This is a big deal.

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has urged a federal court to side with a Howard County man in a lawsuit over his cellphone being seized by Baltimore police at the Preakness Stakes after he filmed officers making an arrest.

The federal attorneys say the lawsuit “presents constitutional questions of great moment in this digital age.” They asked U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg to rule that citizens have a right to record police officers and that officers who seize and destroy recordings without a warrant or due process are violating the Fourth and 14th Amendments.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, which is representing the plaintiff, Christopher Sharp, said it believes this is the first time the Department of Justice has weighed in on the topic of recording police.

“The right to record police officers while performing duties in a public place as well as the right to be protected from the warrantless seizure and destruction of those recordings, are not only required by the Constitution,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in a “statement of interest” filed Jan. 10 in the case. “They are consistent with our fundamental notions of liberty, promote the accountability of our governmental officers, and instill public confidence in the police officers who serve us daily.”

This is pretty incredible. The federal government rarely urges a federal court to give the government less power. (Yes, in this case it’s local police, but the lpolicy would presumably apply to federal law enforcement officials as well.) I’ve criticized Obama in the past for the fact that his Justice Department continually comes down on the side of more power for cops and prosecutors in federal appeals court cases (even though, to be fair, that’s also the accepted practice).

So huge props to Obama and Holder on this. This would also seem to indicate that if one of these cases eventually gets to the U.S. Supreme Court while Obama is in office, the federal government would again argue in favor of a First Amendment right to record police and other government officials in public—even if it meant opposing, say, Chicago District Attorney Anita Alvarez, the most likely opponent in a case like this.

That would be fun to see.

I have a new article up at HuffPost looking at the death of Nick Christie, the use of pepper spray and restraint chairs, and the general culture of jailhouse abuse.

• Two 10-year-0ld boys charged with sexual assault in Houston.
• Fascinating photo essay of  the squatter community in an abandoned Caracas skyscraper.
• Regulatory state story of the day.
• Famous album covers re-imagined with Clip Art and Comic Sans.
• Headline of the day.
• In defense of firing people. (AKA, the stupidest scandal so far in the still-young presidential campaign.)
• Happy Birthday, Gitmo! Nut:  “According to Human Rights Watch, only one of the remaining 171 detainees at Guantanamo faces formal charges.”
• DNA testing points to time-machine killer.
• More great corrections from the NY Times.

• Greece adds pedophiles, exhibitionists, and kleptomaniacs to list of disabilities eligible for state benefits. Sounds like some politicians are ready to retire.
• Haley Barbour pardons another wife killer. My piece on Haley’s odd soft spot for lady-killers here.
• Gary Johnson slags Obama, Santorum over gay marriage.
• She was asking for it by the way she was dangling her cowbell.
• Judah Friedlander would like your vote.
• Four-hour ER visit billed for $20,000.

First Los Angeles, now Denver.

More than 500 people were wrongly imprisoned in Denver’s jails over seven years, with some spending weeks incarcerated or pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit before authorities realized they nabbed the wrong person, a federal court filing shows.

Civil-rights lawyers suing the city and county of Denver assert the documented mistaken-identity arrests “are the tip of the iceberg” and are an undercount of the true magnitude of the problem.

In one case a black man spent nine days in jail after he was arrested on a warrant for a white man wanted on a sex-crimes arrest warrant.

In another, authorities arrested an 18- year-old when they were searching for a man 30 years older.

A white man was hauled in even when the suspect actually was an American Indian who was nearly a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier. He wasn’t released until almost a month had passed and not until the victim of the crime alerted authorities at a court hearing that they had the wrong suspect . . .

“Denver’s approach to this pervasive problem is to put its head in the sand,” the ACLU said in the motion asking the judge to rule on behalf of four individuals suing the city for wrongful arrests. Three others represented by the ACLU already have reached settlements with the city.

The ACLU, in the motion, cites a 2010 report by the city auditor’s office that blasted the city for having an inadequate system for tracking arrest identity issues.

“We cannot improve what we do not measure,” that city audit reported.

