jude Holdman, “dismissed the appeal, declaring it to be ‘wholly without merit, conclusory, incredible, unsubstantiated, and, in significant part, to be predicated on a foundation of fraud.’” The Journal article adds, “For good measure, he barred Mr. Collins from filing future requests for information.”
• When Federal District Court Judge Dora Izirarry called for a hearing to hear from the witnesses who had recanted, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes defended Vecchione. When it became clear Collins had a case, Hynes’ office dropped the charges and freed Collins. But they couldn’t resist a final kick to the teeth, adding that the office’s “position, then and now, was that we believe in this defendant’s guilt.”

Collins now works as a paralegal in the office of the defense attorney who eventually helped him with his case. He has filed a civil rights suit against New York City, but Vecchione of course has absolute immunity. Which means he’ll get to keep prosecuting people. One of the people he won’t be prosecuting? Rabbi Abraham Pollack’s actual killer, who likely remains free.

The Onion has put up a nice appreciation of Layne Staley and the great 90s grunge band Alice in Chains. Their EP Jar of Flies is one of the most hauntingly beautiful albums I own. Here’s the gorgeous and appropriately solemn cut, “Don’t Follow.”

• Town kills off red light cameras because . . . they weren’t making enough money for Redflex.
• Attorneys ask judge to remove himself from a case. Judge refers attorneys to U.S. Attorney for possible prosecution.
• And now: Four Loko stings.
• Florida police chief charged for attempting to undermine the rape case against his friend.
• Study suggests cell phone use may improve driving.
• Knight Kiplinger wants to make 401(k)s  mandatory. Contributing to them, too. Really. Note the justification at the end. Hey, we can force people to purchase health care. So why not? The door has been thrown wide open. Expect more of this.
• I write about this stuff every day, yet sentences like this one never cease to blow my mind: “Tchachoua has the right to file charges in civil court and prove that he had the money legally, police said.”

Here’s a graphic MSNBC was using yesterday in its coverage of the Tucson shootings:

It’s a powerful image. I saw it at the gym on a number of muted televisions, and it stuck with me.

It’s also complete bullshit. There is zero evidence that political rhetoric had any influence on Jared Loughner. In fact, there’s increasing evidence that he had no interest in politics at all.  So does the truth simply not matter at MSNBC?

This is just an egregious assault on reality. Scarier: It seems to be working. Contrast the poll in that link to this one.

Spring Valley, New York:

A village resident said that police conducting drug raids early this morning targeted the wrong house where they roused his family out bed, pointed a machine gun at his 13-year-old daughter and threatened to shoot their poodle…

David McKay said he, his wife, 13-year-old daughter and his brother-in-law were sleeping at 5:30 a.m. when they heard banging on the door of their townhouse at 36 Sharon Drive. When they went to open the door, at least 10 police officers forced their way into the home, he said.

“Their guns were drawn, they were screaming ‘Where’s Michael, Where’s Michael,’ ” McKay recounted hours later in a telephone interview from Nyack Hospital, where he took his terrified daughter for treatment after she had an asthma attack and fainted following the ordeal.

McKay said he was still groggy from sleep but tried to explain that there was no one named Michael in the house.

“They pulled me outside in the freezing cold in my underwear, manhandle my wife, point a gun at my daughter and they won’t even tell me what they are doing in my house,” said McKay. “It was terrifying and humiliating beyond belief.”

It was part of a broad joint federal/local drug sweep for pot involving more than 200 cops from at least 13 different government agencies. More:

McKay said the officers forced his wife, Jamie, and daughter out of their beds. The family’s dogs were barking and police threatened to shoot them, McKay said.

McKay said he was uncertain how long the police were in his home at 36 Sharon Drive, but at one point he heard them discussing a nearby residence. When he took the dogs out for a walk a short time later, he saw police in front of that home, located on the same side of the street.

When the police were preparing to leave, McKay and his bewildered family asked them again what they were doing and why they entered the house.

“They wouldn’t say,” he recalled. “All they would say was ‘You’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow.’ “

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Kentucky v. King. The facts: Police lose sight of their suspect after he sold drugs to a confidential informant. The cops enter the breezeway to an apartment complex and conclude the suspect entered one of two apartments. They smell pot coming from one apartment. They knock, and hear what they say were sounds of people possibly destroying evidence. They kick the door down and find some pot, cocaine, and drug paraphernalia.

But as it turns out, they got the wrong apartment. Their suspect went into the other one. So the question is whether “exigent circumstances” permit police to enter a residence without a warrant even if the circumstances were created by lawful police actions.

The Washington Post write-up of the oral arguments includes this from Justice Scalia:

Justice Antonin Scalia said the police did nothing wrong. When they knocked on the door, the occupants could have answered and told police that they could not come in without a warrant.

