• Leading by example.
• Photos from the Glass Beach.
• Videographer arrested in Miami, charged with terrorism.
• The Muppets theme song vs. “Stray Cat Strut.”
• Cops looking for fugitive raid, ransack the wrong house.
• “How to Make Henry’s Anytime Chili for One.”
• Hero worship at National Review. This is second cover in recent memory that looks like it could have been commissioned from the Leningrad Institute of Proletarian Visual Arts. Remember this one?
• Speaking of commies, it’s kinda depressing that this article could even be written.

Talking about Rick Perry with Alyona Minkovski.

As you near the suburbs of Budapest, there’s a nondescript little gravel-lined park surrounded by brick walls. Inside, there’s a stunning display of the creepy statues, monuments, and memorials the Soviet Union put up around the city during its half-century of occupation. Most East European cities destroyed the Soviet relics, or melted them down to make new monuments. In Budapest they preserved them, and gave them a home in the midst of some ugly suburban sprawl. It’s a remarkable little site.

(Click on the slideshow twice for full-screen.)

• The NY Times on how sentencing reform is catching on in the red states.
• The GOP continues its search for a viable presidential candidate.
• Not touching this one. 
• BART shuts down cell phone service at its stations during protest over a police shooting.
• Court documents allege U.S. allowed drug cartel to import “tons” of cocaine in exchange for information.
• Indiana legislator obviously voted against gay marriage so there would be more single gay men for him to prowl on Craigslist.
• Mississippi judge suspended for advocating vigilante justice.
• Rick Perry: Pastor, Prophet, and Presidential Candidate.

The insanity continues . . .

The aunt of a Monroe toddler who drowned last week has been charged in connection with the boy’s death.

Felicia Tucker, who was watching the child Aug. 1 when he wandered away and drowned in a nearby lake, was arrested and charged Tuesday with second-degree endangering the welfare of a child, the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office announced Wednesday.

Tucker, 26, faces up to 10 years in prison.

Tucker was watching her 2 1/2-year-old nephew, Joshua Moore, at the home she shared with the boy’s mother when he wandered from the home and drowned in nearby Victory Lake. In a release announcing her arrest, the prosecutor’s office said Tucker “endangered” the child “by allowing him to leave the residence and drown.”

Prosecutor’s spokesman Bernie Weisenfeld said a factor in the case was the finding of a “significant period of time when the child was not supervised.”

A devastated Tucker said she was feeling “extremely guilty” when she talked with a reporter last Friday. Neither Tucker — who was released after being charged — nor the child’s mother, Leanne Tucker, could be reached for comment Wednesday.

Last week, Tucker said she had been doing paperwork in her room the evening of Aug. 1 while Joshua and her 4-year-old daughter played around the house. The boy was discovered missing around 7 p.m. when his 15-year-old brother came home and found the front door ajar.

Tucker searched the area herself before calling police around 8:23 p.m. She found the child floating in the nearby lake about an hour later.

(Via Lenore Skenazy)

Salon’s Justin Elliott riffs on that appalling “It takes balls to execute an innocent man” comment from a Texas GOP focus group participant, and wonders if the Cameron Todd Willingham case may actually help Rick Perry in the GOP primary. As Elliott points out, it almost certainly isn’t going to hurt him. And that’s bad enough.

I’d like to hear some of the more thoughtful conservatives lining up behind Perry weigh in on this. Here’s how I see it: A state government has no more awesome, complete, or solemn power than the power to execute its own citizens. If you’re going to claim to loathe big government, this is one area where you ought to be more skeptical of government than any other. Hell, if for no other reason than that it can’t be undone.

The problem here isn’t necessarily that Perry presided over the execution of a man who was likely innocent. If Perry had shown some concern about what happened in the Willingham case, maybe set up an investigation into what went wrong, perhaps even attempted to suspend executions in Texas until he could be sure checks were in place to prevent the execution of an innocent, the way George Ryan did in Illinois—if he’d done any of that, he’d at least have shown some appropriate skepticism. He’d have shown that he’s at least cognizant of the fact that government employees in law enforcement and criminal justice are just as fallible and subject to the trappings of power, bureaucracy, and public choice theory as government employees in, say, tax collection or the regulation of business.

