In Tennessee, a big drug bust is in jeopardy after a federal judge found that police had no reason for the traffic stop that led to the subsequent search and arrest:

It should have been a victory for Tennessee narcotics policing. Drug task force agents see a car zoom past on Interstate 65 South in Robertson County — prime conditions for the kind of pretextual traffic stop that could lead to a drug search. Indeed, a search of the late-model Ford sedan reveals that the two Hispanic men from Dayton, Ohio, are drug mules who’ve been paid a pittance to risk transporting a half-kilo of heroin down a known drug corridor . . .

Instead, Lt. Shane Daugherty, a team supervisor with the 17th Judicial Drug Task Force and perhaps one of the most high-profile narcos in the state, now finds his own credibility in question. Meanwhile, the Ruizes are all but ready to walk out of jail as free men. With one ruling, federal district Judge Aleta Trauger rendered the evidence Daugherty discovered off limits and the prosecution’s case against the cousins virtually unwinnable.

The message Trauger’s memo sends to the agent and the Tennessee law enforcement community in general is clear: Have probable cause nailed down — or suffer the consequences in court. At issue is not whether one or both of the Ruizes were knowingly transporting heroin, but whether they were ever speeding in the first place.

The article goes on to detail how the dash cam and other evidence strongly suggests the Ruizes were not speeding, and that Daugherty pulled them over on little more than a hunch. He has also since changed his story, a couple times.

Critics of the Exclusionary Rule argue that it only protects the guilty. And sure enough, here you have the likely outcome that a couple drug runners—and the drug distributor they gave up—will go free.

But what about all the innocent, likely brown or black people Daugherty also pulled over on a hunch? I suppose it’s possible that every illegal stop Daugherty made solely on instinct turned up drug runners, but that seems unlikely. The fact that his dash cam was set to begin recording only after he turned on his lights—conveniently leaving out whatever traffic violation led to his decision to pull the motorist over in the first place—suggests that this wasn’t his first illegal stop. Most of the innocent people harassed by such stops aren’t likely to file a complaint, much less a lawsuit. Even if they have the inclination to sue, thanks to qualified immunity they aren’t likely to find an attorney to take their case. That’s because even in the unlikely event they can get past qualified immunity, it’s unlikely that a judgment for an illegal roadside search would win enough in damages to make a lawsuit worthwhile. It would take a group like the ACLU, amassing dozens of plaintiffs, to have any real effect. (The ACLU has filed and won such suits. But they certainly don’t have the resources to address this stuff everywhere it happens.)

So without the Exclusionary Rule (and frankly, even with it), there’s little to keep Tennessee cops from illegally pulling over and harassing innocent motorists. In fact, if you’ll remember back to that Nashville TV news investigation on asset forfeiture last month, there’s a strong financial incentive in favor of profiling motorists. I suppose we could fall back on internal discipline—that new police professionalism Justice Scalia is fond of bringing up. But how many police agencies are going to seriously discipline a cop for making pretext stops if every 10th or 20th such stop results in tens of thousands of dollars for his department?

The Exclusionary Rule certainly isn’t ideal. But it does at least serve as some check on Fourth Amendment violations. It’s really the only check. Daugherty’s career-making bust may now be a career-ending one, especially if he’s designated a “Brady cop.”

Yes, an unsavory character may duck charges in the process, but that’s what gets the public’s attention, which is what forces change. The bigger the fish that gets away, the more attention the Fourth Amendment violation that led to the arrest gets in the press, the more embarrassment subsequently cast on the law enforcement agency in question, the greater the likelihood that said agency will better train its cops in the future (or, if you’re cynical, change its unofficial policy). A cop the Nashville Scene says is one of the most high-profile narcos in the state is now fighting for his career. You can bet that the state’s drug cops now know that there’s a federal district court judge who’s growing suspicious of the way they operate. That means less harassment of innocent motorists.

(In less encouraging news, the Louisiana Supreme Court just went the other way, refusing to throw out evidence gathered after a search based on an police officer’s hunch and the old “furtive gesture” routine.)

Venice Beach, California.

• In case you needed another reason to hate politics. That first paragraph is pretty fantastic, though.
• Everything Newt Gingrich knows.
• Why don’t you have a seat over there, Chris Hanson. Karma is delicious.
• See what you’ve done, New York?
• America’s post-9/11 wars expected to cost well over $4 trillion.
• Columnist who defends Righthaven copyright trolls copies content without getting permission from its author.
• Go the Fuck to Sleep illustrator authors pamphlet on jury nullification.
• “It’s different when we do it.”
• Somehow, libertarians are to blame for some dumb survey showing that Texas college students think gay professors are biased. Or something. It it me, or is Gawker damned-near unreadable these days?