Despite the city’s lack of a comprehensive system to track mistaken- identity arrests, the ACLU identified 503 such cases from 2002 into 2009 by combing through orders issued by judges, internal affairs records, arrest warrant logs and jail records. The ACLU maintains that many more cases exist but the city’s lack of a robust tracking system makes it impossible to get an accurate count.

• So this seems suspicious.
• New app lets you scan a bar code, then tells you if company that makes the product supports SOPA.
• The Mississippi woman locked up for eight years without a trial will be committed to a mental institution. That’s the right outcome, though it doesn’t address how this could have happened in the first place.
• Puppycide.
• Fraud, corruption in the Chicago public school system.
• Stephen Hawking, now 70, continues to baffle doctors with how long he has survived with ALS.
• The Washington Post looks at the dubious origins of all those college ranking lists.
• It was all just a misunderstanding! Memphis cop pleads guilty after shooting himself, blaming the shooting on a 17-year-old girl, having sex with the girl, illegally buying the girl Xanax, and having the girl’s house shot up.

• New Florida Marlins acquisition Mark Buerhle can’t live in Miami because he own an 18-month old Staffie, and Miami-Dade County has a dumb ban on “pit bulls.”  I explain the numbskullery of breed-specific legislation here.
• Ken at Popehat draws the line between recording police, take-down notices, and SOPA.
• Alabama minister sues after his photo was posted to the local sheriff’s “most wanted” web page. It was posted after a tip from an informant.
• U.K. couple cleared in the midst of a shaken baby trial after post-mortem exam reveals the child had rickets.
• Veteran photographer threatened by L.A. cop for violating the cop’s “right to privacy.”
• Tumblr of the moment: Ron Paul meets Ron Swanson.
• The threatening letter that the FBI anonymously sent to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Harris County, Texas DA Pat Lykos was one of the prosecutors I praised in Reason last summer.

In 2008 Pat Lykos, a self-described Goldwater-Reagan Republican who supports the death penalty, was elected as chief law enforcement officer of Harris County, Texas, the county that has executed more people than any other, in a state that has executed more people than any other. In fact, under the leadership of former D.A. Johnny B. Holmes—a handlebar-mustached, lock-’em-up tough guy whom the Los Angeles Times once called “the killingest prosecutor” in the country—Harris County by itself sent more people to death row than the 49 states that aren’t Texas.

So Lykos would seem to be an unlikely criminal justice reformer. But upon taking office she set up her own team to review prior convictions for mistakes, similar to Craig Watkins’ unit in Dallas . . .

Lykos has initiated three exonerations so far. In 2010 the Innocence Project of Texas gave Lykos its Honesty and Integrity in Prosecution Award. The organization’s spokesman, Jeff Blackburn, told The Daily Beast earlier this year that “Harris County was the standard bearer of everything bad in criminal justice” until Lykos came along. Under her leadership, Blackburn said, the county “is becoming the single most powerful example of how to change this system and make it work right.”

Naturally, then, Lykos is now facing a challenge from her own party.

Pat Lykos promised in 2008 to change the culture at the Harris County District Attorney’s office, and she has.

The new direction has not pleased everyone. The first-term incumbent drew an opponent from her own party campaigning on a simple message: The office is going the wrong way.

Lykos argues she is a reformer with three years of improvements under her belt while Mike Anderson, a popular 30-year veteran of the courthouse, is trying to convince voters the machine used to be better run.

“A prosecutor needs to run that office,” said Anderson, who was an assistant Harris County district attorney for 16 years before spending 12 years as a felony criminal court judge.

“It’s an enormous undertaking for anybody,” Anderson said. “It would be very hard for anybody who has never been a prosecutor and never tried a case as a prosecutor to run that office.” . . .

Anderson has attacked Lykos for DIVERT, a program she created that allows the equivalent of deferred adjudication for first offense DWIs, and her “trace case” policy, which lessened penalties for possession of trace amounts of crack cocaine or crack pipes.

Lykos says the trace case policy has lowered the jail population by 1,000 inmates and freed up resources for more severe crimes. . . .

