New Orleans.
New Orleans.
New Orleans.
Many foreign journalists covering the July terrorist attacks in Norway were surprised to learn that Norwegian police are generally unarmed. A new survey indicates they want to stay that way.
“We want to have a police force that can handle the most demanding assignments with the least amount of force,” Arne Johannessen, head of the police officers’ union Politiets Fellesforbund, told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) this week.
A survey of the union’s own members showed that fully 60 percent of the police officers questioned said they do not want to be armed at all times. At present, they only arm themselves after receiving authorization in dangerous situations.
Johannessen said that after evaluating the survey, comparing Norway’s practice with that in other countries where police are armed, and talking with weapons experts, Fellesforbund had decided to officially support the policy that being armed will not be standard practice in Norway.
Debate has broken out on the arms issue over the years, and especially after the July 22 terrorist attacks in Oslo and the island of Utøya. Johannessen said that even after the attacks and increased threat of terrorism, the police want to retain what he called “a civil image” and the ability to work closely with the public.
Contrast that to what’s happened here since September 11.
It’s pretty rare to see government officials not only not use a crisis to grab more power, but to actually refute suggestions that they should.
New Orleans.
Florida State Rep. Brad Drake is taking heat for suggesting the state bring back the firing squad. He’s actually sort of right. But as is usually the case when a politician says something sort of sensible, he’s right in ways he didn’t really intend. Drake wants to bring back the firing squad because, “I have no desire to humanely respect those that are inhumane.”
In fact, for the person actually getting executed, the firing squad is probably more humane than the lethal injection. I got into this a bit in a piece for Huffington Post a couple weeks ago. When we debate the the humaneness of executions, we’re usually talking about what effect they have on everyone except the person we’re killing.
A 2005 study in the Lancet found that as many as four in 10 of those executed may have been given inadequate anesthesia.
A large dose of a single barbiturate would kill just as effectively and painlessly. Opponents say pancuronium bromide isn’t necessary, and it masks any indications a prisoner may be experiencing pain. But as The New York Times’ Adam Liptak reported in 2008, defenders of the three-drug procedure offer an interesting argument in response. “[L]awyers for John D. Rees, the Kentucky corrections commissioner, said the three-chemical combination was safe and painless and produced a dignified death,” Liptak wrote. “Using only a single barbiturate, they said, was untested, could result in distressing and disruptive muscle contractions, and might take a long time.”
Liptak went on to write about how the state of Texas came to adopt the three-drug protocol. “[T]he medical director of Texas’ corrections department, Dr. Ralph Gray, consulted a veterinarian in Huntsville, Tex., Dr. Gerry Etheredge,” Liptak wrote. Etheredge says he told Gray that in veterinary medicine, they used a single barbiturate, and that, “we overdosed it and everything went smoothly. It was very safe, very effective and very cheap.” The problem, Etheredge said, is that Gray feared “people would think we are treating people the same way that we’re treating animals. He was afraid of a hue and cry.”
These anecdotes are telling. Rather than subject witnesses to unnerving post-mortem twitching by prisoners who are experiencing no pain, prison officials instead use a procedure that leaves open the possibility of immense, unimaginable pain, but also ensures that witnesses will see no signs of it. We’ve shunned the effective, painless procedure regularly used in veterinary medicine because we don’t want to give the appearance that they’re treating prisoners like animals. But in the process, we may be treating them worse.
Jonathan Groner, the trauma medical director of Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio and a death penalty opponent, told ABC News in 2008, “One of the great ironies about capital punishment when you look at it historically is that when executions appear to be more humane, the application of the death penalty becomes less humane.”
When Utah death row inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner asked to die by firing squad last year for the 1985 murder of a defense attorney, there was some consternation that such a frontier method of execution could still even be an option in America. (It’s only still used in Utah, and only at the request of the condemned.) But a number of experts say death by firing squad is swift, relatively painless and less likely to go wrong than other means of execution. Groner told ABC News the least painful method of execution may be the guillotine.