This story is actually from a couple years ago, but someone just uploaded the news clip to YouTube. It’s worth revisiting, if for no other reason than to watch the police chief compliment the “professionalism” of a SWAT team that shot up the wrong home—a home filled with six children. He then praised them for refusing to retreat when they came under fire . . . from an innocent man.

Venice Beach, California.

From TechDirt:

Last week’s big LulzSec (pre-disbandment) dump of Arizona police info apparently included some documents telling police to search the iPhones of arrestees for specific apps, including OpenWatch, a simple app for recording people (targeted at authorities) without it displaying on the phone that they’re being recorded. The police were also told to look for speed trap identifying apps and an app that lets people spoof caller ID numbers. As we’ve discussed a few times, there are some legal questions about whether or not cops can just search your iPhone during, say, a routine traffic stop, but tragically a few courts have said it’s fine. That seems rather troubling, as the cops can search your phone after just a routine traffic stop… and then potentially get you in more trouble just because they don’t like the types of apps you have?

Separately, the article notes that the Justice Department has been sending around notices to local law enforcement, telling them to be aware that iPhone users have a feature that lets them remotely wipe their phones. This is part of the mobile me service, and the wiping has a perfectly legitimate purpose: to let someone who has lost their phone or had it stolen, to wipe the data from the phone. It’s pretty useful, really. But, to police who are seizing phones and want to search them later, they’re scared that evidence can be destroyed this way, so the Justice Department is telling them to store the phone in Faraday bags to keep them disconnected from any network, so they can’t receive the “wipe” signal.

• Interesting article questioning the notion that universities are engines of economic growth.
• Guys with video equipment get stranded at an airport. Hijinks ensue. Interview with them here.
• More than 18 months later, Fairfax Police Department fires the cop who killed David Masters.
• Democrats find a portion of the Constitution they’d actually like to enforce.
• Headline of the day.
• New doubts in the Amanda Knox case.
• The feds’ case against John Edwards is looking increasingly shallow.
• Charges against Emily Good, the Rochester, New York, woman arrested for recording a police officer, have been dropped. No word on whether the cops who arrested her, or those who engaged in petty retribution against neighbors who stood up for her, will be disciplined.
• Civil rights group demands answers in the police shooting of William Cooper.

From the Seattle Times, a story as amazing as it is infuriating:

For a quarter century Greenberg testified as an expert in forensic psychology, an inscrutable field with immense power. Purporting to offer insight into the human condition, he evaluated more than 2,000 children, teenagers and adults. His word could determine which parent received custody of a child, or whether a jury believed a claim of sexual assault, or what damages might be awarded for emotional distress.

At conferences and in classrooms, in Washington and beyond, he taught others to do what he did. He became his profession’s gatekeeper, quizzing aspirants, judging others’ work, writing the national-certification exam. His peers elected him their national president.

But his formidable career was built upon a foundation of hypocrisy and lies. In the years since Greenberg’s death, while court officials wrestled over his estate, The Seattle Times worked to unearth Greenberg’s secrets, getting court records unsealed and disciplinary records opened.

Those records are a testament to Greenberg’s cunning. They show how he played the courts for a fool. He played state regulators for a fool. He played his fellow psychologists for a fool. And were it not for a hidden camera, he might have gotten away with it.

It’s another lesson in fraudulent self-proclaimed forensics experts, but also in the perils of the larger problem of “the cult of expertise.”

Last year, I made some suggestions about features smart phone aps would need to add to make them more useful in recording government officials.

At the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes about a couple new aps that hit the mark:

Which is what makes two new apps, CopRecorder and OpenWatch, and their Web component, OpenWatch.net, so interesting. They are the brainchildren of Rich Jones, a 23-year-old Boston University graduate who describes himself as “pretty much a hacker to the core.” Flush with cash and time from a few successful forays into the app market, nine months ago Jones decided to devote some of his time to developing what he calls “a global participatory counter-surveillance project which uses cellular phones as a way of monitoring authority figures.”

CopRecorder can record audio without indicating that it’s doing so like the Voice Memos app does. It comes with a built-in uploader to OpenWatch, so that Jones can do “analysis” of the recording and scrub any personally identifying data before posting the audio. He said he receives between 50 and 100 submissions per day, with a really interesting encounter with an authority figure coming in about every day and a half.

The article goes on to describe an encounter in which a defense attorney uses the ap to record cops violating his rights at a DWI checkpoint.

