On Monday, I noted that in response to some heat he’s taken over the Leigh Stubbs case, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood told a local TV station that his office is looking into 20 cases involving disgraced forensic specialist Michael West.

That was encouraging. But it also seemed strange, given that Hood’s office has consistently defended convictions won on West’s testimony, including in the Stubbs case. It also doesn’t jibe with Hood’s steadfast defense of Steven Hayne over the last few years (whom Hood often used when he was a DA). So yesterday I emailed Hood’s press office a request to speak with whoever is overseeing the West investigation. Or at least for a list of the cases they’re looking into. Or really for any additional information on the investigation.

Here was their reply:

We cannot release any of the information you are requesting at this time.

Hood hasn’t been particularly shy in the past about seeking publicity in the past, including putting out press releases about active criminal investigations. These West cases are at minimum several years old, and I’m pretty sure all of them are in post-conviction. If he is indeed looking into some of them them, I’m not sure what advantage there is to being secretive about it. Particularly if he’s going to announce the existence of the alleged investigation to a TV station in the first place.

I’ll have more on this in a follow-up piece for Huffington Post.

Here’s when/where I’ll be speaking over the next few months:

September 13th: Adrian College, Adrian, MI.

September 29th: Columbia Law School, New York, NY. (tentative)

October 6: Tulane Law School, New Orleans, LA.

October 25: University of Mississippi School of Law, Oxford, MS.

November 7: Hanover College, Hanover, IN. (tentative)

• War on Cameras meets War on Lemonade.
• Headline of the day.
• Runner-up.
• Don’t agree with all of it (although I do agree with much of it), but here’s a needed perspective on the class wars.
• Shake!
• Cop who mistook gun for Taser won’t get qualified immunity.
• Government compels personal information under promise of confidentiality. Politician leaks said information. Politician . . . celebrated?

The felony charge against Tiawanda Moor has finally reached a courtroom.

Moore faces up to 15 years in prison for recording her attempt to report a Chicago cop who she says sexually assaulted her. Moore says she recorded the conversation because she felt Internal Affairs officers were pressuring her not to file a complaint. The Tribune article focuses on whether or not that claim is true. Which really misses the point.

State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez ought to be tossed on her tuckus for bringing this case in the first place. In a city with a long history of police abuse and corruption, where we only recently learned that for two decades people were tortured in police stations while Chicago police supervisors, prosecutors, and politicians looked the other way, it’s an absolute outrage that Alvarez would prosecute a woman for trying to protect herself while trying to file a complaint. And shame on the Illinois legislature for not having the courage to repeal this ugly, blatantly unconstitutional law.

My HuffPost article on Moore and other people charged on the law here. My longer Reason piece on the War on Cameras here.

Terrific piece from Reason.tv.

(Obligatory “libertarians don’t give a damn about poor people” comment.)

Budapest.

A. Barton Hinkle has a good column on police militarization today, and not just because he quotes me (though that helps!).

There is one point Hinkle concedes that I’m not sure he should: I’ve still yet to see any empirical data to support the contention that criminals in the U.S. are arming themselves with more powerful weapons—at least in significant numbers. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotes to that effect from police officials while justifying their new APV or armament of military-grade machine guns. But nothing in the way of data.

In fact, in Overkill (see pages 27-28), I noted that the only two studies available at the time—one done in 1995 by the National Institute for Justice and one published in 1991 by Dave Kopel and Eric Morgan—came to the opposite conclusion. Both those studies are pretty dated now, but I’ve yet to see anything newer to support the broad contention that criminals in the U.S. are moving toward higher-powered weapons. But I also haven’t tracked the issue as closely as I did while I was researching that paper.  If anyone knows of something more recent, please send it my way, or throw up a link in the comments.

Man photographs his dog with its head out the window at increasing speeds.

Awesomeness ensues.

Also: Photos of Basset Hounds running.

• Touching video of two Louisiana men who became friends in prison, were both exonerated by DNA testing, now reuniting as free men.
• Related: Federal judge under fire for letting habeas petitions linger for years. One inmate died while waiting. The same judge was removed from another case after an appeals court questioned his impartiality.
• New Jersey cop assaults man recording him.
• National debt jumps $4 trillion under Obama.
• Mother Jones has assembled a database of U.S. terrorism informants and trials of suspected terrorists.
• Missouri teacher says new law banning online contact with students means she can’t communicate online with her own kids.
• Obama administration encourages health care providers to organize, then sues them for doing so.
• New Gallup poll: Hypothetical matchup puts unelectable Ron Paul within two points of Barack Obama.
• More problems for the Fullerton, California, police department.

(CORRECTION: Both Media Matters and Cato’s Dan Mitchell say the CBS article linked above gets it wrong: The 2009 fiscal year was set by the Bush administration, not Obama.)

Budapest.

Half of early rock ‘n’ roll’s best songwriting duo has died. Here are my three favorite Leiber & Stoller songs, not necessarily by the artists that made them famous.

A New Orleans police officer has been arrested for writing more than 200 phantom seat belt citations. Why would he do that?

