My old pal Patterico — a prosecutor in California — has valliantly rushed to the defense of the police tactics that led to the death of an apparently innocent 93-year-old woman. In so doing, he also revisits his old habit of taking cheap shots at my credibility.

I’ll get to his knee-jerk defense of no-knocks and invasive police tactics in a bit. But first, I’d like to address his attacks on my credibility, because he continues to bring them up, and frankly, it’s utter bullshit.

Patterico once pointed out a mistake I made in a Fox column about jury nullification. I attributed an opinion to the U.S. Supreme Court that actually came from a lower court. Fine. I posted a correction on this site, and plan to correct it in the next Fox column I write about nullification. He has in the past also cited an error I made in a post on Terry Schiavo that was brought to the public attention by blogger XRLQ. I admitted error there, too, and posted a correction (note, I only admit to one of the many transgressions XRLQ accused me of — on bills of attainder. The rest are merely points of disagreement, which I’ll get to in a moment). That’s it. Two errors. In nearly five years of blog posts, over a hundred Fox columns, and numerous articles, op-eds, and articles for other publications (I’ve made other mistakes, of course. No one could write as much as I do without erring now and then. But I’ll put my reporting and commenting record up against just about anyone’s. And when I do screw up, I admit to it and correct the mistake).

The remainder of the evidence he cites in attacking my credibility boil down to disagreements, mostly between he and I, and between his buddy XRLQ and I, in which both of them have taken disagreements about policy to the extreme that not only are they right, but that I am objectively wrong. That is, we don’t just disagree, I’m lying, or deliberately misleading. It’s really the height of hubris. “Not only am I right, you are objectively wrong, and therefore lying!”

Let me give you one example. I once wrote that the U.S. Constitution gives Congress no authority to regulate the use of steroids in baseball. XRLQ responded with a lecture on the Commerce Clause, concluding that because the Supreme Court has given Congress broad Commerce Clause authority, I’m factually wrong. Um, no. I’m more than familiar with the history of Commerce Clause jurisprudence. I just happen to disgree with most of it. And there’s a pretty good case to be made that the founding fathers would, too. Pro-lifers will argue that there’s nothing in the Constitution guaranteeing the right to an abortion. Are they objectively wrong? No. They aren’t. Technically, they’re actually right. But the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution otherwise. Congress does lots of things that it isn’t authorized by the Constitution to do, and libertarians (and, sometimes, even conservatives) are right to call lawmakers to account for it. That the Supreme Court won’t reign in these excesses doesn’t make those of us who do ask for some accountability factually in error.

Nullification is another example. I say that jurors have a right to nullify bad laws, and I think there’s a good deal of historical evidence to support that claim. Patterico and XLRQ disagree. They say there is no such right — that nullification is only an option. That’s fine. What’s dishonest is not their disagreement, but their labeling of my position as factually in error.

It’s this kind of thing that Patterico and his ally XRLQ repeatedly cite to point out my “problems with the facts.” It’s bullshit, frankly. To be honest, I’ve read enough of both of them to know to put little value in either of their opinions. But as a journalist, my credibility is pretty important. And when these two put up posts or pop into the comments sections of other blogs with a long list of links to my “factual errors,” someone unfamiliar with my work isn’t likely to actually click through the links to see how bogus their claims really are. They’re more likely to just look at the long list of links, associate my name with “not credible,” and move on. That’s why I think it’s important to address them.

As for the Atlanta case, Patterico again makes spurrious claims about my attention to facts. But if you read through my posts here and at Reason. I’ve clearly labeled what are my own opinions, what are reported facts, and exactly where those facts have been reported. I’ve linked to my sources, so readers and click through and make their own judgments.

Patterico is a prosecutor (oddly, he took it as a personal attack the last time I pointed that out). He’d rather we all just let the police do their own internal investigation, and accept their conclusions as fact. My experience in researching about 1,000 of these raids is that that’s not sufficient. Police have an unfortunate habit of looking out for their own, even when their own have clearly erred. Public pressure is necessary to keep them honest. It’s also necessary to put a raid like this into its proper context — it is part of a larger, disturbing trend toward militarization in this country, one that treats U.S. citizens as collateral damage in the war on drugs. When someone says that one of these raids ending the way the one in Atlanta did rarely if ever happens, I think it’s important to point out that they’re wrong, that this is pattern, and that bad policy is leading to the deaths of people who are either innocent, or are at worst nonviolent drug offenders.