But the idea of bringing back firing squads or the guillotine would make most Americans cringe — even ardent death penalty supporters. That we’d recoil from the idea suggests that we’re gauging the humaneness of state executions not by the swiftness and painlessness they provide for the condemned, but by the amount of discomfort they arouse in the rest of us. We prefer the method of execution least likely to remind us that it’s actually an execution. And that suggests that we may not be as comfortable with executions as we think.
None of this changes the fact the fact that Drake is a grandstanding buffoon. It’s just worth pointing out.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened.
Thousands of people in Florida convicted of DUI may not have been drunk at all. They very well may have been under the allowable blood alcohol limit. The problem may have been law enforcement not calibrating the breathalyzer called the Intoxilyzer 8000.
Now, the 10 News Investigators have uncovered documents and emails that prove the state knew there were problems and didn’t do anything to correct it for more than two and half years . . .
The 10 News Investigators obtained letters where a Sarasota deputy noticed there was a problem recording breath samples and breath flow levels as far back as 2007. He wrote in his notes that he even alerted an inspector who agreed there was a problem.
Those notes prompted an email from the head of the breath testing program, Laura Barfield, telling inspectors not to write down flow sensor problems in their field notes. . .
“As we found, almost half of every Intoxilyzer 8000 used in the state of Florida is not properly calibrated. There are enormous implications. I would tell anybody convicted of DUI using the breath test over the past few years they may want to talk to their lawyer because this information the state wouldn’t tell anybody about,” says Harrison.
While several people, including Bob Marois, who were arrested for DUI using faulty machines have had their convictions thrown out, they ended up losing their licenses for up to a year, having their mug shot forever online, and spending thousands defending themselves.
Not to mention that a DUI can get you fired from your job, ruin your reputation, and have all sorts of other extra-legal implications. It’s really astonishing (in a moral way, not a surprising way) that these idiots could allow people’s lives be seriously disrupted, sometimes ruined—and for more people to continue to be falsely implicated—rather than admit to a fixable mistake.
In a just world, the people who covered all of this up would suffer the same sort of repercussions those falsely convicted of DUI did. That isn’t going to happen.
The Obama administration is now threatening to prosecute media outlets that publish ads for medical marijuana. Stunning. I expected Obama to be a disappointment on these issues, but not to this degree. (Thanks to Libby for the link.)
Meanwhile, law enforcement officials in Los Angeles have pressured the RAND Corporation to remove from its website a study showing no link between medical marijuana dispensaries and crime.
New Orleans. No, I have no idea what’s going on here.
New Orleans.
Here’s a local news report that quotes yours truly, and also gets the law right.
In an age when almost every cell phone is capable of recording quality video, there’s certain to come a moment when you find yourself in the right place at the right time.
Maybe it’s police officers making an arrest, or maybe it’s just your friends entangled in a drunken brawl.
Either way, if it’s happening in a public place, feel free to push “Record.”
No one can take your camera away, and no one can force you to delete the video footage.
Or can they?
Legally, they can’t. In reality, they do.
Under Ohio’s recording laws, a person’s expectation of privacy all but disappears the moment he or she steps outside the front door.
Wiretapping laws that have been bolstered since 9/11, however, seem to confuse some people when it comes to what they can and can’t do with someone else’s private property, according to some legal experts.
Among the apparently confused: law enforcement officers…
Ohio, you may remember, is also the state were the police have expressed a fear of “cell phone guns.” Here’s another incident from today’s article:
In September, Kelleys Island police arrested Sandusky businessman Shaun Bickley and his wife, Jane, after Shaun used his cell phone to videotape five officers arresting a woman for an open container violation.
“We walked outside and there were five cops on one little girl and she was crying,” Shaun said. “I didn’t want to get involved in the situation. It was so overbearing, I didn’t say a single word. I just pulled out my camera and started filming.”
It wasn’t long before one of the officers demanded Shaun put his phone away. He refused and backed away from them when they asked him to stop filming.
By the end of the encounter, the officers arrested Shaun and his wife.
And they took his phone.