“Everything done was perfectly lawful,” Scalia said. “It’s unfair to the criminal? Is that the problem? I really don’t understand the problem.”

Law enforcement, he said, has many constraints, “and the one thing that it has going for it is that criminals are stupid.”

And this from Justices Sotomayor and Ginsberg:

Some justices seemed troubled by the prospect of police wandering halls – “They go to the apartment building and they sniff at every door,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg proposed – to find cause to search.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor worried that agreeing with Farley would mean that police could always enter without a warrant if they thought drugs were being used on the other side, because police could always say they feared that the evidence would be destroyed.

I suppose it depends on how broadly the Court rules in favor of the police in the case, assuming that it does. But we’ve seen a similar phenomenon in no-knock raid cases. The exigent circumstances exception to the knock and announce rule, for example, has been used by police to justify forced entry both when a suspect doesn’t respond to a knock at the door within 10 seconds or so (he’s destroying evidence), and when the suspect immediately turns on a light or makes noises toward the door as police approach, which police have argued are indications that their cover has been blown, which then puts them in danger. The net result is that they’re taking down your door, and there isn’t much you can do about it either way.

• Canada Huck Finns Dire Straits.
• Fair enough.
• Iowa State Daily typo triggers campus-wide rape-fest.
• Haley Barbour compensates for dumb comments about segregation by suggesting black people get their own museum.
• In which Jack Shafer makes me consider getting a toupee.
• Better indicator that the end of America is nigh: Forever Lazy or Pajama Jeans?
• Last week, Canadian cops mistook a skunk smell for a marijuana grow. This week? It’s British cops vs. Guinea pigs.

Thanks to reader Robert Neinast for sending this ad, which appeared in the Columbus Dispatch.

In case you can’t read the fine print at the bottom, it says:

Paid for by: California Indian Nations Gaming Commission

That seems to be the takeaway from this Will Saletan piece.

Does the Tucson, Ariz., massacre justify tighter gun control? Don’t be silly. Second Amendment advocates never look at mass shootings that way. For every nut job wreaking mayhem with a semiautomatic weapon, there’s a citizen with a firearm who could have stopped him…

The new poster boy for this agenda is Joe Zamudio, a hero in the Tucson incident. Zamudio was in a nearby drug store when the shooting began, and he was armed…

But before we embrace Zamudio’s brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let’s hear the whole story. “I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,” he explained on Fox and Friends. “I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.” Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. “And that’s who I at first thought was the shooter,” Zamudio recalled. “I told him to ‘Drop it, drop it!’ ”

But the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. “Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess,” the interviewer pointed out…

The Arizona Daily Star, based on its interview with Zamudio, adds two details to the story. First, upon seeing the man with the gun, Zamudio “grabbed his arm and shoved him into a wall” before realizing he wasn’t the shooter. And second, one reason why Zamudio didn’t pull out his own weapon was that “he didn’t want to be confused as a second gunman.”

This is a much more dangerous picture than has generally been reported. Zamudio had released his safety and was poised to fire when he saw what he thought was the killer still holding his weapon. Zamudio had a split second to decide whether to shoot. He was sufficiently convinced of the killer’s identity to shove the man into a wall. But Zamudio didn’t use his gun. That’s how close he came to killing an innocent man. He was, as he acknowledges, “very lucky.”

That’s what happens when you run with a firearm to a scene of bloody havoc. In the chaos and pressure of the moment, you can shoot the wrong person. Or, by drawing your weapon, you can become the wrong person—a hero mistaken for a second gunman by another would-be hero with a gun. Bang, you’re dead. Or worse, bang bang bang bang bang: a firefight among several armed, confused, and innocent people in a crowd.

This seems like a strange interpretation of what happened. Zamudio saw violence. He was carrying. So yes, he’s naturally going to ready his gun. But he didn’t draw, point, or shoot before he assessed the situation. He did exactly what he’s supposed to do. I’m not sure how that’s an argument for gun control.

Contrary to stereotypes, legal gun owners tend to be sticklers about safety. For example, I received about a dozen emails and Facebook messages from gun owners chastising me for our October 2010 cover, which shows a woman violating gun safety rules by having her finger on the trigger.

Saletan notes that these mistakes happen in war all the time. I’m not sure that analogy works. While the military certainly tries to prevent collateral damage and friendly fire on the battlefield, it’s also understood that they’re inevitable and expected consequences of war. Accidental shootings and mistaken identity don’t generally result in criminal charges. The same goes for cops, who are rarely even disciplined for honest mistakes, much less charged. On the other hand, most people who carry legally do know that they will face severe consequences for responding to a violent incident by drawing and firing on the wrong person. And those consequences will likely include jail time.

