A new Cato study finds 5,000 incidents from 2003-2008 in which a gun was used in self defense. But the authors point out that even that figure likely low-balls the real number.
The data set supporting this paper is derived from a collection of news stories published betweenOctober 2003 and November 2011.
There is a selection bias problem withthe method of gathering news stories. Many defensive gun uses never make the news.Sometimes that is because the person us-ing a gun in self-defense saw no need to callthe police—he or she scared off the bad guy.In some cases, the victim might not wantto explain to the police that he has a gun,perhaps because he is a felon, or perhapsbecause he lives in a jurisdiction with very restrictive gun control laws. Sometimes thepolice do get called, but the officers do notfind the circumstances sufficiently impor-tant to issue a press release. After all, “ManScares away Burglar, No Shots Fired” is notparticularly newsworthy, unless you live in a very small town.
I found this part interesting.
For a very long time, gun control propo-nents would insist that having a gun was a mistake, because many people (especially women) would not be willing to shoot a person who was attacking them—and thecriminal would then take away the victim’sgun and use it on the victim. Oddly enough,while the authors have recorded a large num-ber of incidents where someone has their guntaken away from them, it is usually the otherway around. In 227 incidents, a criminal’sgun was taken away from him by the victim.This does not necessarily mean that the victim shot the criminal, but it does mean thatthe victim successfully disarmed the crimi-nal and then threatened the criminal withit in order to make him leave, or make himremain on the scene until the police could arrive. Often, these were situations where the victim, at the start of the attack, did not have a gun . .
. . . By comparison, the data set contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal tooka gun away from a defender; the reverse, aswe have seen, was reported more than 20times more often.
You may remember Gwinnett County, Georgia from such hits as “Where Did the Coke Go?,” “Smothered, Covered, and Tasered,” “The I Accidentally Entered the Wrong House and Killed a Dalmatian Blues” “Disabled Guy and a SWAT Team,” “No-Knock, Wrong Wouse,” and the follow-up just a few months later, “Sorry We Pointed Our Guns at Your Baby (We Got the Wrong House Again.)”
Now, Sheriff Butch Conway has entered the world of web video, teaming up with a Bail Bonds outfit to bring you a video roundup of Northeast Metro Atlanta’s biggest dirtbags*, complete with a bitchin’ guitar soundtrack and bad-ass crime reenactments. Enjoy!
(*Note: All suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty. You pussy.)
Great bit of reporting by my HuffPost colleague Elise Foley:
On a single day this past fall, the United States government held 13,185 people in immigration detention who had not been convicted of a crime, some of whom will not be charged with one, according to information The Huffington Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Instead, at a cost of roughly 2 million taxpayer dollars per day, the men and women were detained while immigration authorities sorted out their fates.
This case stands in stark contrast to the stated goal of immigration policy under the administration of President Barack Obama: to detain and deport unauthorized immigrants who’ve been convicted of crimes.
“ICE is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes the removal of convicted criminal aliens, fugitives, recent illegal border crossers and egregious immigration law violators, such as those who have been previously removed from the United States,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Nicole Navas said in a statement. “ICE’s enforcement approach is enhancing public safety in communities around the country.”
The FOIA request for information on all immigrants in detention on Oct. 3, 2011, turned up a list of nearly 32,300. Forty percent of those held by ICE had not been convicted of a crime, nor were they awaiting criminal trial. Despite what the term “illegal immigration” implies, simply being in the country without status is a civil, not a criminal, offense.
Rapists and murderers, frequently cited as the main unauthorized immigrants ICE is trying to remove, made up a far smaller percentage of those held that day than the innocent, traffic violators or low-level drug offenders, according to ICE’s crime breakdown.
“The fact is, we’re not deporting huge numbers of rapists and murderers,” said Emily Tucker, director of policy and advocacy for the Detention Watch Network, which pushes for limiting detention and deportation. “They would like us to think that, but that isn’t what is going on.”
Locking people up is big business. The Corrections Corporation of America, which gives heavily to both parties, is explicit about the connection between immigrant detention policy and the private prison company’s bottom line. “[T]he demand for our correctional and detention facilities and services … could be adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws,” the company wrote in an analysis for investors filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “Immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal, state and local level also could materially adversely impact us.”