Sheryl Berg, a state Republican Executive Committee member in Senate district 11, said she supports Anderson.

“I said it’s time for new leadership,” Berg said. “And I said I thought he was the ideal candidate for that position.”

She also denied that a fight at the top of the ticket is bad for the party.

“Robust competition brings out the better candidate and brings out better voter turnout,” she said.

Valoree Swanson, another Republican Executive Committee member who is supporting Anderson, said Lykos needs to be replaced.

“She’s a moderate who is soft on crime and is rude to people who work under her,” Swanson said. “It really hurts her that she was never a prosecutor, a lot of her policies are bad policies.”

Lykos also recently received a vote of no confidence from the Houston police unions for the trace policy. Lykos has said pursuing felony charges for trace amounts is not only wasteful (she says she wants to prosecute cartels, not crack pipes), it’s problematic because there often isn’t enough of the drug for both the prosecution and the defense to test it. The cops of course hate the policy because arresting petty users is a hell of a lot easier than arresting major dealers. And when you don’t charge the users, they can’t pad their stats for those lucrative federal anti-drug grants (and, if Houston is similar to what we’ve seen in Atlanta and New York, for raises and promotions).

Lykos is not without her problems. Her office is currently the subject of a grand jury investigation over the accuracy of portable DUI breath test units. Lykos herself appears to be concerned about the problem, but her office is apparently continuing to process DUI cases based on the tests, anyway. But the intra-party anger seems to stem mostly from her efforts to change the culture in the Harris County DA’s office.

• Seattle policy on dash cam videos: We will happily release the police dash cam videos you have requested for your lawsuit . . . just as soon as the statute of limitations expires.
• The historian Newt Gingrich is apparently unaware that Washington and Jefferson grew hemp. He also seems to think we had a drug war back then. That, or he thinks Washington and Jefferson were just shooting up pot smokers, vigilante-style.
• Utah cop is killed, several others are injured after a shootout during a drug raid. The suspect had no prior criminal record, save for a traffic misdemeanor. The police haven’t yet said if they found any drugs.
• Citing prosecutorial misconduct, a Texas judge has vacated the conviction of man who has served 31 years for rape.
• Illinois police officer writes woman a traffic ticket, then looks her up in the DMV database and asks her out on a date.
• Houston man arrested, jailed for 36 hours for photographing an arrest is looking for representation for a lawsuit.

• Just a reminder that you still have a little over a day to vote for the 2011 Worst Prosecutor of the Year award.
• Front page Chicago Tribune story on challenges to the Illinois eavesdropping law.
• 40,000 new laws to take effect in the U.S. this year.
• “Whether they know what they are doing or not, lawmakers seem intent on moving forward.” As Jacob Sullum quipped on Twitter, the article is about SOPA. But it could really be about nearly anything.
• The futility of prognostication.
• Hammered cop kicks down door, breaks into home, gets hammered again.
• Bizarre lawsuit of the day.
• Yes, this happened. Gross.

• So seven panelists are going to spend two-and-half hours discussing this.
• Rick Santorum’s big government record.
• ACLU “Civil Liberties Report Card” on 2012 candidates gives Gary Johnson highest marks, followed by Ron Paul, then President Obama. The report didn’t include the death penalty or the drug war, which would have put yet more space between Johnson/Paul and Obama.
• Headline of the day.
• Library sends cops to collect 5-year-old girl’s overdue books.
• 2011 local news bloopers. With jet pack bonus.
• Correction of the day. (Scroll down.)

And it really is pretty awful.

Tina Funderburk is a forgotten woman.

The 37-year-old mother from Brooklyn, N.Y., remains in the Hinds County Detention Center, where she has spent much of the last eight years behind bars.

She remains in legal limbo – still charged with murder in the death of her 3-year-old daughter, Reina Russell, but unlikely to ever be tried.

In 2009, Hinds County Circuit Judge Tomie Green ordered Funderburk, who has been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, sent to the State Hospital at Whitfield unit for those determined to be criminally insane, but after treatment, Whitfield officials returned her.