Instead, Perry couldn’t even acknowledge the possibility of doubt about Willingham’s guilt. He justified his stubbornness by pointing out that Willingham also allegedly beat and was verbally abuse toward his wife, as if that were at all relevant to Willingham murder trial. (Unfortunately, lots of men beat their wives. Most of them don’t also burn their children alive.) More importantly, Perry’s pivot to a “Willingham was a bad man” defense glosses over the most alarming aspect of Willingham’s case, which is much bigger than Willingham: The state of Texas used completely bogus forensic evidence to convict a man in a capital case. (The state also used testimony from a fraud psychologist in the death penalty portion of Willingham’s trial, as it had in dozens of other trials.)  If that was allowed to happen here, it has happened in other cases, and in other contexts. Worse, when the state’s forensics committee attempted to investigate Willingham’s execution, Perry replaced the committee members pushing for an investigation with new members more sympathetic to prosecutors.

Perry was confronted with the possibility that the government over which he presided may have abused it’s most awesome and sacred power. And instead of skepticism of government, he showed deference. Instead of demanding transparency, he actively obfuscated. Instead of exposing and demanding accountability for a possibly historical government error, Perry used his own power to keep himself and his constituents ignorant, lest they begin to question whether government should have such power. And it’s not as if there aren’t ample other examples of the flaws with Texas’ death penalty and its criminal justice system. Hell, Texas has one county that that has seen more exonerations than all but a few states.

If it helps, think of the the death penalty as a “government program.” It’s one thing to support this government program. It’s something else to refuse to believe your favorite government program could ever do wrong. And it’s downright pathological to be so confident in your favorite government program’s infallibility that you actively undermine an investigation into said government program’s possible flaws.

And he’s doing it again. In the Hank Skinner case, Perry has actively fought DNA testing that could confirm the innocence (or guilt) of another Texas man on death row. Skinner was at one point hours from execution before the Supreme Court intervened (the intervening justice was Antonin Scalia, believe it or not). In Skinner’s case, the prosecution actually began to conduct DNA testing on crime scene evidence, then stopped when the first tests confirmed Skinner’s version of events. Perry again justified willful ignorance in this case by simply noting that he’s personally convinced of Skinner’s guilt. As if there aren’t dozens of examples of what appeared to be clearly guilty people who were later exonerated by DNA. With Skinner, Perry is not only choosing willful ignorance over transparency, he’d rather risk executing another innocent person than possibly undermine support for the government’s power to execute its citizens.

I understand the law and order instinct on the right. I also understand why people support the death penalty. But you can hold both of those positions and still be disgusted by Rick Perry’s actions in the Willingham and Skinner cases. In fact, I’d say that if you’re going to claim the banner of limited government with any integrity, you damned well ought to be.

Seems appropriate this week: Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn.”

• An ode to Chris Mullin.
• Now: Porn causes terrorism.
• Bill Cosby’s face in jello.
• Facebook page for Miss. Attorney General Jim Hood stops taking comments, apparently because of the response to my article on the Leigh Stubbs case.
• Onetime Agitator guest blogger Libby Jacobson on the alleged shrinking middle class. Bonus: Comes with misleading, vertically stretched line graph from the Center for American Progress.
• Okay, this is funny.
• This seems promising.
• Time-lapse video from Taipei 101.
• A. Barton Hinkle on the U.K. riots.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Leigh Stubbs’ brother-in-law left a few comments at Huffington Post that are worth reposting here:

I am Leigh Stubbs brother in law and I appreciate the author and the Huffington Post for featuring Leigh and the Innocence Project of Mississippi.

