From Chicago.

A group of Chicago police officers armed with weapons and a warrant violated the Constitution and may face sanctions for barging into the wrong house and threatening to shoot a mother and her kids, a federal judge ruled.

On June 7, 2009, Officer Billy Gonzales applied for a warrant to search the first floor of 3811 West Diversey Ave., based on the tip that it was a Chicago crack house. The application was granted.

The next day, the police executed their search at 3815 West Diversey, the building next door to 3811. The officers approached the building through the alley in the rear and broke down the back door with a sledgehammer. Two officers stayed outside to watch the building entrance.

Startled by the noise, Nancy Simental walked upstairs from her basement apartment with her two children. She claimed to find police pointed their guns at her and saying, “Don’t move or I’ll shoot you.” When she asked the police to put their guns away because children were present, a policeman repeated that he would shoot Simental and another pointed a gun at the children.

Officers also walked in on first-floor resident Francisca Nava as she was in the bathroom and told her not to move. The court said officers also pointed guns at Guadalupe Simental and Cesar Leon.

Sometime after the police entered the building, one of the officers stationed outside informed the team leader that the address on the front door did not match the warrant. All the officers then exited the building, leaving furniture overturned and the residents’ belongings strewn across the floor…

Not only did defendants provide the court with innumerable improper and unsupported claims about Gonzales’s purported intentions regarding the warrant in question, defendants audaciously claimed that plaintiffs actually admitted that their home was the intended target of the warrant.”

“There is no evidence in this case that the warrant contained any errors,” he wrote. “Instead, the evidence shows that officers erred by searching the wrong house.”

Such a mistake might not be a constitutional violation if the officers made a reasonable effort to ensure they searched the correct building, the court explained.

But Hibbler said “the officers did not even make the effort to look at the prominently displayed address on the front of the house. The fact that they approached the house from the rear does not excuse the mistake.”

This one is from Richland County, South Carolina, home of Sheriff Leon Lott and his “Peacemaker” tank.

A Gibbs Road couple came home from work Thursday to find their home surrounded by Richland County sheriff’s deputies, their front door kicked in and their home ransacked.

Deputies were executing a search warrant at Wanda and Reginald Blanding’s home Thursday, after drug agents said a confidential informant “made a controlled purchase of crack cocaine from an unknown black male at the location,” according to the search warrant.

“He hit the door right here with it,” explained Wanda. “He still had the ram jack in his hand when I walked up.”

The informant told investigators the drug buy was made at 402 Gibbs Road. That’s where the sheriff’s drug unit staged its raid, looking into the one drug purchase the informant alleges happened there.

“They told me why they were here and I was like, ‘Okay, no one is supposed to be here. No one sells drugs out of this house,’” said Wanda.

Reginald is the only black male that lives at the home. He says when he arrived after the raid, deputies never searched him for drugs and never asked to look through his two cell phones even though the search warrant states that’s one of the things deputies were after.

Reginald says deputies told him they had his house under surveillance and know the drug buy went down.

The Blandings deny there ever was a drug buy at their home and think deputies got bad information from their informant.

Wanda says deputies emptied nearly every drawer in the home, searched through the attic and their daughter’s bedrooms.

Sheriff’s Capt. Chris Cowan says deputies made a purchase from the home and had every right to search it. “The drugs that we purchase were out of that home, we purchased from a family member of that home,” said Cowan. “We purchased the drugs out of that home.”

The only people who live there are the Blandings and their three high school-aged daughters.

When asked if enough due diligence was done in preparation for the raid, Cowan said the officers did everything they were supposed to do.

Meanwhile, the Blandings, who have been married for 20 years, say they both have clean records. Wanda has been a corrections employee for 21 years and Reginald has worked for Pepsi for just as long. Both say they have never gone near drugs and don’t allow them in their home.

“This is humiliation,” said Wanda. “I mean, come in, I can see the door, go through my room, clothes and everything all over the place. I mean, they went through every room in the house and just tore it up.”….

The sheriff’s office says an apology is just not happening, and they’ll continue investigating this case until they make an arrest.

Maybe the Blandings have some connection to Michael Phelps.

Get your freak on, girl.

Can’t wait to see the next Mark Ames piece in the Nation or Alternet explaining how this Feministe writer is secretly tied to the Koch brothers.

Rovinj, Croatia.

