Actually, the end result in this particular case is an isolated incident.

A federal jury awarded $333,000 to a Chicago family Thursday after Chicago police officers raided its South Side home with guns drawn and shot its dog in a search that found no criminal activity in the apartment.

Teenage brothers Thomas and Darren Russell were in their second-floor apartment in the 9200 block of South Justine Street in February 2009 when officers announced they had a warrant to search both units of the two-flat. Thomas Russell, then 18, opened the door and found officers with their guns drawn, according to the lawsuit. Russell said that he put his hands in the air and asked permission to lock up his 9-year-old black Labrador, Lady, before they entered.

Police refused the request and came into the house, the lawsuit said. When Lady came loping around the corner with her tail wagging, Officer Richard Antonsen shot the dog, according to the suit, which alleged excessive force, false arrest and illegal seizure for taking the dog’s life.

Thomas Russell was arrested and charged with obstructing police but was later found not guilty. No drugs were found in the Russell family’s apartment, though police recovered drugs in the building’s other unit, the family’s lawyers said.

It’s rare for a suit like this to even get into court, much less result in substantial damages. Even more extraordinary, the jury actually ordered one of the cops to personally pay out punitive damages, though it was only $1,000 (and I’m not sure—that may still be covered by the city, or perhaps by the police union).

Guess we’ll see if the award holds up on appeal. But it would be great to see more of this kind of accountability.

This is probably my favorite protest song. Old Crow Medicine Show’s, “I Hear Them All.”

I’ll be doing a Twitter chat about open records laws with the folks at Sunshine Review.

Starts today at 2pm ET.

Budapest.

• New hearing raises hopes the West Memphis Three may be released today.
• Photos from Bolivia’s salt flats. This is high on my list of places to see.
• This kid’s got soul.
• Headline of the day.
• Steve Chapman on the failure of sex offender registries.
• It’s for the children.
• Nice article of the Cory Maye case, and the role of Georgia State School of Law Prof. Jessica Gabel in helping to free him.

Farmer at a town hall event asks President Obama how he can obtain information about new regulations that he, as a farmer, may need to know about. So he can, you know, follow them and stuff.

Obama tells him to “contact the USDA.” This brings knowing chuckles from other farmers in attendance. To which Obama responds, “Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about.”

So a Politico reporter tried to do just that. He contacted the USDA to get an answer to the farmer’s question. Nine phone calls and, by my count, 14 buck-passing bureaucrats later, the reporter is finally rewarded with . . . an ass-covering, buck-passing press release from the USDA.

The punchline:

So, still no answer to the farmer’s question.

Keep in mind, this was merely an attempt to find out what the regulations are, so the farmer can abide by the law.

(Related: It’s August 18th, and I still haven’t received my 2010 federal income tax refund.)

Back in 2007, the Grits for Breakfast blog noted that Williamson County, Texas, District Attorney John Bradley gave some curious advice on a discussion board to another prosecutor. The other prosecutor was asking about how to construct a plea agreement in a way that would forfeit any future right to DNA testing. Bradley responded, “Innocence, though, has proven to trump most anything.” How unfortunate! He then added:

A better approach might be to get a written agreement that all the evidence can be destroyed after the conviction and sentence. Then, there is nothing to test or retest. Harris County regularly seeks such agreements.

Destroying evidence is an odd way to seek justice, especially given how many “slam dunk” cases and convictions based on false confessions have later been overturned after DNA testing.

I bring this up for a couple reasons. First, because Bradley is the DA involved in the pending DNA exoneration case I linked to this morning. And he’s accused of some pretty serious misconduct. From the article:

New DNA results, combined with evidence that was improperly withheld by Williamson County prosecutors for more than two decades, indicates that an Austin-area man has spent 24 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, a court filing alleged Wednesday.

Michael Morton, now 57, was convicted in the brutal beating death of his wife, Christine Morton, and sentenced to life in prison in 1987.

But a recent court-ordered DNA test, conducted on a blood-stained bandanna over the objections of Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, points instead to an unnamed California felon as the killer, according to court briefs filed by the Innocence Project of New York.

