In 1984, Thomas Haynesworth, then 18 and with no prior criminal record, was arrested after one victim in a series of five rapes over a month-long period around Richmond, Virginia, spotted him on the street and identified him as her assailant. The other four women eventually identified him in a photo lineup. He was convicted of three rapes, acquitted of a fourth, and the charges were dropped in the fifth. He has been in prison ever since. The victim IDs were the only evidence against him.

The problem is, the so-called “Black Ninja” rapes, which bore a close resemblance with those for which Hayneworth was convicted, continued well after Haynesworth was in cutsody. Nearly a year and at least a dozen rapes later, police arrested Leon Davis for those subsequent rapes. Davis was charged with 12 rapes, was convicted of three, and was sentenced to multiple life terms.

In 2005 Virginia Gov. Mark Warner ordered a review of thousands of rape cases after five men convicted of the crime were exonerated by DNA evidence. That review discovered that one of the three rapes for which Haynesworth had been convicted was committed by Davis. The two are similar in appearance.

Davis has always maintained his innocence. The problem for him is that there’s no testable DNA remaining from the other two rapes for which he was convicted.

At this point, the prosecutor’s office in Richmond believes Hayneworth is innocent, as do prosecutors in Henrico County, the site of the other rape. So does Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a guy who ran on law-and-order credentials.

But as the Washington Post points out, even when defense attorneys and prosecutors agree that a man has been wrongly convicted, the courts aren’t obliged to agree.

The Virginia Court of Appeals, which considers so-called Writs of Actual Innocence, has only once exonerated a convict in a case that didn’t have the certainty of genetic evidence. The court must be convinced that no jury would convict Haynesworth if it heard all the facts known today.

One victim is advocating for Haynesworth’s release. But another, a woman in a case without DNA, remains convinced that she identified the right man.

“Courts are very reluctant to reopen criminal convictions, for reasons of finality and because they worry that the new evidence may be less reliable than the evidence available at the time of trial,” said Brandon L. Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor who has studied exonerations.

It’s an impossibly high standard, and one that would likely have denied nearly all the 266 people exonerated by DNA testing had that testing not been available. But the flaws in the system that allowed those convictions to happen are obviously just as prevelant in cases where there’s no genetic material to test. Perhaps the most important thing DNA testing has shown us is that it’s time to rethink the premium that appeals courts put on finality.

A citizen in Raleigh, North Carolina presented the city a proposal to install traffic lights near his home. One city official responded by calling for the citizen to be investigated for what basically amounts to doing math without a license.

Cox and his North Raleigh neighbors are lobbying city and state officials to add traffic signals at two intersections as part of a planned widening of Falls of Neuse Road.

After an engineering consultant hired by the city said that the signals were not needed, Cox and the North Raleigh Coalition of Homeowners’ Associations responded with a sophisticated analysis of their own…

The eight-page document with maps, diagrams and traffic projections was offered to buttress their contention that signals will be needed at the Falls of Neuse at Coolmore Drive intersection and where the road meets Tabriz Point / Lake Villa Way.

It did not persuade Kevin Lacy, chief traffic engineer for the state DOT, to change his mind about the project. Instead, Lacy called on a state licensing agency, the N.C. Board of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors, to investigate Cox…

Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer…

Lacy said he had told the group last year that it should hire an engineer to make its case. He said he was surprised to see engineering-quality work in a report that was not signed by a licensed professional.

“When you start applying the principles for trip generation and route assignment, applying judgments from engineering documents and national standards, and making recommendations,” that’s technical work a licensed engineer would do, Lacy said.

Lacy is right. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if we let just regular, unlicensed people use sophisticated arguments when petitioning their government.

(Thanks to Michael Chaney for the link.)

• Alabama drug court requires the parents of enrolled teens to take drug courts, too.
• Hysterical headline of the day.
• Hot, impassoned fight in Maine over whoopee pie. It’s not nearly as dirty as it sounds.
• So it runs out that Redskins owner Daniel Snyer is kind of a dick.
• Okay, forget kind of. He’s totally a dick.
• The St. Petersburg Times also has a pretty skeptical take on the war on cops stuff.

In my Monday column debunking the “war on cops” meme currently working its way through the media, I noted that fatal attacks on police officer deaths have dropped pretty dramatically over the last 25-30 years. Yesterday a reader sent me a link to this mostly unfortunate discussion of the column at an online forum for police officers. The thread itself gets pretty vicious. But one poster in that thread points out that if you look at numbers from the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed & Assaulted database, non-fatal assaults on police officers are in decline as well.

A couple points. First, these figures are reported assaults, not convictions. Second, in my column I wrote that there are 850,000 cops on the beat. I got that figure from the Fraternal Order of Police. I suspect the variation is due to differing interpretations of who qualifies as a police officer. But if the figure for officers emloyed is actually higher than what you see in the table, then the percentage of police officers assaulted will be lower.

Overall, though, non-fatal assaults against law enforcement officers are in decline. Which means the downward trend in fatalities isn’t necessarily due to better body armor, bulletproof vests or other police equipment.