• Defense attorney ordered to pay damages for creating fake child porn to show jury how it easy it is to create fake child porn.
• The problem with private prisons, put in pretty frank terms by a private prison company.
• Chicago cop kills unarmed man who was lying prone. It’s the cop’s third shooting since January.
• A photo that’s both heartbreaking and inspiring.
• The dumbest thing you’ll read today. (The original Pajamas Media post, not the critique of it.)
• Awesome company turns child drawings into stuffed animals.
• Democrats gay-bait Republican congressional state senate candidate.
• Today’s assault on the Fourth Amendment brought to you by my state of Tennessee.
• High school officials scare the hell out of kids to clear the hallways . . . so they can then search the kids’ lockers for drugs.

I’ve been in D.C. the last few days, and I’ve been chatting about this issue with a number of people. I think it might make for an interesting conversation here.

We libertarians are regularly accused of being corporatists, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary. But what are the arguments in favor of keeping the legal protections that define corporations?

It seems to me that there are a number reasons libertarians might support doing away with them. The most obvious is that corporations aren’t remotely free market, and there’s really no incentive for them to be. If your sole duty is to your shareholders, rent seeking—using your political influence to get the government to pass laws that restrict competition and hurt your competitors—isn’t just a good business strategy, it’s really an obligation. Same with other issues like the use of eminent domain.

Just from observation, it seems to me that the kinds of people who rise up to lead publicly-held corporations tend take a pretty namby-pamby, go-along-to-get-along approach to free markets. You rarely see a corporate executive angrily stand up to politicians or regulators who abuse their power. There’s very little to be gained from it. In my experience, the hardcore free market types in the business world tend to be people who have started their own businesses, and they tend to be partnerships or sole proprietorships. Which makes some sense. When you don’t have shareholders to report to, there’s more room to act on your principles. There also seems to be something inherently wrong with a legal structure that shields people from any personal financial ramifications for the decisions they make. We libertarians understand the problems that stem from shielding government actors from any real repercussion for their actions. Seems like the same would apply to corporations, and explain some of the pretty awful things we find corporations doing from time to time.

But I’ll confess that this is well outside my area of expertise. So I hand the question over to you. Should we do away with corporations? If not, why not? If so, what sort of legal/organizational structure should replace them?

It’s obviously never going to happen. But I think it’s an interesting question.

And on pretty dubious grounds.

The measure calls for creating a 14-member bipartisan commission with a $5 million budget to examine all levels of the justice system – federal, state and local. It is intended to lead to recommendations on how to change laws, enforcement practices and prison operations to make the justice system fairer and more cost-effective. The panel would have to complete its work in 18 months.

Two Republican senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, spoke against the amendment, saying that allowing a federal commission to examine state and local criminal justice systems would encroach on states’ rights and that the commission’s $5 million budget should be used for other purposes.

Hutchison said studying the federal system is within Congress’ powers but including state and local justice systems “is an overreach of gigantic proportions.”

“We are absolutely ignoring the Constitution if we do this,” Coburn said.

A majority of senators supported Webb’s amendment, 57-43, but it fell three votes short of the 60 needed to be added to a spending bill.

Webb blamed Republicans for blocking the legislation and vowed after the vote to keep pressing for the commission.

“Their inflammatory arguments defy reasonable explanation and were contradicted by the plain language of our legislation,” Webb said in a prepared statement. “To suggest, for example, that the nonbinding recommendations of a bipartisan commission threaten the Constitution is absurd.”

Absurd is right. If state and local law enforcement officials, prosecutors, courts, and prisons are violating the constitutional rights of their residents, then there’s a clear 14th Amendment justification for federal involvement.

But let’s be honest, here. This is some pretty blatantly selective fidelity to the Constitution. The drug war is as direct and aggressive an assault on federalism and the power of states and localities to make their own criminal justice policy as anything else the federal government does. Yet Hutchison, Coburn and the rest of the GOP senators who killed the Webb bill all support it. They also support all sorts of federal grants to local police departments. They all support letting the Pentagon give military equipment to local police departments.

Along comes a bill that would create a committee to make some non-binding suggestions that, if followed, may make it less likely that someone will be wrongfully imprisoned, or beaten by cops, or otherwise  get screwed over by the criminal justice system, and suddenly all of these GOP senators get a case of the constitutional vapors.

New Orleans.

You may remember Emily Good, the Rochester woman arrested earlier this year for videotaping a traffic stop from her front yard.

When last we visited the story, Good’s neighbors had held a rally for her. Then Rochester police showed up at that rally, and began writing tickets for those attendees who parked more than 12 inches from the curb. The cops even brought rulers.