When he got it back hours later, the video footage had been erased.
“I just don’t believe they could do that,” Shaun said.
The footage would have been proof he and his wife did nothing wrong, Shaun said.
A Kelleys Island incident report clearly states Shaun was filming the officers, but the footage was gone when police returned the phone.
Kelleys Island police Chief Ron Ehrbar said none of his officers tampered with the phone.
Strange. There seems to be some odd glitch built into cell phones that causes any videos depicting police officers to spontaneously delete themselves.
Here are a few shots and a short video of a great old-timey band I caught on Royal Street in New Orleans Saturday. They’re called the Loose Marbles.
Still working out how to shoot video with the new camera, as you can see by the (lack of) focus.
Texas death row inmate Hank Skinner is set to be executed on November 9.
I wrote about Skinner for Slate last year. While the Troy Davis execution was awful because there were significant doubts about Davis’ guilt, and the Willingham execution because there has since been an overwhelming consensus among forensic arson experts that he was convicted with junk science, the outrage in Skinner’s case exceeds both—and that’s despite the fact that Skinner may well be guilty.
Skinner (who has already come within an hour of execution) is about to be executed despite the fact that there is testable DNA from the murder weapon, the rape kit, hairs one of the victims was found clutching, and a jacket left at the crime scene similar to one worn by another possible suspect, all of which has yet to be tested.
And it’s even worse than that. The state started testing on the hairs a decade ago. When preliminary mitochondrial testing came back negative as a match to either Skinner or the victim, the state just decided to stop further testing.
It’s one thing to consider all of the evidence, find it unconvincing, and then proceed with an execution despite strong disagreement from the suspect’s supporters. It’s a whole other level of moral culpability to deliberately remain ignorant about evidence that could definitively establish guilt or innocence.
The testing will at most cost a few thousand dollars. Skinner’s attorneys and a lab and Arizona have already agreed to cover that cost. It would take no longer than a few months. If Skinner is indeed guilty, the tests could have been done, confirmed his guilt, and he’d have been executed years ago.
I have no idea if Hank Skinner is guilty. Neither does the state of Texas. The difference is that I and anyone with a lick of conscience would prefer we find out before the man is put to death.
Seems that Texas officials would just rather not know.
This is really one of the scarier recent assaults on the Fourth Amendment.
California Gov. Jerry Brown is vetoing legislation requiring police to obtain a court warrant to search the mobile phones of suspects at the time of any arrest.
The Sunday veto means that when police arrest anybody in the Golden State, they may search that person’s mobile phone — which in the digital age likely means the contents of persons’ e-mail, call records, text messages, photos, banking activity, cloud-storage services, and even where the phone has traveled.
Police across the country are given wide latitude to search persons incident to an arrest based on the premise of officer safety. Now the nation’s states are beginning to grapple with the warrantless searches of mobile phones done at the time of an arrest.
Brown’s veto message abdicated responsibility for protecting the rights of Californians and ignored calls from civil liberties groups and this publication to sign the bill — saying only that the issue is too complicated for him to make a decision about. He cites a recent California Supreme Court decision upholding the warrantless searches of people incident to an arrest. In his brief message, he also doesn’t say whether it’s a good idea or not.
Instead, he says the state Supreme Court’s decision is good enough, a decision the U.S. Supreme Court let stand last week.
Last time I posted on this, commenter “Puzzling” made a very good point.
Cell phones are also not simple “containers” to the extent that modern phones show both local data and vastly more data information stored in cloud services, often all integrated together seamlessly to the user. These law enforcement searches are actually retrieving information stored in “containers” elsewhere.
So a traffic infraction can now lead to a search of your email (much of which may be stored on off-site servers, but still downloadable from your cell phone), GPS history, cell phone photos and video, web browsing history, history of phone calls placed and received, text message history, and anything else you do with your cell phone. Troubling, to say the least.
New Orleans.
I have a new piece at Huffington Post with the details.
Also, I can now say I once got up to write and file a story by 10am . . . all from a bar.
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