The Internet, cell phone cameras, and video have made police more accountable and brought more exposure to bad cops. I don’t doubt that this has fostered more skepticism of police authority, and even resentment at how infrequently bad actors held accountable. But there’s just no evidence that more criticism of law enforcement, less respect for authority, or rising anti-government sentiment are manifesting as increased violence against police officers.

I’ve written quite a bit about the cops vs. cameras issue over the last couple years. I can’t recall a story as egregious as this one, from the Miami New Times. It’s about four men who suffered the wrath of Miami police after they filmed a frightening confrontation with a cop who nearly killed them by cutting them off in traffic, then pulled them over, then screamed at them for filming the encounter.

That confrontation, filmed in 2009, was the first of dozens that Hammonds and three friends caught on tape. They’ve paid dearly, spending thousands on legal fees and tickets, and sleeping multiple nights in county lockup. They’ve even seen their faces plastered on a warning flyer sent to departments around Miami-Dade County…

They never planned to become police agitators. But when Bredwell tried to retrieve his seized Sony camera the day after that first incident, he says Miami Beach police claimed not to have it in the evidence room.

A week later, the friends returned to police headquarters to try again. This time, they brought a full assortment of cameras and mics. They shot footage of the cops stonewalling Bredwell again. When officers noticed the cameras, they arrested Hammonds and charged him with obstruction of justice, loitering, and trespassing. He says an officer grabbed him by his hair in an interrogation room and then locked him in a sweltering van for two hours in 90-degree heat…

Miami Police Department officers, meanwhile, say they only arrest camera-toting civilians like Hammonds when they harass cops and break the law. “When you go beyond filming to trying to piss off an officer, you’re subject to arrest,” says Delrish Moss, a department spokesman.

Sorry, but while “pissing off an officer” isn’t advisable, it also isn’t a crime. And if you arrest someone who merely pisses you off but has committed no underlying crime, you’re violating his rights and you’re violating the law.

It gets worse.

The day after Hammonds’s arrest, Miami Beach police printed a flyer with mug shots of Hammonds, Bredwell, and a friend, Christian Torres. Headlined “FYI Officer Safety,” it warned that the trio “were seen filming the Miami Beach Police Department” and were “extremely hostile” and “looking for a confrontation.” Anyone who spotted them “should use extreme caution.”

“They make us sound like terrorists for filming a protest,” Hammonds complains.

Sanchez, the Miami Beach Police Department spokesman, says the trio acted suspiciously. “[They] were claiming they were filming in part for a documentary, [but] they had no credentials,” Sanchez writes in an email statement. “Post 9/11, and in keeping with homeland security, the filming of any possible location which could be considered a target… arouses suspicion.”

Either way, the flyer was effective, the friends believe. In the months that followed, the three — along with a fourth member of their crew, Klemote McClean — were pulled over and detained more than a dozen times.

The group filmed almost all of the confrontations. Though their cameras were repeatedly seized, they’ve gotten all equipment back save for one camera, which the Miami Beach police claim to have no record of.

It goes on like that, including incidents where the men were arrested for filming police from their own property. There are also more quotes from police spokesmen claiming that by making video recordings, the four were trying to “incite” police. They’ve been arrested multiple times on vague, catch-all charges like resisting arrest or obstruction. The charges are always dropped.

I hope they consider filing a lawsuit. Florida is an all-party consent state, but the law does include the provision that the non-consenting party have an expectation of privacy. This is brazen, systematic abuse. The four are now selling a DVD of their encounters, titled Man vs. Pig. I wish they had picked a less inflammatory title. But if this article is accurate, you can hardly blame them for being angry.

• I had the same reaction after the Colts-Jets game.
• Here’s a soul-crushing photo essay. Just in case you needed one.
• Headline of the day.
• The drug war gets yet more depraved.
• I suppose one exists, but it’s hard to conceive of a scenario in which it would be justified to shoot a man while he’s handcuffed in the back of a police car.
• See if you can spot the future world leader who is undercover an undercover spy in this photo.
• Also, in this one.

In Philadelphia, a seven-year-old faces criminal charges for bringing a Nerf-like gun to school.

And in Virginia, a 14-year-old has been suspended and charged with assault for using a small tube to blow bits of plastic at his classmates.

So you’d think the leftists at Balloon Juice would be happy that there’s a journalist who devotes nearly all of his working hours to reporting on police misconduct, prosecutorial abuses, and other criminal justice outrages—outrages that, yes, disproportionately affect the very low-income and minority groups good leftists claim they represent. You’d think they’d be happy about this no matter what political views that journalist happened to hold.

But you see, I work for Reason. Which means I’m one of those glibertarians. So today we get a Balloon Juice post that not-so-subtly implies—in the headline, even—that I’m corrupt. Yeah. Corrupt. And let’s be honest here. If you’re suggesting that I’m corrupt in what I don’t write about, you’re also suggesting that the work I do produce is tainted. And therefore less than legitimate. Now if Balloon Juice were anything more than the cartoonish, unable-to-be-parodied exercise in partisan blogosphere hackery that it has become, I’d be a little honked off. But the site at this point is just an unfunny joke. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to indulge myself and take a couple hacks at this overripe, undulating fruit.