I’ve poked fun at the HuffPost commenters for faulting private prisons for nearly everything that’s wrong with the criminal justice system. But the connection between private prisons, detention policy, and the odious immigration laws in states like Arizona is pretty hard to deny. I’ve never really been comfortable with private prisons. Whether they’re more efficient or cost effective is less important to me than the fact that I don’t like having a government-created industry whose bottom line is dependent on keeping as many people behind bars as possible. (I have similar feelings about defense contractors, though there are some important differences.) They also tend to be less transparent, and in many cases aren’t covered by open records laws.
Last July’s criminal justice issue of Reason also had a good feature by Jesse James deConto explaining the odd legal space occupied by immigration detention centers.
I’m currently working on a piece for Huffington Post on the latest prescription painkiller hysteria. In researching the piece, I found this 2010 Time piece by Maia Szalavitz on how post-mortem overdose diagnoses may be overstated.
The problem is that it’s difficult to isolated a particular drug as cause of death. So the rise in opioid-related overdose deaths that the CDC and numerous media outlets have been screaming about for the last few months could be the result of lots of people ODing on painkillers, or it could merely be that because more people are taking painkillers, more people are likely to have painkillers in their systems when they die. Hence, the use of the term “opioid-related” to describe these deaths. That allows panic-sowing without the need to establish any causal connection. (It’s similar to the way the government calculates “marijuana-related emergency room incidents.)
But the problem gets more urgent when we start using these diagnoses in court, as the government has done in the trials of doctors accused of contributing to a patient’s overdose death.
It’s here that the opinions of one of Szalavitz’s sources seem particularly troubling.
Given the state of the science, then, should it be used in court? Ed Cheng, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and expert on scientific testimony, says, yes, noting that more research is still needed. “If we were to require studies and statistical assessment on every assertion, almost nothing would be able to be used in court. My view on this is that the question here is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” says Cheng. “It’s clear that the forensic sciences do not have as much of an empirical basis as we would like them to have. The question becomes how do we motivate them sufficiently to come up with the empirical basis that we want?”
In the Schneider case, which entered jury deliberations on Wednesday, the defense team sought and failed to prevent the jury from hearing testimony that it believed did not have sufficient scientific foundations. But according to Cheng, it may be preferable to let the jury hear both sides of the scientific dispute and make up their own minds. “I myself have floated between the poles on this,” he says. “I’m currently more on the ‘Let the jury hear it’ side. I’m not convinced that good science and bad science is always cut and dried.”
“Let the jury hear it” sounds great on its face. But there’s more to it than that. If the science linking a particular drug to a particular overdose isn’t established–if the scientific community is split over whether you can make that connection–then the jury shouldn’t hear it. (If nothing else, that would seem to establish reasonable doubt.)
Yes, we do have an adversarial judicial system. But lay juries aren’t trained scientists. Most people don’t know what to look for when evaluating the veracity of some science-based claim. Get two scientific-sounding witnesses pitching the jury competing or mutually-exclusive theories, and the winner will more often be not who advocated the best science, but who was a better expert witness. Or more bluntly, who was a better salesman.
We’ve seen this over and over again with bite mark testimony. Frauds like Michael West have sold crap science to juries for years, sometimes unopposed, but often opposed by more credible experts. Even now, with a solid consensus in the forensics community that you can’t “match” bite marks in skin to one person to the exclusion of everyone else, we still see appeals courts shoot down post-conviction petitions on the grounds that the defense already challenged the state’s expert at trial, and the jury found the prosecution’s witness more convincing. It doesn’t seem to matter that we now know the prosecution’s witness was spewing pseudo-science hokum.
I think you could make a strong case that West was able to persuade juries because he didn’t sound scientific. I’ve read more than a few trial transcripts where West and the prosecutor would actually use an opposing expert’s credentials against him, contrasting him as a fancy out-of-town hired gun with a bunch of letters after his name with West, the local dentist just trying to do the right thing, helping put bad guys away with intuition, common sense, and some self-taught expertise. The scary thing is that when you see West in action, he sounds convincing, even when you know he’s a fraud.
Of course, West is only one example (although he is one of the most egregious). I don’t know the best way to determine what science has reached enough of a consensus to be used in a courtroom, but leaving the decision to individual juries on a case-by-case basis seems like a bad idea. In the federal courts, and in much of the country, challenges to scientific evidence are currently resolved by the judge in what’s called a Daubert hearing. From my understanding, while those hearings have done a decent (but far from perfect) job keeping junk science out of civil cases, the process has been less successful at keeping it out of criminal cases.
Skeptical as I am of blue ribbon commissions, this may be one area where we’re best off having an established, accredited panel of specialists set policy.