The court filing urged a Williamson County district judge to remove Bradley from the case, saying he cannot be trusted to oversee a reinvestigation of the killing because he has shown “unprofessional” animosity toward Michael Morton and his lawyers.

What’s more, the motion alleges, Bradley worked to keep a key piece of evidence hidden from Morton’s lawyers — a transcript of a police interview that shows the Mortons’ 3-year-old son witnessed his mother’s murder and said the attacker was not his father.

The second reason I bring this up takes us back to Texas Gov. Rick Perry. If you’ll remember, just before the Texas Forensic Science Commission was set to open up an investigation into the Cameron Todd Willingham case, Perry abruptly replaced three of the commissioners with nominees who were more friendly to prosecutors, all of whom opposed reopening the case.

One of the replacements Perry nominated was . . . you guessed it . . . Williamson County, Texas, District Attorney John Bradley.

(Thanks to reader Kevin Spencer and commenter “thefncrow” for the leads.)

Got them authoritarian local gub’mint blues:

A woman fighting a terminal form of bone cancer is trying to raise money to help pay bills with a few weekend garage sales, but the city of Salem says she’s breaking the law and is shutting her down.

Jan Cline had no idea, but the city of Salem has a clear law that states a person can only have three yard sales a year.

Cline has been selling her stuff in the backyard for a few weekends and said she thought she’d be fine by keeping the sale out of everyone’s way.

“It’s a struggle,” Cline says. “It’s a struggle for me because I’m very independent, used to taking care of myself.”

She’s run businesses and supported herself for years but this summer she was diagnosed with bone cancer.

“It’s a bone marrow cancer that eats through the bones and causes holes in the bones so that just by walking I can break a bone,” she says.

In one day she lost her independence, her ability to work and earn an income that could pay for all those medical bills.

So she decided to sell what she owned. The sale was bringing in several hundred dollars each weekend until one neighbor complained and she got a visit from the city.

“He said, ‘I’m sorry. Rules are rules.’”

• Another DNA exoneration looming in Texas.
• Pun-tastic genius headline at Fark.
• Incarceration and crime rates, Indiana vs. New York.
• Michelle Bachman announces her plans to become the immigrant-bashing candidate. No GOP primary would be complete without one.
• “The police broke my house by mistake, wouldn’t pay to fix.”
• Excellent lede.
• The name of your new band: Anarchist Dog Walking Collective.

Budapest.

A source in Mississippi tells me that Attorney General Jim Hood held a press conference tonight to talk about forensics charlatan Michael West. That’s all I know so far.

Weirdly, Dunn Lampton, the former U.S. Attorney and Mississippi DA I criticized in my article about the Leigh Stubbs case last week, also passed away tonight.

My new piece at Huffington Post looks at what’s happened in the three months since the SWAT raid that killed Jose Guerena.

 . . . said the cop pointing his stun gun at a handcuffed bicyclist.

So you just oversaw a disastrous government operation in which your agency passively stood by while illegal weapons were smuggled into Mexico, many of which were later later used in brutal murders carried out by drug cartels. What’s next for you?

Why, a promotion of course!

The ATF has promoted three key supervisors of a controversial sting operation that allowed firearms to be illegally trafficked across the U.S. border into Mexico.

All three have been heavily criticized for pushing the program forward even as it became apparent that it was out of control. At least 2,000 guns were lost and many turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and two at the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

The three supervisors have been given new management positions at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF’s deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency’s Phoenix office . . .

And it gets better.

McMahon was promoted Sunday to deputy assistant director of the ATF’s Office of Professional Responsibility and Security Operations — the division that investigates misconduct by employees and other problems.

Kenneth E. Melson, the ATF’s acting director, said in an agency-wide confidential email announcing the promotion that McMahon was among ATF employees being rewarded because of “the skills and abilities they have demonstrated throughout their careers.”

Emphasis mine.