The evidence for my corruption is apparently that I didn’t take a break from the the writing I’ve done over the last several days about cops killing people, unsupported police propaganda, the government putting innocent people in prison, and the felony conviction of a low-income black woman in Ohio for trying to get her kids out of a dangerous, under-performing public school . . . in order to condemn a private security guard hired by the Koch Foundation for being rude to a journalist at last weekend’s private conference of free market bigwigs. I’m also in trouble because I haven’t registered my outrage that a liberal activist who tried to infiltrate said private conference, on private property, to which he was not invited, was asked to leave upon being discovered. Also, someone canceled his lunch reservation.

So let me state for the record: I hereby condemn the rude security guard for his rudeness. And for his empty threat of arrest. I’ll go even farther. I’ll go ahead and condemn rude private security guards everywhere. I also condemn any cretinous bastard who would dare trample the civil liberties and free speech rights of a political opponent by surreptitiously canceling his lunch reservation. Finally, I also condemn anyone who would ask a political opponent to leave a private conference on private property that said opponent has attempted to infil . . .   Wait. I can’t condemn that. That just makes good sense.

But all that other stuff. Consider it condemned. If you could see me right now, you’d see a (handsome) face seething with righteous anger.*

I hope the Balloon Juice crew and I can now put this pettiness aside and get back to our regular business. For me, that means back to the ol’ corporate whoring. When I first got the Google alert that the fine folks at Ballon Juice were again discussing me this afternoon, for example, I was researching a possible future column about a homeless whittler in Seattle who was shot and killed by a police officer.** I was thinking of pairing it with another story about a 74-year-old pastor and garden supply store owner in Spokane who was shot and killed by a cop who had trespassed onto the pastor’s property.*** So I’ll get back to doing that.

As for the Balloon Juice crew, I hope they can now go back to producing the kind of independent, free-thinking contributions to American political discourse we’ve come to expect from a blog uncorrupted by corporate interests. Such as raising money for politicians, calling people assholes, and hurling racial slurs at black people who don’t have acceptable political opinions.

Hope this clears things up!

(* Or possibly smiling.)

(** I’d like to thank the Whittling Lobby for their generous six-figure donation to my employer, which of course had nothing to do with my decision to look into this story.)

(*** Likewise, my decision to look into this story was in no way influenced by my all-expenses-paid trip to the 2010 Lawn & Garden Expo at the Terre Haute, Indiana, Knight’s Inn.)

Glad you asked.

My favorite: For the cost of the national debt, you could buy 1,105 giant foam “We’re #1″ fingers each for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

And it would probably still be more effective than the stimulus.

(Obligatory.)

Cato’s David Rittgers rounds up cases of terrorist “fusion centers” erring on the side of labeling, well, pretty much everyone, a potential terrorist.

The North Texas Fusion System labeled Muslim lobbyists as a potential threat; a DHS analyst in Wisconsin thought both pro- and anti-abortion activists were worrisome; a Pennsylvania homeland security contractor watched environmental activists, Tea Party groups, and a Second Amendment rally; the Maryland State Police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in a federal terrorism database; a fusion center in Missouri thought that all third-party voters and Ron Paul supporters were a threat; and the Department of Homeland Security described half of the American political spectrum as “right wing extremists.”

The ACLU fusion center report and update lay out some good background on these issues, and the Spyfiles report describes how monitoring lawful dissent has become routine for police departments around the nation.

I believe this is the part where right wingers justify including anti-war and environmental groups on these lists, and left wingers justify including Tea Partiers, anti-abortion activists, and Second Amendment advocates.

• The AtlanticWire is a good place to keep track of what’s happening in Egypt. Things appear to have taken a turn for the worse.
• Debunking the “anchor baby” smear.
• Fascinating study on impulse buying and where the first letter of your last name falls in the alphabet.
• When will America stand up in opposition to the media consolidation going on in our streaming porn?
• Google now takes you into the world’s great art museums.
• On giving the president an Internet “kill switch”: “Senator Susan Collins, the co-sponsor of the bill, insisted today that the legislation would not be used for censorship” Well okay, then! As long as Susan Collins pinkie swears.
• Over the weekend, the family of and attorney for Jeremy Marks held a press conference to denounce the massive police raid on his home. Bizarrely, I still haven’t seen any coverage of the raid outside of the socialist site Liberation.
• Single serving blog dedicated to soccer flops.

The video embed doesn’t seem to be working. But you can watch here.

• After The Wire.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation report finds systematic lawbreaking in FBI intelligence operations.
• Fascinating interview with Pamela Geller.
• Headline of the day (Obvious Division)
• Runner-up.
• Headline of the day. (“How Generous of Them” Division)
• A good lesson from Egypt for the people who criticize Oath Keepers. I’ll have an interview with OK founder Stewart Rhodes that will go online next week.
• Clever.
• Pretty stunning frankness from the paternalist Governors Highway Safety Association: Laws are more important than deaths.
• Apple amends its policy on water-damaged iPhones.
• ProPublica and Frontline have put together a massive new report on the country’s autopsy and death investigation systems. I’ll have more on this after I wade through it all.