Agents Raid Wrong House in Sterling Heights: MyFoxDETROIT.com

A commenter who seems to come over here from Balloon Juice (at least according to previous comments left under his IP address) posits the real reason I took an interest in Cory Maye:

well, if a story advanced by libertarians and left wingers (Mr. Blako’s interviews, according to Mr. maye’s Wiki page, are with lefties, not righties) helps make Reason seem like a neutral arbiter of evetns (instead of a Republican functionary organization), then more people might listen to them and the Koch brothers financing of Cato, AEI, and Reason will help them have more influence and this more wealth.

[sic all around]

Well, shit. The gig is up. I’m sure I’ll hear about this during tomorrow morning’s Koch conspiracy conference call.

A few months ago, I got a call from a reporter at the Economist asking what I thought about a proposal in the U.K. to make local police chief an elected position. The measure failed, but I thought it was a pretty interesting question. The more I’ve thought about that question since, the more I’m unsure of the answer.

I’ve written a bit before about the problems with over-politicizing the criminal justice system. When you look at prosecutors, for example, guys like Forrest Allgood or Ed Jagels have continued to get reelected despite some pretty egregious misconduct, both by them and their subordinates. And the last 30 years have basically been one long lesson in the perils of mob-based criminal justice policy.

But then, the courts and bar associations have also done very little to discipline and hold rogue prosecutors accountable. While the old axiom that a thinly disguised Bill of Rights probably couldn’t win as a ballot referendum in most states today is probably true, appointed judges haven’t exactly gone out of their way to preserve, say, the Fourth Amendment, either. If it’s a bad idea to look to the electoral process for accountability, where should we look?

We have started to see at least some voter backlash, most notably the two judges in Colorado whom voters refused to retain after learning the two had withheld exculpatory evidence in an innocence case during their time in the DA’s office. The reelection of Dallas County, Texas, DA Craig Watkins was encouraging, too.

I’ve seen quite a bit of academic research into the effects of electing judges (most of it critical), but I’ve seen very little on what effect elections have on prosecutors, and if electing them is preferable to, say, having a governor appoint district attorneys the way a president appoints U.S. attorneys. It would be also interesting to see studies comparing sheriffs (who are generally elected) to police chiefs (who are generally appointed), and what effect each process has on effectiveness, accountability, and civil rights. I haven’t been able to find any such studies.

So what say you, readers? Would choosing more of our criminal justice officials through elections be a good or bad thing? If not through elections, how do we hold bad police chiefs and prosecutors more accountable?

Harless is the Canton, Ohio cop who went nuts on a conceal carry permit owner during a traffic stop in June. There’s now a second video of a 2010 stop in which Harless again repeatedly threatens to kill the people he has just pulled over. Watch below. It’s well and good that he’s now under investigation. But why did it take these videos going public for that to happen?

• Bloodshed in Syria.
• Real lawsuit over virtual horses.
• TSA agent flashed badge, harasses slow driver.
• Honoring those who stood against torture.
• Hatching baby crocodiles.
• The saddest thing you’ll read today.

A TV producer forwarded me this email, which Mr. Steinberger sent to him. I’m guessing he sent it to quite a few other producers, too. I’ve emphasized my favorite part.

As a Celebrity Criminal Defense Attorney, Former Prosecutor, Law Professor, and Judge Pro Tem, Attorney [Jeffrey] Steinberger can provide expert legal commentary regarding any story involving any Celebrity Arrests, Conviction or Sentencing (i.e. Drug Rehab; Jail Time; Alternative Sentencing, etc.).

Attorney Steinberger is available to discuss all civil matters as well and any other legal matter not mentioned above.

Attorney Steinberger is able to take a position on either side of any case– defense or prosecution.

In Attorney Steinberger’s 15 years of doing “hits” for all the major news channels, I have provided legal commentary for CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and ABC, NBC, CBS news networks, as well as CourtTV, Inside Edition, Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, and Showbiz Tonight.

More on cable news here.

(*I apologize in advance to any whores who might (justifiably) be offended by me including Mr. Steinberger among their number.)

Forgot to put this up yesterday. Here’s track six from our Agitator playlist. Cinderella’s “Shelter Me.”

• Taser International comes up with a new, more painful way for governments to hurt people.
• Speaking of which, file this under “not remotely surprising.”
• The U.S. isn’t the only cash-strapped country still foolishly arresting pot smokers.
• Horrifying police brutality story of the day. This is not a repeat of yesterday’s story.
• Apple has more cash on hand than the U.S. Treasury. I can’t decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
• Community succumbs to predator panic after grandfather spotted taking pictures of his grandson in a park.
• White people (not) dancing to 50 Cent.

Really nice report by Kaelyn Forde.

Also, here’s an interview with Ben Vernia, one of Cory’s attorneys:

• Horrifying police brutality story of the day.
• Trying, and failing, to count the number of federal crimes.
• This week in the erosion of protections for the accused.
• More bad legislating in wake of the Casey Anthony verdict.
• Jury nullification pamphleteer sentenced for “indirect criminal contempt.”
• Puppy fakes her own death.