Glenn Gross, who works in the NOPD’s information technology department, was writing bogus tickets for seat-belt violations, allowing him to collect extra pay, Superintendent Ronal Serpas said.

The department received a federal grant in June that pays for overtime for officers who enforce seat-belt laws. Rather than doing the work and writing up motorists who had violated the law, Gross, 44, wrote tickets to phantom motorists, officials said.

Officials said the investigation is continuing and that other officers, and possibly a supervisor, are also under scrutiny. Serpas said he couldn’t say how much overtime Gross collected as a result of the scam.

You know, libertarians are often mocked when we decry mandatory seat belt laws, or when we get all hot and bothered about federal meddling in trifles like this.

Even if you don’t much care about personal freedom, here’s why this stuff matters: Put aside this particular cop and his made-up violations. Put aside the others who may also be implicated in the investigation. Put aside also the (legitimate) concerns about how such incentives might encourage bad cops to fine actual motorists who are wearing seat belts, or about how primary seat belts laws give police another reason to make pretext stops that can then lead to dubious searches and harassment.

Even assuming that everybody’s motives are on the up and up, here, you still have a city with a murder rate that’s ten times the national average. And here you have a federal program that hands out bonus checks not to cops who spend their time walking beats in dangerous neighborhoods, who patrol high-crime areas, or who put in overtime to solve murders . . . but to cops who hunt down motorists who aren’t wearing their seat belts.

Good to see this case get some local coverage. Video includes grainy footage from the security camera that Michael West magically enhanced.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood’s defense of Stubbs’ prosecution in this video is so vague, it’s pretty much impossible to address. There was no evidence presented at trial other than West’s bite mark and “video enhancement” testimony that Leigh Stubbs assaulted Kim Williams. (Well, other than the weird prosecution theory that homosexuals are especially prone to biting one another.) I’m told that Hood also took a couple questions about the case last week, and referred to Stubbs’ “dope” convictions in the case as the other evidence of her guilt. So maybe that’s what he’s referring to in this video.

Problem is, not only does that have nothing to do with the alleged assault, there’s also no evidence Stubbs had much of a role in the theft of dope from Williams’ boyfriend. She passed a drug test shortly after her arrest. And witness accounts from the night in question also indicate that Stubbs was sober. There was evidence that Stubbs knew Vance and Williams had stolen the drugs and were ingesting them. And she obviously didn’t report them. But that isn’t the sort of crime for which one gets a 44-year prison sentence, particularly for a first offense.

At the end of this report, the anchor says Hood says his office is looking into at least 20 cases in which West has testified. That’s the first time I’ve heard of any Mississippi state official investigating old West/Hayne cases. So that’s encouraging. But I’ll withhold praise for Hood until/unless he can come up with a single case in which he determines that West’s testimony should invalidate a prosecution. So far, his office has either defended West’s testimony, or argued that defendants whose cases are in post-conviction status are procedurally barred from challenging West’s credibility. As for Hayne, Hood has not only steadfastly defended him, Hood led the fight to overturn Hayne’s termination so he could resume doing autopsies for Mississippi prosecutors.

My HuffPost article on the Stubbs case here.

Pour Me Coffee’s Twitter account reminds me that today is the late John Lee Hooker’s birthday. And that this duet with Van Morrison is one of the great songs-to-brood-to ever made.

• ThinkProgress apparently thinks a positive (for now) outcome magically makes our war in Libya legal. Alternate explanation: They’re just partisan hacks.
• Movie line rhymes.
• Luddite rant of the day.
• Fed gave out more than $1 trillion in secret loans.
• Michael Moynihan on Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.
• Gallery of Japanese manhole covers.
• Battling the scourge of . . . female masturbation.

Budapest.

So we free market folks often point out that about half the country pays no income tax. Our worry is that as an increasingly small percentage of earners fund the government, we’ll soon have a majority of people who pay no tax voting for more and more government services they benefit from, but don’t have to pay for.

The response from the other side is that the poor do pay Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes, and that those taxes aren’t progressive. So they hit the poor especially hard. That doesn’t exactly refute the problem of all other government programs getting funded by an increasingly small pool of taxpayers. But it’s still a valid point in and of itself.

So here’s my idea: Let’s make the Medicare and Social Security taxes more progressive. (While we’re at it, let’s subject both programs to means testing.) But in exchange, we also scrap the Earned Income Tax Credit in favor a negative income tax. Built into this would be a mechanism ensuring that when government spending goes up, everyone pays for it—it’s just that people in lower tax brackets would “pay” by getting a smaller reverse income tax payout. The idea is to be sure everyone has to sacrifice a bit of discretionary income when a politician proposes some big new government program, so everyone can decide whether the benefit from the new program is worth its cost.

I’d prefer scrapping the income tax altogether, mostly because I don’t like the idea of government knowing how you earn a living—which leads to government snooping on how you spend your money, money laundering laws, and all sorts of other nastiness. But as long as we have it, I’m curious to hear what my fellow free marketeers, and our opponents, make of this . . . I guess we’ll call it a “compromise.”