I would like to share a few comments about this article. Leigh was a college student when she approached her Mother and Father about her addiction. She sought help and completed the program at Caty Hill and she has been drug free since then. She was portrayed as a lesbian by Prosecutor Lampton to insight prejudice in the Lincoln County Mississipp­i Jury. Her sexuality is her business and not mine or Prosecutor Lamptons! The Circuit Judge Mike Smith served more as a prosecutor than a judge, telling Leigh’s father that he would sentence her to the maximum on every count BEFORE THE TRIAL BEGAN . . .

Leigh has spent the last 10 years teaching inmates in the GED program and working on various work details at Central Mississipp­i Correction­al Facility. She remains upbeat and looks forward to the day that she is home. Several people have commented about her smiling in her prisoner identification photo, Leigh smiled so her mother would enjoy her photo! . . .

It is hard to believe that Leigh’s been in prison for over 10 years. Only last month did the Mississippi Supreme Court recognize the merit in the Petition filed by the Mississippi Innocence Project on Leigh’s behalf. Thank you to former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Diaz and Chuck McRae, who showed moral courage in their dissent…saying the trial result would have been different had the judge not allowed West to testify as an expert in fields he was clearly not and expert in. We respect these men without reservatio­n and their words have sustained our families during difficult times, as have the prayers and support of our friends old and new.

Hey, maybe Lawrence O’Donnell could talk about this new Reason.tv video on his show tonight. I mean, only if he can find some time between discussing Richard Belzer’s tattoos and Sarah Palin’s eating habits.

• Words most looked-up by NY Times readers. Fantastical isn’t one of them.
• Tea-party businessman moves to recall Fullerton city council members who have sided with police in the Kelly Thomas killing. I’d love to see Tea Party groups do more of this.
• Why are restaurant websites so terrible?
• Whither the anti-war movement?
• “95% sure it’s badger.”
• Woman may face criminal charges after recording police beating a man with a flashlight. Note that even the one cop who was fired had a long history of use of force issues, and was fired a day after getting a disability pension.

Split, Croatia.

Ken at Popehat has details on the city’s latest efforts to use an anti-cyberstalking law to intimidate whoever is posting Internet cartoons that mock the local constabulary.

A few items on the Leigh Stubbs case that didn’t make it into my article yesterday:

First, the state’s reply to the Mississippi Innocence Project’s post-conviction petition does argue a couple other reasons why West’s testimony shouldn’t be cause for a new trial other than the procedural issues. They’re both pretty lacking.

The first is that the state included the name of an FBI agent associated with the agency’s analysis of the videotape on the list of potential witnesses it gave to the defense. This, the state argues, was sufficient to fulfill its Brady requirement to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence. Providing the actual FBI report wasn’t necessary. If Stubbs’ attorney didn’t contact that agent and press him enough to learn about the report, that’s not the state’s fault.

There was no explanation as to why the FBI agent was included on the list. And if the attorney did know about the repot but didn’t follow up or bring it up when cross examining West, you’d think Stubbs would have a pretty darned good claim for ineffective assistance of counsel. Of course, the state argues against that, too.

Another of the state’s arguments is that West explained in his testimony that the images in the surveillance tape were “difficult to see” and that the purpose of his testimony was merely to “allow people to look at the video and come to their own conclusions.” The state writes, “In other words, he was trying to assist the jury,” instead of conclusively telling them what’s in the video.

Problem is, that line is lost in West’s BS about his NASA-like enhancement software, which is then followed by pages and pages of him explicitly telling the jury exactly what is in the video. Hayne and West do this often. They include a line or two of mild qualification in their testimony, then go on ad nauseum with baseless opinions and conclusions. It’s the latter that sticks with the jury. It’s the former that Mississippi appeals courts consistently cling to in refusing to throw out their testimony.