Here’s Cory Maye talking with RTV at Saturday’s homecoming party.

Mother criminally charged for illegally boarding a school bus . . . because she thought her kid was dying.

Other kids were standing over the kindergartner’s assigned seat, yelling that Xander was slumped over.

“Help, he’s not moving,” she recalled during a recent court hearing. “We can’t wake him up.”

So she ran to the bus, up the steps and to the landing. The driver told her she couldn’t get on the bus. It’s against the law.

Keener kept going. “My focus was on my son,” she told a judge.

What happened on that bus Dec. 15 has earned Keener a misdemeanor charge of unlawfully entering a school bus. She’s now awaiting trial in Perry County Court.

The bus company remembers the story a little differently, and reported the incident — as they are required by law — to the state police because the driver asked Keener to leave the bus and she refused.

They say no one was screaming ‘help,’ that Xander was sleeping, like he had before and the driver wasn’t given enough time to handle the situation herself.

“Everyone’s focused on, he wasn’t really sick,” said Keener’s attorney Jeffrey B. Engle. “How do you know that? He could be choking on a Jolly Rancher. I can hop a fence to save someone who is drowning, even if it says ‘Keep Out’ if the harm sought to be avoided is greater than the possible violation of the crime.”

Keener faces up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. The prosecutor says the bus company urged him to press charges. The bus company denies that. But here’s the best line by the idiot prosecutor:

“Most parents aren’t a problem, but what do you do when a … sex offender wants to get on the bus and get his kids off? We need to have that protection in place.”

He’s right. I mean, you let this one mother who thought her kid was dying duck the law, and the next you thing you know, sex offenders will be coaching their kids to fake choking and heart attacks, so they can board buses full of children under the guise of an emergency, and then, and then . . . and then, what? . . . quickly molest all the children before anyone notices?

• Here’s a nice article from a local newspaper about Lynchburg, Virginia, attorney Abe Pafford and his involvement in the Cory Maye case.
• Prosecutors duped by guy who framed his ex-girlfriend for a series of armed robberies.
• Your plane tickets should be cheaper right now. Here’s why they aren’t.
  
• ” . . . .teachers . . . loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it ‘to stop students from becoming this advanced.’”
  
• Cops take drug dogs on warrantless don’t-call-it-a-search through an entire apartment complex.
• Inside Norway’s humanitarian prison. Be interested to see how much something like this cost per prisoner to compare to the facilities we have here. I have a hunch that your average U.S. prison probably pays more. Also be interested to see if more humane treatment produces better results.
• Connecticut recently decriminalized marijuana, so prosecutors are naturally throwing the book at the people convicted of pot offenses before the law took effect. It’s like that last binge before you to on a diet.

Possibly lighter than average blogging for the next week or so. Just left New York City this morning after taping a segment for John Stossel’s show last night. I talked about this column. Should air in a couple weeks. Headed now to Annapolis, Maryland, to give a talk at Cato University. Then headed to D.C., where I’ll be giving my talk on SWAT teams . . . to a roomful of cops.

Also, on the weekend of August 6-7, I’ll be giving the keynote at the Liberty Summer Seminar near Toronto.

Mom puts three-year-old down for a nap. Mom lays down for a nap herself. Three-year-old gets up, lets herself out, wanders around the neighborhood. Naturally, the local law enforcement idiots charge mom with a crime, in this case child endangerment. Lenore Skenazy comments:

Sounds more like the mom underestimated her child — didn’t realize the girl could or would get up and go!

So how about giving the mom some of those babyproofing thingies that make it hard for a child to open a door? Or an alarm that sounds if the door is opened? In other words, how about helping the mom — and child — rather than making this sound as if the mom is a no-good parent who needs to be punished? As it doesn’t seem like there was any evidence of drugs or alcohol, sounds to me like we’re talking about a parent who simply had something go wrong, which can happen to even the “best” of us.

When we criminalize the ups and downs of normal life, we start making it seem as if living that normal life (which inevitably involves some mistakes and surprises) is criminal.

I think we’re already there.

A Georgia judge sentenced Nelson to a year of probation and 40 hours of community service this morning.

Nelson was also offered a new trial, which strikes me as somewhat unusual.

My article on Nelson here.

• More towns take aim at food trucks.
• Poor saps.
• It’s so hot, the dog is melting.
• Best take yet on the anti-Muslim right’s response to Oslo.
• Puppycide. (NOTE: As pointed out by a couple commenters, this one seems pretty justified. The earlier version of the article did not indicate that the dog belonged to the suspect. Or if it did, I misread it.)
• How campaign finance restrictions empower the media.
• Time lapse video of the NY Times homepage.
• Headline of the day.
• The moral failing of the CIA’s vaccination scam in Pakistan.
• Jacob Sullum absolutely obliterates Mark Bittman.