I owe John Cole of Balloon Juice an apology. I figured he’d just ignore the 96-page special issue of Reason featuring 23 articles devoted to the many problems with the criminal justice system. To my knowledge, it’s the most in-depth treatment of the criminal justice system any public policy or current events magazine has published to date (the Economist and The American Prospect have also addressed the topic in a series of articles, but not in an entire issue).

I figured Cole would ignore the “Criminal Injustice” issue because it doesn’t fit into the “libertarians are selfish assholes who only care about themselves” nonsense he’s always foaming at the mouth about. Sure enough, a couple weeks after the issue came out, he rolled out another libertarian bashing post, but made no mention of the issue. I suppose it’s possible he wasn’t aware of it. But if you’re going to say libertarians only devote time and energy to issues that benefit themselves, you should probably at least first look for some evidence that might contradict your thesis, no?

But as it turns out, I should have waited a bit longer. A week ago, Cole finally made Balloon Juice readers aware of the criminal justice issue. Okay, so the entire package only garnered one line in yet another silly Cole rant, populated with the usual straw men, about how libertarians are horrible, awful people because they favor policies that are different than the policies favored by John Cole. And he didn’t really acknowledge the issue so much as obliquely reference a single article from it—in this case, an article about prison rape. And he didn’t really acknowledge that article, or even link to it, so much as bring it up so he could quickly and blithely dismiss it as, in the grand scheme of things, one of those unimportant peripheral issues libertarians sometimes obsess about. (I’d imagine that actual victims of prison rape—very few of whom would likely describe themselves as libertarians—probably disagree with Cole on this point.) Oh, also, in the same post, Cole links to another article that criticized another article that mentioned the “Criminal Injustice” issue. So there’s that.

But hey, Cole did at least, sort of, in a roundabout way, in the course of writing another post attacking libertarians, hint at the fact that the criminal justice issue of Reason exists. In Balloon Juice world, this is about as close to intellectual honesty as you’re going to get. So let’s give some credit where credit is due!

In this editorial about the ATF, the Washington Post writes that gun owners are “[c]oncerned to the point of paranoia about the erosion of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

This would be the same newspaper that’s published in a city that, until it was rebuked by the Supreme Court, made it all but impossible for its citizens to buy or own a gun. The Post supported those laws, of course.

The same ed board shows today that it really isn’t all that concerned about the First Amendment, either.

• NRO’s Kathryn Jean-Lopez: New York gay marriage law, passed by an elected legislature, signed by an elected governor, is like something you’d see in North Korea.
• This looks like it could be pretty good.
• The strange priorities of Forrest Allgood: He charges a woman who miscarried with murder, but not a woman who twice ran over a bicyclist.
• NY Dept. of Agriculture requires vendors at farmer’s markets to get a “food processing” license in order to sell sliced cheese.
• Chilling tale of an L.A. man wrongly accused of a heinous crime.
• Two of the three highest wage earning counties in America—and five of the top 13—are in the Washington, D.C. area.

So the reason I was in L.A. this weekend was to attend the L.A. Press Club Awards. It turned out to be a good night.

Reason Magazine’s Radley Balko, who was Print  Journalist of the Year (circulation under 50,000), was also named Best of Show Journalist of the Year and received $1,000.

I knew I was nominated for the first award. The second was a pleasant surprise. I had to give a short, impromptu speech, which I pulled off with awkwardness and nervousness. But both are really nice honors. My former colleagues at Reason hauled in two other wins, along with several second places and honorable mentions.

Fun part: I got to meet Justified‘s Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) and had drinks with Little Carmine from The Sopranos (Ray Abruzzo). So in all, a pretty great weekend in L.A.

MORE: Here’s the full list of winners. Nice judge comments about your Agitator:

Radley Balko is one of those throw-back journalists that understands the power of groundbreaking reporting and how to make a significant impact through his work. Time and time again, his stories cause readers to stop, think, and most significantly, take action.

 

My final contribution to the Reason “Criminal Injustice” issue is now online.

It’s “dishonor roll” of  bad prosecutors, plus praise for three prosecutors who do their job well.

In this post, Gawker’s Jeff Neumann calls Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes a “racist”, without any supporting evidence whatsoever. The poorly-reported Mother Jones article he links to makes a number of questionable allegations and implications against Rhodes and his organization, but even that article doesn’t imply that he’s racist.

I know that Gawker is more about smug and smart-ass than serious commentary, but there ought to be at least some concern about accuracy, no?

My interview with Rhodes here.