It occurs to me that a promoted ATF agent is less likely than a fired ATF agent to be forthcoming about what higher-ups—political appointees, for example—knew about the operation, and how much and when they knew about it. But that would assume bad intent. Then again, the alternative is that these agents were promoted solely on merit, which really isn’t any less disturbing.

In any case, these guys should probably start making room on their mantles for a Medal of Freedom.

Budapest.

• California legislator wants to mandate fitted sheets at hotels, and make noncompliance a criminal offense.
• Woman faces 1-10 years for stealing a can of beer.
• Abercrombie offers to pay Jersey Shore cast to stop wearing its brand.
• Penn Jillette: “I Don’t Know, so I’m an Atheist Libertarian.”
• Hunter S. Thompson rejects your manuscript.
• Awing photo.
• Everything you ever wanted to know about Yogi Bear’s collar.
• D.C. circuit upholds sex offender registry, says requirements are “regulation” not punishment.
• Depressing poll results.

• Local news station fans hysteria after single man was spotted taking photos at a playground. Horrors! (Hope this doesn’t land me on a sex offender list!)
• Joggers mistake phone book deliverymen for a kidnapping predator.
• Six dumb things schools are doing in the name of safety.
• Two studies show futility of sex offender registries.
• FBI promotes new app by using scary (but fake) statistics about child abductions.

Great Market Hall, Budapest.

• Sarah Palin: Still an idiot.
• Nashville food trucks forced to form a political organization. Kinda’ sad that you can’t just provide a product people want anymore. You have to become politically active, too. For simple self-preservation.
• Anti-U.S. propaganda posters from North Korea.
• Aftermath of crash involving truck loaded with printer ink.
• Scott Greenfield has more on that Texas Appeals Court dash cam ruling.
• The Economist on the Danziger bridge convictions. I wonder if syndicated conservative columnist Deroy Murdock is ever going to apologize to the victims he libeled?
• Here’s a chart that might surprise you.
• How courts sanction prosecutorial misconduct.

This is beautiful. The clip at the end is particularly telling.

 . . . and now, motor oil.

In April, Janet Goodin of Warroad, Minn., was crossing into Canada for an evening of bingo with her daughters when an officer with the Canadian Border Service conducted a routine search of her van. The officer found an old bottle of motor oil, did a field test and told her that it contained heroin.

“I can’t even describe the feeling of amazement,” Goodin, 66, said in an interview. “I said, ‘That’s not possible, it’s leftover oil.’”

The bottle was re-tested, and agents said it again revealed the presence of heroin. Goodin was arrested, handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was strip-searched. The motor oil was sent to a Canadian federal laboratory, which eventually determined there was no heroin in it. After 12 days behind bars, Goodin was released.

Goodin’s case has been seized upon by critics who question the reliability of field drug-test kits, which are used widely by law enforcement.

“She is what you call collateral damage in the drug war,” said former FBI special agent Frederic Whitehurst, a North Carolina attorney and forensic consultant with a Ph.D. in analytic chemistry, who has publicly raised concerns about field drug-test kits. “When you run the tests, you run into all sorts of problems from overzealous cops.” . . .

The Border Service won’t explain how they made the mistake. But Sgt. Line Karpish of the RCMP said her agency used “reasonable grounds” based on information it got from the Canadian Border Service. She noted that drugs are smuggled into Canada by all types of people. “We find it in diapers, we find it on old ladies, young ladies, beautiful ladies,” Karpish says. “You can’t let ‘grandma’ cloud your judgment about the police force. That’s why terrorists use kids.”

No, but you might start to question the veracity of field test kits that continue to produce absurd false positives. Links to the prior field test horror stories in the headline here.

This is pretty incredible:

Drivers have no recourse if police say the tape from a dashboard-mounted video camera is not available, according to a ruling Wednesday from the Texas Court of Appeals. Mark Lee Martin wanted to defend himself against drug possession charges filed in the wake of an August 29, 2008 traffic stop, but he was told no video was available.

Travis County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Jennings claimed that he pulled over Martin that evening because he failed to signal a left-hand turn. Within less than two weeks after the incident, Martin’s attorney formally requested that the department preserve video evidence from the stop. Subpoenas were issued to ensure “all videos and dispatch calls” would be saved. At trial, Jennings was asked why the camera evidence had not been kept.