Monroe County District Attorney Michael Green declined to charge Good, because, well, because she didn’t break any law. This has apparently invoked the wrath of the police union. Green isn’t running for reelection, but one of his lieutenants running for the job. The police union has endorsed her opponent, and the Good case appears to be a big reason why.

Doorley said she thinks her prosecution of corruption within the Greece Police Department and the decision not to prosecute Emily Good, who was arrested while video recording a police traffic stop, thwarted her chances for law enforcement support.

She said during her endorsement interview that she was questioned at length about the DA’s decision that Good had not committed a crime.

Good was charged with interfering with a police stop — the arresting officer contended she was endangering police — but the District Attorney’s Office decided the charge should be dismissed.

Doorley, who was then first assistant district attorney, appeared in court to request dismissal of the charge. Prosecutors determined that, under the statute, Good had not committed a crime.

A number of prosecutors scrutinized past cases involving the same criminal statute and determined the criminal charge was “not sustainable,” Doorley said.

Imagine the union’s reaction if the DA’s office had done what it should have done—criminally charge the cops who arrested Good for illegally detaining her.

(Hat tip.)

So it’s worse than initially reported.

The D.C. police department has released preliminary statistics on the controversial practice of arresting drivers whose vehicles are unregistered or have expired registration. The numbers indicate that the practice is more widespread than previously thought, with several arrests per day on average.

In the one-year period starting Oct. 1, 2009, records indicate that 2,163 persons were arrested in the District for expired tags. In the subsequent year, ending in September, arrests declined dramatically, to 1,334.

Funny thing about numbers. The article notes that of those 3,500 people arrested, only about 250 were actually put in a jail cell. The disparity between the two numbers first evoked in me an, “Oh, well that’s not so bad” reaction. So just consider that latter number on its own: Over two years, 250 people were jailed in D.C. for having expired license plates. Absurd.

• Non-existent DOJ study repeatedly cited to justify police benefits.
• Stuff Siri says.
• Pat Buchanan: Black people were more American back when they were second-class citizens.
• Remember the high school principal arrested for DWI despite blowing 0.0 on the breath test? There were no drug or alcohol in his system. Still, the cop swears he smelled alcohol. And the DA says he believes the arrest was made in good faith.
• If only this could actually happen.
• Trucking gets a little freer today. The usual suspects predict mass calamity.

New Orleans.

Today’s bizarre attempt to politicize a news story:

I like the response from James Poulos:

If it saved just one deeply humbled Speaker from one escaped tiger attack, the stimulus was worth it.

Ah, Washington.

It seems a rare act of civic sacrifice: in the name of deficit reduction, lawmakers from both parties are calling for the end of a longstanding agricultural subsidy that puts about $5 billion a year in the pockets of their farmer constituents. Even major farm groups are accepting the move, saying that with farmers poised to reap bumper profits, they must do their part.

Yay! But wait. Hold on . . .

But in the same breath, the lawmakers and their farm lobby allies are seeking to send most of that money — under a new name — straight back to the same farmers, with most of the benefits going to large farms that grow commodity crops like corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton. In essence, lawmakers would replace one subsidy with a new one.

And so it goes.

• Headline of the day.
• French court tells ISPs to block sites that post videos of police misconduct.
• Fun video: What the world would look like as you approach the speed of light.
• Gene Healy on Obama’s venture into Uganda.
• The conservative Rutherford Institute: “The War on Drugs Has Become the War on the American People”
• Innocent Atlanta woman arrested, jailed for 53 days. TV station finds the actual suspect.
• Depressing lede of the day.
• Baltimore radio host, libertarian, and all-around decent guy Ron Smith has stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I’ve done Ron’s show many, many times. He’s smart, incisive, principled, and clearly cares about the sorts of stories we cover on this site. This is crappy news. Best wishes to him and his family.

New Orleans.

If you’re in or around Oxford, Mississippi next Tuesday, I’ll be speaking on a panel at Ole Miss on the Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks cases. The panel will happen after a screening of the documentary Mississippi Innocence.  More details here.

Here’s a trailer for the movie. (In the interest of vanity, I feel compelled to note that there were 65 pounds more of me when I shot that interview than there are today.)

MISSISSIPPI INNOCENCE – Trailer from UM Media Documentary Projects on Vimeo.

Over at The Daily Beast, Eli Lake looks at how defense contractors are shopping war on terror technology to local police departments.