Patterico also attacks me for citing the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s claim that search warrants in Georgia are part of the public record. If the charge is accepting the word of a reporter at a respected newspaper when it comes to a factual citation, then yeah, I guess I’m guilty. If the reporter proves to be wrong about that fact, then I guess I was wrong to cite him, and I’ll post a correction. Until then, I’m going to go ahead and assume that what’s written in an edited, respected, large-circulation newspaper is mostly correct, and I’ll continue to find it laughable that doing so provides further evidence proving my “disregard for the facts,” or some such nonsense.

More interesting, though, is the rest of that particular Patterico post. He goes on to defend keeping search warrants secret in these types of cases. In other words, not only should we “wait until all the facts come in” before passing judgment, we should also make sure that the public doesn’t actually get access to all the facts. Instead, we should simply entrust the warrants, affidavits, and details of this case to the police. Because if there were problems with the warrant, or with the thoroughness of the investigation, we can count on the police to hold one another accountable. Riii–ight.

Patterico then talks about cases where the informant’s identity doesn’t really matter, such as when an informant merely tells police where drugs are available, then an undercover cop goes and makes the actual purchase. Fine. But what about cases where the legitimacy of the warrant directly hinges on the credibility of the informant? Like say, Cory Maye’s case? How many other suspects have been wrongly raided, charged, and/or convicted because some dirtbag informant like Randy Gentry lied to tell cops what they wanted to hear, and some Prosecutor like Patterico insisted on keeping the informant’s identity confidential? The fact that defendants are routinely denied access to cross-examine the informants accusing them is yet another preposterous example of how the war on drugs eats away at the Bill of Rights.

When an informant gives a bad tip that leads to a wrong-door raid, the fact that he’s kept confidential means the police can keep on using him. After the Alberta Spruill case, judges and prosecutors still insisted that the search warrant leading to Mrs. Spruill’s death be kept secret to protect the informant, despite the fact that the informant had a long history of bad tips, and that this particular bad tip had led to an innocent woman’s death. Perhaps if those earlier warrants hadn’t remained sealed, that informant could’ve been identified as having repeatedly given bad tips, removed from the CI registry, and Alberta Spruill would still be alive. Instead, we’re supposed to trust that police will always do the right thing. No oversight. No accountability.

After the wrong-door raid on elderly couple Martin and Leona Goldberg in New York City a few years ago, police and prosecutors were finally forced to reveal record of the informant whose tip led to the raid. His tips proved successful just 44 percent of the time. Despite this, police still routinely described him in search warrant affidavits as “reliable.”

It is the integrity of this process that Patterico thinks ought to be kept intact by keeping search warrants sealed. If you ask me, the real reason prosecutors don’t want information about informants released is because they don’t want the public to see just how slimy informants really are. Were it to become common knowledge that police routinely send SWAT teams to invade the sanctity of someone’s home based on no more than the word of a convicted felon, a drug dealer looking to snuff out a rival, an admitted bigot, or some lowlife who gets paid for his tips, well, there might be quite a bit more opposition to the use of informants, and to the drug war in general.

Of course, none of this addresses why the police in Atlanta couldn’t release the search warrant with the name of the informant redacted.

It’s telling that Patterico, a prosecutor, is assuming the classic law enforcement position after a botched raid or police brutality case. Standard LEO operating procedure in cases like these tends to go something like this: (a) tell everyone to calm down, and wait for the facts to come in — a process that police typically drag out for months, which conveniently allows the incident to drift from public consciousness; (b) at the same time, work to make sure the public actually receives as few facts as possible by keeping important evidence sealed; and finally, (c) attack the credibility of people who dare to ask questions.

Give him credit for thoroughness. Patterico’s three for three.

I’ll close this post by conceding that I am of course not immune to mistakes. But when I’ve made them, I’ve copped to them. Given that I continue to get published, and continue to build a readership here, there are obviously a fair and growing number of people out there who are fine with my reporting and commentary.

It isn’t surprising that a prosecutor wouldn’t like what I write about police and prosecutoral abuse. But disagreement is one thing. Maligning my integrity is just plain sleazy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 23rd, 2006 at 9:13 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.