“Since I didn’t put it in my report it wasn’t preserved because I didn’t believe it had any type of evidential value,” Jennings told the court.

The dashcam is automatically activated when an officer turns on his emergency lights. Department policy states that all video must automatically be saved for thirty days. Jennings could not say whether his machine was operating that night, but he would have noted either at the beginning or end of the shift if the device had not been functional. Jennings stated that the only way to know for sure if the video had been taken would have been if he had preserved the video. Martin argued the police were obviously hiding evidence.

“The officers intentionally destroyed the video and thereby put exculpatory evidence as far as the search is concerned or evidence favorable to the accused out of the reach of the accused,” Martin’s attorney claimed. “We feel that for no other reason the search is invalid and any evidence found as a result of that search should be suppressed.”

The appellate court found no merit in this argument.

“We agree with the state that the record supports a finding by the district court that the police did not act in bad faith,” Justice Bob Pemberton wrote. “The United States Supreme Court has held that ‘unless a criminal defendant can show bad faith on the part of the police, failure to preserve potentially useful evidence does not constitute a denial of due process of law.’”

The court found no evidence of bad faith because the officer testified that he had “no clue” whether there even was a recording made.

Relevant excerpt from my Reason piece “The War on Cameras”:

Last March, Justice Lee Ann Dauphinot of the Second Court of Appeals in Texas complained in a dissent that when defendants accused of driving while intoxicated in Fort Worth challenge the charges in court, dash-camera video of their arrests is often missing or damaged. “At some point,” Dauphinot wrote, “courts must address the repeated failure of officers to use the recording equipment and their repeated inability to remember whether the car they were driving on patrol or to a DWI stop contained the video equipment the City of Fort Worth has been paying for.”

Well I guess they are addressing it, now. They’re giving cops a how-to guide when it comes to destroying dash cam footage that makes them look bad, or that could exonerate a motorist: Just make it look like you’re incompetent, not malicious.

Art studio in Budapest.

•  Jose Guerena family to file $20 million lawsuit.
• “Kids for Cash” judge gets 28 years in prison.
• The philosophy of Louis C.K.
• Writer watches every Coen brothers movie.
• Crappy Crime Lab of the Week Award: Houston! Houston is a repeat winner of this award.
• Bad idea of the week: Anti-discrimination laws for the unemployed.
• Wait, shouldn’t all those cold medicine laws have us winning the war on meth?
• Soldier kills himself while facing ninth deployment to a war zone.

Unbelievable:

Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures “with no apparent esthetic value” is within Long Beach Police Department  policy.

McDonnell spoke for a follow-up story on a June 30 incidentin which Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, was detained by Officer Asif Kahn for taking pictures of North Long Beach refinery.

“If an officer sees someone taking pictures of something like a refinery,” says McDonnell, “it is incumbent upon the officer to make contact with the individual.” McDonnell went on to say that whether said contact becomes detainment depends on the circumstances the officer encounters.

McDonnell says that while there is no police training specific to determining whether a photographer’s subject has “apparent esthetic value,” officers make such judgments “based on their overall training and experience” and will generally approach photographers not engaging in “regular tourist behavior.”

This policy apparently falls under the rubric of compiling Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) as outlined in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order No. 11, a March 2008 statement of the LAPD’s “policy …  to make every effort to accurately and appropriately gather, record and analyze information, of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism.”

Among the non-criminal behaviors “which shall be reported on a SAR” are the usage of binoculars and cameras (presumably when observing a building, although this is not specified), asking about an establishment’s hours of operation, taking pictures or video footage “with no apparent esthetic value,” and taking notes.

Of course, taking photos with no aesthetic value usually does fall under “regular tourist behavior.” Also, this policy land everyone who uses Hipstamatic on death row.

Jokes, folks. From a guy who regularly takes photos as a tourist. Just lightening the mood. Because this has gotten so goddamned ridiculous.

(Link via commenter “Jay.”)