One other item of note. I mentioned in the article that Dunn Lampton was the U.S. Attorney who twice indicted then-sitting Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz. (Diaz was acquitted in both trials. He’s also now suing Lampton.) That experience altered the way Diaz viewed the criminal justice system. He became a strong defender of the rights of the accused, and a vocal opponent of the death penalty. It was Diaz who wrote the strongest opinion denouncing Hayne in the Tyler Edmunds case, and who in that opinion and others attacked Hayne and West, writing on a couple occasions that Hayne should be barred from testifying in Mississippi courtrooms. (In fact, if it weren’t for Diaz, Edmonds would likely still be in prison.)

The unfortunate coda: Diaz then lost his bid for reelection in 2009, in part because of Lampton’s indictments, and in part because a series of TV ads bought by a Virginia-based law-and-order activist group that denounced Diaz for his opinions in three cases. As I wrote at the time, two of the ad’s claims were misleading at best. The third was the case of Jeffrey Havard, a man currently on death row in Mississippi thanks primarily to Hayne’s testimony. His testimony in that case has since been criticized by more reputable forensic pathologists, but Havard is still on death row.

Love the vicious anger in this one.

Fantastical?  That must be something like fantastic, except that it isn’t a word.  Someone needs a dose of reality strong enough to pull them back from the brink of Pulitzer-wannabe ambition to the reality of red-shirt team, sometimes-contributor to Huffpost, the most feeble excuse for journalism on the planet.  Someone with an ancestor under the illusion that taking the “B” off the front of a real name, somehow created another real name.  Aha, our first clue to the origins of fantastical!  I tried this once, in grad school, with the term violencentric – and was rewarded with my only “B”.  Here’s your “B” – to do with as you please - perhaps to restore to its rightful place on the front of your name.  Keep things in perspective.  You’re barely anybody yet.  Avoid trying so hard that you become nobody before you’re somebody.

Who wants to tell him fantastical is actually a word?

From commenter H. Rearden:

Meet Michael West of Mississippi
He could match bite marks to teeth, infamously.
But his bluff has been called,
Yet the DA’s still enthralled
And people languish in jail, innocently.

And from commenter SJE:

Steven Hayne runs an autopsy shop
processing body parts all day non-stop
he’ll do any deed
prosecutors need
coz he always finds for the cops

Michael West can tell from a bite
if a perp is black or white
their SAT score
height, address, and what’s more
he is 100% right.

This is why I blog.

• Virginia bar disciplines prosecutor for misconduct. More of this, please.
• Those calorie count mandates aren’t working out so well.
• New report from the Institute for Justice: “How Cities Can Create Economic Opportunity by Knocking Down Protectionist Barriers to Street Vending.”
• Because they can.
• Yet another state forensics lab is under fire, this time in Connecticut.
• Man sent to jail because he can’t afford to pay fishing fine.

Bill doesn’t waste words:

I gave up after reading one page of your prose.Please find another profession.

PLEASE.

Bill

Anyone have any ideas? It’s probably too late for my childhood dream of playing in the NBA.

Charles Bridge, Prague.

My latest piece for Huffington Post looks at the case of Leigh Stubbs, a Mississippi woman serving a 44-year prison sentence thanks primarily to testimony from our old friend Michael West.

West performed his typical bite mark voodoo in this case, but he also donned the title of “video enhancement expert,” claiming he was able to use some fancy computer equipment to “enhance!” security camera footage well beyond its resolution. He also gave his expert seal of approval to some, um, interesting opinions about homosexuals and crime. There’s also some nifty misbehavior by former U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, back when he was a Mississippi DA.

They were just helping him out, in case he didn’t know where it was.

Officers arrested and handcuffed Lopez as an “illegal alien,” according to the ICE investigation report. His resistance was the reason Lopez “was subsequently guided into a wall by the officers,” the report read.

Hat tip: Dara Lind.

You might keep this story handy the next time you hear someone complain about how “industry” is to blame for our food being over-processed, filled with preservatives, and loaded up with various other additives.

A few years ago, Kris Swanberg, having been laid-off from her job as a Chicago Public School teacher, remembered she received an ice cream maker as a wedding gift. TheChicago mom fished it out of her kitchen cabinet and eventually started a new career.