For some reason, this really drove it home for me.

There’s something poignant, modern, and beautiful about completing the journey from subject of an activist Facebook page calling for your release, to out of prison, free, and . . . starting your own Facebook page.

Good dissection of the Tennessee version of the law from the Nashville Scene:

Such slapdash legislating is no way to build a sensible legal structure, says Terry Maroney, a criminal law professor at Vanderbilt University whose areas of expertise include the role of emotion in law. She says that, while she understands the instinct behind this and similar movements, it’s not a tendency she supports.

“I think the problem with this kind of approach to criminal law is that it’s shortsighted,” she says. “It takes something about a particular case, takes it out of context, and then builds this new legal rule around it and patches it onto the pre-existing legal framework.”

Ketron didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a recent Tennessean op-ed, he summoned the public frustration to prove a point no one is arguing: When it comes to reporting a child missing, time is of the essence.

To those who doubt the prudence of “Caylee’s Law,” that’s precisely the problem: What attentive parent would intentionally wait to report their child missing? And on the flip side, would a negligent parent — or one with murderous intent — be deterred by the threat of a Class E felony?

“It’s never a good idea to build rules around the exceptions,” Maroney says. “In the vast majority of cases, parents are going to report their children missing. What upsets people about the Casey Anthony case is that she didn’t for so long, but that’s extraordinarily aberrant.”

In response to the post just below this one:

More than one “should” in an article. How droll.
You do realize that the verb “should” describes a state contrary to reality.
Not a subjunctive hypothetical but an antithesis.
Saying that A should or should not do B is wishing for reality to be other than it is. It is to put not to fine a point on it a republicrat bloviatory creptitation and is avoided in acceptable writing.

Kinda’ reminds me of those Mike Tyson sketches on In Living Color. Or, to borrow from “Little Carmine” Lupertazzi, this commenter sounds like “an old-fashioned kind of guy—very allegorical.”

Vorus and the ACLU are suing Washington, D.C. over his detention for photographing D.C. police officers last summer. I wrote about the incident in my January feature on cops and cameras:

In another incident last summer, Washington, D.C., photographer Jerome Vorus was detained over the July 4 weekend after taking photos of police making a traffic stop in Georgetown. According to Vorus, four cruisers and 10 police officers eventually responded to his picture taking. All of them, including two supervisors, wrongly told him it is illegal to photograph D.C. police officers. Asked about the Georgetown incident on a radio call-in program, D.C. Police Chief Kathy Lanier said the city has no policy against photographing police officers, but she also defended the cops, explaining that they don’t like being photographed because “we can have our pictures end up on all sorts of websites, and that can be dangerous for us.”

Lanier’s position is bunk. If he wasn’t doing anything illegal, Vorus shouldn’t have been detained. And if recording cops isn’t illegal, Lanier shouldn’t be defending cops who told him it was. She should be disciplining them.

I’m with P.Z. Myers when he denounces the right’s rush to link the Oslo attacks to Islamic extremism before the facts were in. Jennifer Rubin and the Wall Street Journal editorial page especially embarrassed themselves. (Pam Geller did too, but she embarrasses herself a few times per day.)

I’m also with him in denouncing as absurd Rubin’s suggestion that the attacks are a good reason why we shouldn’t cut defense spending.

But then Myers goes off the rails:

I would support more tanks for the army iff they were immediately dispatched to take out the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Discovery Institute, Focus on the Family, a few thousand megachurches, and miscellaneous other extremist organizations. It’s a nest of snakes, you know. And as these loons are always urging us, stomping on a nest of snakes really, really hard always works to end the problem. (For the snark impaired, cock one eyebrow and read the last two sentences sardonically.)

Sending government tanks in to “take out” organizations with whom you have political disagreements. Hilarious! I’ll bet this guy thinks it’s funny. Wherever he is.

Aside from his twisted sense of humor, Myers also again demonstrates how he completely loses his shit when it comes to libertarians. For the record, the Cato Institute opposed the first war in Iraq (and lost funding for taking that position), opposed the second war in Iraq, supports pulling out of Afghanistan, and opposes the bombing in Libya and broader U.S. meddling in the Middle East. Cato has also called for massive cuts in defense spending, and is on the opposing side of organizations like Heritage and AEI on just about every other contentious war on terror issue.

Myers’ commenters have pointed all of this out to him. He has yet to post a correction.

Yes, I tried the raccoon. It was good. Stringy, greasy, and rich. Tasted a bit like pot roast.

• Chicago Tribune looks at the fat severance packages given to departing public school superintendents.
• L.A. Times on increased financial fraud among L.A. county sheriff’s deputies.
• Instead of charging these women with crimes, how about getting them some treatment? Not to mention the fact that the medical literature is far from conclusive on the impact of meth transferred through breast milk.
• Institute for Justice helps Louisiana monks defeat a casket cartel.
• One for the game show clip hall of fame.
• Cop threatens to kill the dog of a paraplegic medical marijuana patient.