It’s known as IBISS, the acronym for the Integrated Building Interior Surveillance System. Like its name suggests, it can see through the walls of buildings and sketch out images of what’s inside.

ntil this year, IBISS was a classified system, a piece of high-tech wizardry the military used to fight the war on terrorism. The contractor that made the system, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), couldn’t talk about it in public, but that’s changing. IBISS is one of the new products SAIC is hoping to sell to local police stations and fire departments as the defense contractor explores what is known in the industry as “adjacent markets.”

The only thing preventing more widespread implementation of this stuff at the moment are strained state and local budgets.

“In some ways this is the entire trend we’ve been seeing since 9/11. All kinds of capabilities that were developed with an eye to foreign countries are being turned inward upon the American people,” Stanley said. “We’ve seen this with everything from the NSA to spy satellites even to a lot of the technologies that are moving through what is called the green to blue pipeline, which is to say the military to the police.”

The trend goes back quite a bit farther than 9/11.

Amazing story from California:

David Dutcher met Sharon on Match.com in late 2008, a few months after separating from his wife. “We had a lot in common,” he recalled. Sharon loved four-wheel-drive trucks and sports.

They met for coffee, then dinner. Sharon was tall, slender, blond and beautiful. She moaned that she had not had sex in a long time. She told him he had large, strong hands and wondered if that portended other things. She described his kisses as “yummy.”…

On their second date, Sharon suggested they join one of her friends “who was partying because she had closed a real estate deal,” Dutcher said. They drove to an Italian restaurant in a suburb near San Francisco. Sharon’s friend, “Tash,” was a loud and raucous brunet who was pounding down shots.

The women fiddled with Dutcher’s tie and massaged his neck and shoulders. The brunet unbuttoned her blouse to reveal generous cleavage. “I am way over my head with these girls,” he remembered thinking. “I hadn’t been out dating in a while.”

Sharon had trouble finishing her tequila shots and asked Dutcher to help, he said. When the women went to the bathroom, two men at the other end of the bar peppered Dutcher with questions…

The women suggested going to a house with a hot tub that Tash was housesitting, Dutcher said. He followed them in his truck. Within a few minutes, a flashing red light appeared in his rearview mirror. The officer said he had been swerving.

Three months later, Dutcher’s wife filed a motion in their divorce case, telling the court that her soon-to-be former husband had been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving and that she feared for their children’s safety. The judge ordered that Dutcher’s visits be supervised.

Here’s what happened:

Dutcher had been duped.

The women who’d ogled him worked for Butler’s detective agency. Sharon, who told Dutcher she was a divorcee employed by an investment firm, actually was a former Las Vegas showgirl.

A man who once worked for Butler had blown the whistle. He told authorities Butler arranged for men to be arrested for drunk driving at the behest of their ex-wives and their divorce lawyers — and that entrapment was only one of many alleged misdeeds.

Butler, 49, a former police officer, was arrested in February. In addition to setting up at least five DUIs, he sold drugs for law enforcement officers and helped them open and operate a brothel, collecting and delivering the profits, according to prosecutors and a statement Butler gave them after his arrest.

In the March 15 statement obtained by The Times, Butler said his accomplices reasoned that they could shield their illegal businesses because any complaints would be investigated by a state-run narcotics task force, which one of the officers headed.

The alleged crimes implicated three different law enforcement agencies — the San Ramon and Danville police departments and the narcotics task force — and took place in Contra Costa County, a collection of mostly middle-class communities that stretch from the East Bay shoreline opposite San Francisco to upscale suburbs inland.

Jewett called the scandal a “sordid drama” that overwhelmed the resources of the county and raised potential conflicts for police departments being asked to investigate their own.

In May, the FBI took over the probe, interviewing Dutcher and other ex-husbands arrested on suspicion of drunk driving. A federal grand jury indicted Butler and two of the officers in August and September. The charges included drug dealing, running a prostitution business and illegal possession of a weapon.

More indictments are expected. A third officer, implicated by Butler in the DUIs, faces state charges of accepting bribes to make arrests.

Half of America now supports legalizing pot. That number exceeds the approval ratings of President Obama, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and every GOP candidate running for president.

Legalization is also at the top of the White House’s “We the People” petition site, and it isn’t even close. Next time Obama laughs off the question—and he will—I’d love to hear a White House reporter ask him if he’s aware that a higher percentage of Americans now support legalizing marijuana than think he’s doing a good job as president.