“This poor woman diagnosed as having psychosis and delusions is languishing in jail?” said Tucker Carrington, director of the Mississippi Innocence Project. “That seems needlessly cruel.”

Angela Ladner, executive director for the Mississippi Psychiatric Association, said the situation needs to be corrected. “You don’t put mentally ill people in jail,” she said. “You get them medical treatment.”

Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith said he is open to negotiations with the defense. Until that happens, “we cannot override a court’s order,” he said.

Stanley Wesley, who has visited Funderburk in jail, said she has already served twice as much time as then-District Attorney Faye Peterson offered in a plea bargain – four years for child endangerment.

Funderburk didn’t take the deal, insisting she never killed her child, he said.

Funderburk is severely schizophrenic. At the very least, she appears to have abandoned her daughter while traveling through Mississippi, while in the middle of a schizophrenic episode.But even if she had killed the girl, it doesn’t excuse locking a severely mentally ill woman up for eight years, without treatment, without so much as a trial.

If you’re wondering, yes, Steven Hayne was involved. Based on the girl’s remains, he determined her death was a homicide. Other doctors found insufficient evidence for that conclusion.

Once again, remember that the misdeeds can be cumulative. They need not have all happened in 2011. This year’s winner will be added to the annals of ignominy, along with prior winners Forrest Allgood, Mary Beth Buchanan, and Tanya Treadway.

Durham, North Carolina, District Attorney Tracey Cline

Mike Nifong’s successor is doing all she can to live up to her predecessor’s infamy. In September, the Raleigh News & Observer published a series on Cline’s conduct as a prosecutor, going back to when she worked in Nifong’s office as an ADA. The series hitched off the case of Frankie Washington, convicted of home invasion, kidnapping, assault, and sexual assault in 2007. An appeals court overturned the convictions, finding that Cline had withheld biological evidence for several years, then claimed she had sent it to the beleaguered state crime lab, which she said was responsible for the delay. The News and Observer series found a pattern with Cline:

In her quest to convict those accused of serious crimes, Cline has misstated facts to judges in other cases, a News & Observer investigation shows. She has not provided evidence favorable to defendants, as is required under the U.S. Constitution, state law and ethics rules that govern lawyers.

Cline’s conduct is under scrutiny for similar behavior in at least five cases other than Washington’s that are in various stages of the courts, according to documents and interviews.

Last month, Superior Court Judge Orlando Hudson, the senior resident judge in Durham, dismissed a murder charge against Michael C. Dorman II of Mebane after ruling that the prosecution by Cline violated the man’s rights. The evidence in the case, a partial skeleton, had been destroyed before the defense could examine it.

Amusingly, Cline responded by calling the newspaper’s series a “terrible injustice” to her.

Then, last month, it got surreal. Michael Peterson, a former newspaper columnist who was convicted eight years ago of killing his wife, was seeking a new trial based on the allegations of corruption and sloppiness at the state’s crime lab. Cline was the prosecutor handling Peterson’s hearing, Hudson the judge. Cline then asked that Hudson be removed from the case, oddly alleging that Hudson had orchestrated a vast conspiracy to destroy her, one that also involved several defense attorneys and the News & Observer. She filed other motions accusing Hudson of “moral turpitude,” and asking he be barred from hearing other criminal cases. She subpoenaed more than 50 people for the Peterson hearing, including Hudson, court clerks, defense attorneys, other active and retired judges, staff from the News & Oberserver, and, as the paper put it, “a considerable part of Durham’s legal community.”

Judge Carl Fox, brought in from another county especially for the hearing, gave Cline unlimited time to make her arguments. According to the News & Observer account of the hearing, Cline presented stacks and stacks of evidence that had nothing to do with the Peterson case. She was making her case for a broad conspiracy.  At one point, she mentioned an appeals court decision she realized she hadn’t yet read. So she asked for time to read it. The News & Observer reports a scene that would be downright comical were it not for what was at stake.

The packed courtroom sat in silence while Cline sat alone at her table, flipping through documents. After 14 minutes, Fox broke the silence: “Are you still reading the case?” Cline said she hadn’t located the correct citation.