Today Swanberg’s Nice Cream — on offer at local Whole Foods and farmers markets — is considered a star of Chicago’s rich and beloved artisanal ice cream scene, one that could be shut down entirely by state rules, she recently learned.

She says that a couple of weeks ago a representative from the Illinois Department of Public Health came to Logan Square Kitchen and informed her she’d have to shut down if she did not get something called  ”a dairy license.”

Swanberg and others in her field had operated for years now without ever hearing of such a thing and, indeed, they say, the City’s Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, to whom they applied for business licenses, never informed them they would need one to operate.

Apparently, they do. And in order to keep operating they’ll need to “work out of their own space,” have their ice cream tested once a month for bacteria levels, change all packaging and labels to meet state standards, and purchase a $40,000 pasteurizer.

More:

Swanberg says that the IDPH officer who visited told her that her ice cream probably wouldn’t pass the bacteria tests if she continued to use fresh strawberries. Instead the officer suggested she use “strawberry syrup,” Swanberg said.

IDPH spokesperson Melanie Arnold said that it isn’t illegal to use real strawberries but that IDPH “does not encourage it simply because when you try and clean a strawberry to make sure it doesn’t have any bacteria, it kind of deteriorates.”

The department’s Dairy Equipment Specialist, Don Wilding, said that other ice cream producers use irradiated strawberries. He says look good but he can’t vouch for the taste.

Swanberg could continue to work without a license, Wilding said, if she used a premade ice cream mix that is usually formulated with stabilizers and other additives — the kind of thing typically used at Dairy Queens, Wilding noted.

Still, Swanberg feels that using strawberry syrup and a premade soft serve mix might not attract the same customers who buy her product made from fresh organic cream blended with local and often organic produce like basil and strawberries she picks herself.

The department could not confirm the $40,000 price tag on a pasteurizing machine. But it did confirm that, even if she uses pasteurized milk and boils all of her ingredients together, she would then need to pasteurize it in this special machine again.

I guess it could have been worse. They could have sent the SWAT team.

At the website for the Columbus (Mississippi) Dispatch, a commenter recounted portions of my recent Reason piece on bad prosecutors to make the case against reelecting District Attorney Forrest Allgood. Allgood responded with a lengthy letter of his own.

Allgood’s letter purports to include a bunch of documentation I don’t have, and that the newspaper didn’t print. But after running Allgood’s letter by my sources, I stand by my reporting. He is right that I did not contact his office for comment before that most recent article was published. Perhaps I should have. But that article a summary of my previous reporting. And I’ve contacted his office numerous times in the past requesting comment. He has never returned my calls.

But Tyler Edmonds, one of the victims of Allgood’s prosecutorial overreach, did respond to Allgood’s letter. Edmonds’ thorough rebuttal does a great job exposing Allgood’s slipperiness.

In any case, Allgood was reelected once again last week, and by a nearly two-to-one margin. (Interestingly, he did lose his home county.) In the end, the guy who has seen two people he convicted of murder later exonerated by DNA evidence, and two more later acquitted after appeals courts threw out the convictions due to prosecutorial misconduct and the use of faulty forensic testimony, the guy who once compared disgraced “bite mark expert” Michael West to Galileo  . . . will get another term.

• Alexandria, Virginia, gets serious about preserving chain-link fences.
• Geek humor.
• Missouri state doctors get paid while sleeping.
• Shocker: Government price controls on cancer drugs create shortages.
• Gotta love the “arrest first, ask questions later” response from the casino owner. If you could figure out the algorythm of where states ship winning scratch-off lottery tickets using publicly available information, why should that be against the law?
• Your latest TSA outrage.
• Horrifying headline of the day.
• Putting the science in forensic science.
• Cory Maye, via Facebook: “Had my first day at work today. Helped put in a transmission and fixed air conditioner system in a van. Tomorrow, gonna rebuild another transmission for a car and give tune ups and fix power stering on a grand-am.”