I linked to a story about this case last summer. It’s another “but for video” case in which a citizen-shot video (shot by a priest, no less) pretty clearly show that the cops lied in their police report. Bonus points, they actually lied about the citizen-shot video.
The police report, David Cari, one of two arresting officers, states that he didn’t know what the New Haven priest was holding. He wrote that he saw an “unknown shiny silver object” that Manship had “cupped” in his hands, and was afraid for his safety. Read the police report here. . .
The police report alleges that Father Manship concealed the fact that he was videotaping the officers, by cupping his hands over “a silver object.”
“Not knowing if Manship was holding a camera or a possible weapon this officer asked Manship to show me what was in his hands,” Cari’s report reads.
In direct contradiction of Cari’s claim, the video from Manship’s camera shows Officer Cari twice verbally identifying the “silver object” as a camera.
“Sir what are you doing? Is there a reason that you have a camera on me?” says Officer Cari, in the video.
“I’m taking a video of what’s going on here,” Manship replies.
“Well, I’ll tell you what, what I’m going to do with that camera,” Officer Cari says, as he walks around a shelving unit to approach the priest.
The FBI has arrested four East Haven police officers on conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges following an investigation into alleged civil rights violations . . .
Federal law enforcement officials said in indictment papers that Officer Dennis Spaulding, Officer David Cari Officer Jason Zullo and Sgt. John Miller executed unreasonable searches and seizures and used unreasonable force and concealed their actions.
“At its core, this is an abuse of power case,” said Assistant US Attorney General Thomas Perez.
Mayor Maturo said the four men were arrested at about 6 a.m. Tuesday.
The officers are linked to the 2009 arrest of Father James Manship, who videotaped officers inside a store owned by Hispanics. Father Manship was arrested, but the charged were later dropped.
In a statement, Janice Fedarcyk, the Assistant Director of the FBI in New York, said “These officers have damaged the reputation of their department.”
“They behaved like bullies with badges,” she said.
Once again, all due credit to the Obama administration on this. The DOJ is not only backing citizens in lawsuits against police who violate the right to record, in the more egregious cases it looks like the agency will also hold police officers criminally accountable for—well—breaking the law.
Great news. Even better, the ruling was unanimous, although there was a split on why warrantless GPS tracking violates the Fourth Amendment.
The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and tracked its movements for 28 days.
But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies.
The minority found the tracking itself to violate the Fourth Amendment, which I think is a more satisfying rationale. In her own concurring opinion, Justice Sotomayor went even further. (PDF)
More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medi- cations they purchase to online retailers.
Perhaps, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to accept this “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” post, at 10, and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they can attain constitutionally protected status only if our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.
I think it’s probably time for me to concede that I was wrong about Sotomayor. (See here, here, here, and here.) Not only has she not been a liability in criminal justice cases, you could make a strong argument that in her short time on the court she’s been better on these issues than any other justice. (Despite his libertarian reputation, you could also argue that Thomas is the worst.) She is definitely now the justice who is most wary of the death penalty.
I don’t think it was unreasonable of me to be wary, given Sotomayor’s background and how she was sold to the public. (Remember, Biden told a gather of cops and prosecutors not to worry about Sotomayor, because “she’s got your back.”) But so far, it’s nice to be proven wrong.
MORE/CORRECTION: Orin Kerr points out that the court did not rule that the government needs a warrant before attaching a GPS device, which means my headline is wrong. (Actually, it was wrong even aside from that; the majority only ruled on the application of the device to a car, not the act of tracking.) The majority ruled only that the placement of the device constituted a search for Fourth Amendment purposes. They didn’t rule whether conducting such a search without a warrant would be unreasonable. So this looks to be a rather narrow ruling. Alas.
The Sotomayor portion of the post still stands, though.
MORE: Here’s an even more pessimistic take on today’s decision.
Williamson County, Texas, District Attorney John Bradley is the winner of our 2011 Worst Prosecutor of the Year award. It was a tight four-way race for the first day. North Carolina DA Tracey Cline then broke open a small lead on day two, before Bradley closed on the final day of voting.
A few updates on Bradley: On January 4, UPI reported that the Texas State Bar cleared Bradley of any ethics violations for spending 20 years fighting the DNA test that kept Michael Morton in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. This isn’t terribly surprising. State bars are notoriously lax at disciplining misbehaving prosecutors.