• Pretty sure something in HIPAA prohibits this.
• Those speedy neutrinos, explained.
• Australian government may levy fines for insulting politicians.
• The unlikely early funder of Occupy Wall Street.
• Jacob Sullum slaps around food columnist Mark Bittman.

New Orleans.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood gave an interview to the Jackson Free Press last week. Most of it is the nauseating fluff you usually hear from politicians. Hood also wants to take a more active role in “policing the Internet,” whatever that means. He also wants to make it a felony to witness a felony and not report it. And he wants to do lots of things for the children. And orphans and widows. The man is nothing if not bold.

But here’s the fun part:

Last year, you spoke out against a bill that would require a pathologist in Mississippi to hold an American Board of Pathology certification saying it threatened cases involving Steve Hayne. Can you explain your position?

There has been a misconception, and (JFP managing editor) Ronni Mott did this. … She didn’t listen to what I had told her as well as that other guy who writes for the paper (freelancer and then-Reason magazine columnist Radley Balko). Dr. (Michael) West is someone we have investigated, and I don’t support him in any matter. It’s not that I have supported Steven Hayne in any matter. What I have said are the facts: When I was a DA, he testified against me in criminal cases. I always found him to do a good job. By saying that, they assume I am just supporting him all the way, which is absolutely not true.

I don’t know what Hood means when he ways that he doesn’t support West “in any matter,” but his office most certainly continues to defend convictions won based on West’s testimony. In at least two cases, Eddie Lee Howard and Leigh Stubbs, Hood’s office argued that the defendant was procedurally barred from asking for a new trial because of West, because they’d already challenged his testimony and had been denied. If Hood truly believes West isn’t a credible witness, why is he asking that people convicted due to West’s testimony be kept in prison (or in Howard’s case, on death row) on a technicality?

Hood has also previously mentioned some sort of investigation into West, but his office wouldn’t give me any specifics on what was being investigated, or who was doing the investigating. He has also yet to recommend a single conviction be overturned because it was tainted by West’s testimony. West’s lack of credibility has been common knowledge in the Mississippi legal community for well over a decade. What’s taking so long?

As for Hayne, Hood has also previously made the claim that Hayne often testified for the defense back when Hood was a prosecutor, thus I guess establishing Hayne’s impartiality. I’ve yet to find a single example of this. It may have happened, but it certainly wasn’t common, and was dwarfed by the thousands of times Hayne testified for the state. The last time Hood made this claim, I asked his office for a list of cases where Hayne testified for the defense, against Hood when Hood was a prosecutor.  Hood’s office did not respond to my request.

More from Hood:

As far as the legislation goes, what I was saying was if Dr. Hayne has done all these examinations, and say it was several years before—and you know it takes two or three years sometimes before a case goes to trial—then when he goes to take the witness stand, and the statute passes, they are going to be hammering him with the law. And trying to keep him on and qualified in a murder case that occurred before we passed the law will be difficult. … The second thing about a pathologist is that very seldom do they make or break a case. All they say is the manner of death and cause of death, and that’s about it.

The first part of this graph is clearly incorrect. The law passed, and Hayne is still testifying in those old cases. Thing is, the scenario Hood fears should be happening in Mississippi—and a hell of a lot more. Mississippi should be reviewing every case in which Hayne or West has ever testified. But it isn’t. And the law in question wouldn’t have done anything of the sort. It only made sure someone like Hayne couldn’t do autopsies for the state going forward. Hood is either really dumb, or he knew this, and spread misinformation anyway. Neither scenario speaks particularly well of him.

The last statement in the graph above is also plainly false. It may be the case that the testimony from a competent medical examiner doesn’t usually make or break a case, but Hayne often gave testimony that turned a case, and in a number of cases, that testimony was later found lacking by more credible medical examiners. There are currently three men on death row (two in Mississippi, one in Louisiana) who are there because of critical testimony from Hayne (and in the Louisiana case, also because of West). And Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, both exonerated, would never have been convicted were it not for Hayne’s propensity to find bite marks no other doctor had seen, and for West’s “talent” to then match them to the state’s favored suspect. The state had no other evidence.

My Nashville Byline blog has relaunched over at Huffington Post.

The first post today is my report from the Americana Music Fest. It comes with a slideshow of photos from the festival, including an uncomfortably up-close photo of John Oates.

The introduction to this Buddy Holly performance on Arthur Murray Dance Party . . .  is simply wonderful.

(Hat tip: Lucy Steigerwald.)