Perhaps the wild west scenarios Saletan lays out have happened, but if they have I haven’t heard about them. And I would think “would-be hero gun owner shoots, kills wrong guy” would be the sort of story that would have generated some headlines.

Christopher Drew, whom I’ve written about here and here, is a Chicago artist who was arrested in December 2009 for recording his arrest by a Chicago police officer. Drew set out to get arrested. He was protesting a Chicago city ordinance that prevented him from selling art on city streets without a permit. He says he recorded the arrest to document it for the lawsuit he was planning to file to challenge the ordinance.

But as regular readers will know by now, it is illegal to record anyone in Illinois without their permission. And that includes on-duty police officers in public spaces. So Drew has been charged with felony eavesdropping. He faces 4-15 years in prison if convicted.

Drew has already challenged the law on constitutional grounds in Cook County Circuit Court. He lost. But he had another hearing last month in which he argued that the contents of his recorder shouldn’t be admissible in court because they were obtained by police without a warrant. Regardless of the merits of that particular argument, some of the arguments raised by Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney Jeff Allen during that hearing are ridiculous. (You can read the transcript here (PDF)).

As it turns out, the officer who confronted and arrested Drew was doing foot patrol on a counterterrorism beat. (Why the officer would put that charge on hold to take the time to confront and arrest a guy for selling $1 art is a good question for another time.) He doesn’t come right out and say it, but Allen insinuates throughout the hearing that Drew posed a terrorism threat because his recording device was picking up audio from the counterterrorism officer’s radio. Allen also says at one point that because the device was still on Drew’s person and recording once he was taken to the police station, Drew had effectively planted a bug in the police department.

It’s a tortured, asinine argument, but you can see how it might have some sway with a jury. We can’t have people recording cops, even recording their own arrests, because the recording devices might pick up police chatter about drug informants, counterterrorism strategies, and other secret information about tactics and undercover operations.

As I’ve written before, this law, and these arguments in particular, are especially troubling in Chicago, which has seen a number of police scandals over the years, including several in which audio and video recordings have shown police to have lied, both in court and in police reports. There’s also a still-unraveling scandal going back to the 1980s in which police officers beat and tortured suspects in the police station.

• Germany falls in love with a cross-eyed opossum.
• Georgia Governor: Putting drug addicts in jail is “draining our treasury.”
• Crazy video of the flooding in Australia.
• The Village Voice continues its terrific reporting on NYPD, this time looking at the agency’s inept, sometimes corrupt internal affairs bureau.
• Chicken owners face jail time.
• And now: A porn parody of the Simpsons.
• Stupid Tucson reaction, Dems edition: Rep. Chellie Pingree tells GOP to take the phrase job killing out of the name of their health care repeal bill.
• Stupid Tucson reaction, GOP edition: Rep. Peter King wants all guns banned within 1,000 feet of a member of Congress. In edition to the obvious sense of privilege on display here, how in the hell would this even be enforced? Would someone with a carry permit just have to know where every member of Congress is at all times, and adjust his own movements accordingly?

Here’s my appearance on The Alyona Show last week.

. . . all just “white people problems.”

As for gun control, ask any black person living in a high-crime urban area if the inability to legally purchase a handgun is a “white person’s problem.” I have. And it isn’t.

This follow-up is hilariously ignorant, too. The most well-known libertarian public interest law firm in the country spends half or more of its resources fighting bullshit power grabs by huge corporations.

Talking about photographing and recording the police . . .

• The comments to this recipe are hilarious. (Hat tip: Trey Garrison.)
• Happy 50th birthday, military-industrial complex!
• Daily Beast writer suggests that 2009 DHS report about right-wing extremist groups might have prevented the Tucson shootings if it had been taken seriously, quotes an academic who criticizes those who criticized the report at the time . . . then acknowledges there’s no real connection between Jared Loughner and right-wing extremism. There’s been a lot of this sort of commentary. “Okay, so maybe there’s no evidence of a connection to my favorite scapegoat. But dammit, I’m going to go ahead and make it anyway.”  It’s really pretty shameless.
• Good discussion of rhetoric and political violence here.
• Weird back-and-forth between Roger Ebert and Huffington Post.
• Here’s a bit more from my friend Libby Jacobson (quoting from a friend of hers) on that police brutality incident on the D.C. Metro last fall. I’m a little surprised we didn’t hear more protest from feminist groups about this. I mean, it happened in D.C. And you have a cop who tackles a woman, by all appearances for backtalking him, then forces himself on top of her, hikes up her skirt in the process, then continues to lay on her while yelling at her to “stop resisting”. It’s pretty striking to watch.

Enjoy!

(Hat tip: Jonathan Blanks.)

Here’s my appearance on FreedomWatch last week.