In this November New York Times profile that I didn’t catch when researching Bradley to nominate him, Bradley actually shows some contrition, going so far as to say the DNA results in the Morton case—which, again, he fought like to prevent from ever happening—have changed him. I hope that’s the case, but I’m inclined to think that after the Morton case, after having once advised another prosecutor to seek plea agreements that allow evidence to be destroyed so it can’t be tested in the future on an innocence claim, and after doing all he could to bury any investigation into the Cameron Todd Willingham case, Bradley’s period of penance should probably last more than a few months.
Nevertheless, even after all of that, last year Bradley was still elected to the board of directors (PDF) of the National District Attorneys Association. (Nominee Anita Alvarez is also on the board.) I don’t know if his election was the result of obliviousness to the controversy surrounding Bradley or a way of symbolically defying Bradley’s detractors. Either way, it really doesn’t speak well of the organization’s membership. Or at least of its voting membership.
Bradley is up for reelection for his current DA position. His critics have adopted an amusing way to protest his candidacy: They’re hanging bandannas from Bradley’s campaign sings. The DNA that eventually cleared Michael Morton was taken from a bandanna left at the crime scene.
A few updates from the other 2011 nominees:
With the constitutionality of Illinois’ eavesdropping law already facing several court challenges, a Democratic state representative from Northbrook has filed a bill that would allow people to audio-record a police officer working in public without the officer’s consent.
“I believe that the existing statute is a significant intrusion into First Amendment rights, so with the prosecutions and the court cases that have been reported about, it just seemed that this is a problem in need of a swift solution,” Rep. Elaine Nekritz said in an interview Thursday.
Illinois’ eavesdropping law is one of the strictest in the country and makes it illegal to audio-record police without their consent, even when they’re working in public.
It’s really pretty amazing how quickly things have been moving in the right direction on this issue. No guarantee the bill will pass, of course. But if you live in Illinois, you might give your state rep and state senator a call.
Good piece from Reason.tv. The Taser, like pepper spray, like the restraint chair, like the baton, is a tool. Whether or not it becomes a tool of abuse depends on how it’s used. That comes back to training, and to the culture police administrators foster within their agencies. Taser itself deserves some blame (and some liability) for the way they’ve marketed the device over the years, which has undoubtedly contributed to the tendency among police to use the weapon to force compliance instead of as an alternative to lethal force.
A new report from the Chicago Tribune illustrates the problem:
A Tribune analysis shows Taser use has jumped fivefold in the city since 2008 and suburban agencies that were surveyed were on pace to double their use, as departments equipped more officers with the devices. Chicago police were deploying Tasers at a rate of more than twice a day in 2011.
And oversight has not kept pace with the explosion in use. Departments are on their own in developing policies on when and how electroshock devices should be deployed, with no state regulation . . .
Although no Illinois agency collects data on uses of force by police, figures provided to the Tribune by Mundelein and eight randomly selected suburban departments that use the devices show police are on pace to deploy them roughly twice as often in 2011 asthey did in 2008.
Police in those departments used the weapons 35 times in 2008. By fall 2011, they had used them 56 times on the year. If that pace continued through December, the figure for 2011 would fall near 70.
Departments reported deployments at different levels of detail, and it was not clear in every case how a “use” or “incident” was defined. But the trend toward more frequent use was clear.
The rise has been steeper in Chicago. In 2009, officers logged 197 incidents. A year later, after hundreds more weapons were passed out, Chicago police reported 871 incidents. As of fall, the department was on pace for 857 uses in 2011, which works out to 2.3 per day.
The Tribune references an NIJ study released last June showing Tasers to be safe. Except, as I pointed out at the time, the study’s conclusion actually says Tasers are perfectly safe . . . but only when they aren’t used on the sorts of people most likely to be Tasered.
“There is no conclusive medical evidence in the current body of research literature that indicates a high risk of serious injury or death to humans from the direct or indirect cardiovascular or metabolic effects of short-term CED exposure in healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons.”
The Taser’s purpose is to be used on people who, at the very least, are rather stressed. And not “normal,” whatever that means. They also, by their very nature, are frequently used on people who are intoxicated. Put another way, Tasers may indeed be safe when used on “healthy, normal, nonstressed, nonintoxicated persons,” but it’s unlikely someone who meets all of those criteria would be a legitimate Taser target in the first place. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say the study’s real conclusion is that Tasers are only safe when they’re used on people who shouldn’t be Tasered.
Most headlines at the time only indicated that a broad NIJ study determined that Tasers are safe. Which will only contribute to their use in situations where it has yet to be proven that they are.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivs 2.5 License.
TheAgitator.com