When I was in Prague last May, I stopped by a used bookstore just a few blocks from my hotel. Toward the back of the store, I found stacks of what had to be hundreds of old photos. I got a little mesmerized looking through them. I probably spend more than an hour there, and found myself wondering about what happened to the people in the pictures. A few appear to be professionally taken, but most look like family photos. The owner of the bookshop said he started buying photo albums at what I gathered were yard sales, or the Czech equivalent of estate sales (there was a bit of a language barrier). He sold the photos for about 25 cents each, so I picked out a couple dozen that I found interesting.

Once I got home, I wasn’t really sure what to do with them. So I’ve had them scanned, and figure I’ll share them with you. Maybe if these float around the Internet a bit, someone might recognize a face or two, and give us some history about who we’re looking at.

Click twice on the slideshow to view at full-screen.

In celebration, Washington Post columnist Esther Cepeda takes a bold stand with the governments shutting down children’s lemonade stands. And the piece isn’t just boot-licking authoritarianism, it contains factual errors, too! (If you get sick from lemonade you bought from a kid’s front yard, no, you can’t sue the city)

If it weren’t for the rest of the column, you could be forgiven for mistaking this last paragraph for satire.

By all means, let’s celebrate Lemonade Freedom Day — make it a teaching moment. Those who actually care about preparing the next generation to become profitable businesspeople should take their favorite youngster down to city hall to jump through the necessary hoops and learn what it really takes to become a successful entrepreneur.

And by that she means your kid should have to pay for hundreds of dollars in permit and inspections in order to sell 25-cent cups of lemonade. Hell, as long as we’re giving the kids a dose of reality, you might as well bring some “walking around money” to City Hall, too. At least then, your kid will learn how things really get done in government.

UPDATE: Lemonade Freedom Day organizer Robert Fernandez, on Twitter:

UPDATE: You can see video of the arrests here. Action starts at about the 25 minute mark. Unfortunately, much as I sympathize with the general cause, the people in the video seem to be going out of their way to force a confrontation. They’re selling on U.S. Parks land, near the U.S. Capitol, and were shouting out to tourists and passers-by. That’s a far cry from kids selling lemonade on the front lawn. I guess if you’re making a political point, the National Mall is the place to do it. But it just doesn’t seem like a particularly smart way to generate support for the overall theme, here. I doubt most people who were unaware of the lemonade wars will find the people in the video all that sympathetic.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, SWAT team raids house looking for narcotics, finds none. Instead, issues citation for keeping a “disorderly house.”

And it’s not the first time they’ve charged someone with that after coming up empty.

Found this fun 1995 Newsweek article in a link from another article. General theme: The Internet is too random, spontaneous, and amateurish to be useful. A few excerpts:

I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. . . .

Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure . . .

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Thanks to the Internet, you needn’t trek to your local library and wade through microfiche files to read and enjoy Clifford Stoll’s article. (If you’re under 25, ask your parents what microfische is.) The Internet has enabled you to appreciate his genius from your couch. You don’t even need to put on pants!

Bonus: The article is now hosted at The Daily Beast, which saved Newsweek from extinction.

• Internet thread of the week. (Warning: Not for the squeamish.)
• The world’s most desolate countries.
• Michele Bachman seems to be uncertain of her own biography.
• Smoke a joint, lose your kid.
• Photos of people napping around the world.
• “Green jobs” initiative is a massive flop.
• Washington State Supreme Court orders that police misconduct investigations be made public. We need this in more places.
• Anderson Cooper makes poop joke, can’t stop giggling about it. Stepjen Colbert pounces. Hilariously. (Yes, that’s the second poop-related link this morning. What can I say? I’m 10.)
• Zombie newlywed photos.
• Kabul Rock City: Afghan teens fight corruption, violence with heavy metal.

Wow.

Michael and Adrian Ayala were closing up the 7911 Food and Liquor Store on South Archer early Wednesday morning when they said a bunch of Chicago police officers, mistaking them for robbers, beat them up.

Officers were driving by around 1 a.m. as Michael Ayala, 23, was grabbing his keys from inside and his brother waited outside by his bicycle.

Police were apparently not interested in listening to Adrian Ayala’s explanation, and they handcuffed him. That’s when Michael Ayala went outside to find out what was going on.

“I seen them roughing up my brother,” Michael Ayala said. “I was telling them, ‘Could you please stop doing that to my brother.’ When I said that, a cop came around, opened the door and he hit me a couple times.”

The video does not show that, but it clearly shows what happens after the cops let the two men go without charges. An angry Michael Ayala yelled at one of the cops that he had them on video tape, and he wasn’t going to let it go.

“That’s when the sergeant just flipped out on me,” Michael Ayala said.

Here’s what happened next:

The statement from Chicago PD is interesting. It doesn’t really even attempt to defend the officers:

“The Chicago Police Department was notified by the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) that they are conducting an investigation into the alleged actions of Department members involved in two arrests on August 16th on the 4800 block of S. Archer. The alleged conduct does not represent the high standards of professionalism and excellence maintained as core values of the Department and which officers demonstrate on a daily basis serving and protecting the community. The Chicago Police Department is fully cooperating with the IPRA as it conducts its investigation.”

Andy Levy offers one to Chris Brown.