(Via Lucy Steigerwald)

• Another public relations triumph for TSA.
• Good point.
• Cops disciplined, but not fired, for locking teenagers in a van for more than 12 hours. We aren’t allowed to know how they were discipline . . . due to regulations protecting their privacy.
• Another argument for federalism.
• Taxpayers continue to pay for former Maricopa County Prosecutor Andrew Thomas’s defense against ethics charges.
• Washington state will more aggressively snoop on its citizens’ health records. All in the name of protecting them from themselves.
• Speaking of wholesale failure at public relations . . .
• Ken at Popehat gives the proper reaction to Hillary Clinton’s insulting “Whose side are you on?” comment.
• Jerry Seinfeld takes over the world.

I’m staying with a friend in L.A. this weekend. I decided I’d buy her a nice bottle of bourbon to thank her for the hospitality. So I walked to a liquor store this afternoon, where the following conversation (roughly) took place:

Me: Do you have any Booker’s?

Clerk: Booker’s?

Me: Yes.

Clerk: No. We don’t have that. What is Booker’s?

Me: It’s a good bourbon.

Clerk: What is . . . “bourbon”?

To be fair, he didn’t speak the best English, so maybe that was the problem. But still. If today were the plot to a horror movie, this would be the part where the protagonist realizes he heas just slipped into an alternate and terrifying universe.

Seems like we got a pretty good response to the meetup post.

So let’s shoot for a place called Waterloo and City tonight at 7pm.

Address: 12517 West Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90066.

A Charlotte police officer threatens to arrest a North Carolina blogger for attempted photography. She then asks for the cop’s name. He gives her someone else’s. She calls to complain, at which point a Charlotte PD rep completes the triple play of police buffoonery by lying to her about the law.

All-around, a pretty stellar exercise in bullying police work by the CMPD.

Also, I am posting this from the sky. How flippin’ wonderful is in-flight WiFi?

Answer: Pretty flippin’ wonderful.

• New York legalizes gay marriage. In protest, Newt Gingrich promptly divorces his third wife.
• Washington Post editorial denounces the D.C. cab commission arrests.
• Supreme Court again upholds Confrontation Clause right to confront crime lab witnesses. Once again, I was skeptical about how Sotomayor would come down on criminal justice issues. So far, I’m happy to say I was (mostly) wrong.
• The state of Texas is making a nice little rake on the stuff they take from you at TSA checkpoints.
• Headline of the day.
• Puppycide in New Orleans.
• Caught the pilot of this show. Thought at first it could be a one-gag trick. But it might have some potential. I laughed.
• More disturbing signs that the TSA gropefests are moving outside the airport. The searches of private passengers cars near ports is particularly enraging. Also, can’t wait for the Mark Ames expose on how Mother Jones is also on the Koch, anti-TSA payroll.

. . . a reporter from WTOP radio tried to visit the Washington, D.C. cab commission this afternoon to inquire about Wednesday’s arrests of two journalists for recording an open meeting. Here’s what happened:

In an effort to get an explanation about the incident, WTOP’s Mark Segraves went to the commission office Friday and was thrown out by security. The door to the office was subsequently locked, and the lights turned off — leaving the entire cab commission office in the dark.

If the D.C. Taxicab Commission were a four-year-old child, I believe this is what we’d call a temper-tantrum. The article also notes that the D.C. attorney general’s office will not be pursuing charges against Jim Epstein and Pete Tucker. That’s great. But the office ought to be debating whether to file charges against the cab commission officials and cops who ordered and carried out the arrests.

The video below is from a Rochester, New York, neighborhood meeting in support of Emily Good, the woman arrested for videotaping a traffic stop from her front yard. So Rochester police sent four squad cars to ticket the cars of meeting attendees who parked more than 12 inches from the curb. Yes, they even brought a ruler.

That’s some staggering vindictiveness, officers.

By the way, due to a $50 million budget shortfall, the city of Rochester is considering cutting 27 full-time police positions. If the the cops in Rochester have time to carry out petty grudges against citizens who dare to show support for a woman who was illegally arrested, maybe the city ought to consider cutting 40 or 50 positions instead. They could start with the cops in this video.

(Via Boing Boing)

MORE: Local news writeup here, with the obligatory, transparently ridiculous defense from the local police union rep.

The final installment of my HuffPost series is now online.

Today’s topics: sex offenders, eyewitness testimony, and wrongful convictions.

Johnson was on for most of Alyona’s show yesterday, and gave a comprehensive rundown of his platform. The interview is broken into three parts:

• That Rochester, New York, woman who was arrested for recording a police officer has been charged with “obstructing government administration.”
• Ah . . . campaign season, when the media starts losing its collective mind.
• Head-slapper of the day.
• Here’s something else for you to worry about. Also, this would make a pretty awesome B-horror movie.
• A love that dare not bark its name. (Yes, I stole that headline.)
• In case you needed a reminder that government is capable of doing some pretty horrendous things.
• Obama vs. the free press.