When it was clear that Fox wasn’t going to rule in her favor, Cline withdrew the motion. Once defense attorney told the paper:

“She tied up almost the entire defense bar of Durham trying to defend her own reputation, and that’s pitiful and a waste of resources,” Holmes said. “She had detectives out serving subpoenas all weekend when they could have been out solving crimes.”

 

Catherine Voelker, supervisor of the Narcotics and Misdemeanors division, Ventura County, California, DA’s Office

Actually, the entire office apparently turns winning convictions into a competition. (Hey, games make work more fun!) Prosecutors who bring in the most convictions in Ventura County get their name engraved on a plaque that hangs in the office. One former DA told the Ventura County Star that “management would sometimes ‘turn up the heat’ and push prosecutors to take cases to trial regardless of whether there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Another added, “They still want you to take a swing at it even though the defendant is probably innocent.”

But Voelker took it all a step farther, circulating an email in late 2010 in which she formalized the competition, offering specific rewards for case volume, and encouraging prosecutors to get inspiration from the viral “Honey Badger” video.

James Ellison, the second-in-command at the office, said Voelker’s competition was ended quickly, and denies the office rewards prosecutors for taking on more cases, or punishes them for taking on too few.

Prince William County, Virginia, State’s Attorney Paul Ebert

This Paul Ebert’s third nomination. Ebert, you may remember, made the list several years ago for refusing to investigate the massive corruption among public officials in Manassas Park, Virginia in their efforts to shut down David Ruttenberg’s Rack & Roll pool hall. In 2008 and 2009, Ebert was the special prosecutor in the Ryan Frederick case. Frederick shot and killed Chesapeake, Virginia Det. Jarrod Shivers during a drug raid on Frederick’s home. Frederick had no prior criminal record, and says he thought he was being robbed. Which is credible, given that police informants had broken into Frederick’s home days earlier to obtain probable cause for the raid, part of a possible pattern of illegality among police informants Ebert found unimportant.

Ebert tried Frederick for capital murder. He attempted to change the venue, arguing that bloggers and Internet writers had made it difficult for the state to get a fair trial. He told jurors Frederick was a pot-crazed killer, then sought to exclude video of Frederick’s post-raid interviews at the police station, where a clearly despondent Frederick bursts into tears and vomits upon being told that he had killed a cop. Best of all, Ebert put on the stand a perfectly-named jailhouse snitch named Jamal Skeeter who claimed that during their one hour per day of rec time at the jail, Frederick repeatedly boasted about killing Shivers and mocked Shivers’ widow. Skeeter was so utterly devoid of credibility, fellow Virginia State’s Attorney Earle Mobley made the admirable and rare move of speaking up in  mid-trial to say that he and other area prosecutors had determined Skeeter was a professional liar, and had stopped using him years ago. You’d think that’s something a prosecutor might look into before using a witness to help put a man in prison for the rest of his life.

Ebert makes the list again this year after getting reprimanded by a federal judge in a death penalty case. In August, U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson vacated all charges against Justin Wolfe, whom Ebert convicted in a 2002 murder-for-hire case. The hit man who testified that Wolfe had hired him recanted in 2005, claiming police told him he’d get the death penalty unless he implicated Wolfe. Even though the state’s entire case hinged on the hit-man’s testimony, Ebert fought another six years to protect his conviction. From Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick:

Jackson’s 57-page memorandum opinion is scathing in its findings of prosecutorial misbehavior by Ebert and his assistant, Richard A. Conway. Conduct evidently included choreographing and coordinating witness testimony, withholding tapes of witness interviews from the defense, and knowingly allowing false testimony to be introduced at trial. Jackson finds that prosecutors failed to turn over a report showing that it was police detectives who first introduced the idea to Barber that Wolfe had masterminded the killing, and who gave him the option of implicating Wolfe or receiving the death penalty. He finds that they suppressed evidence that Barber confessed to his roommate that he’d acted alone.

Ebert’s incredible justification for withholding exculpatory evidence: He feared that it would have allowed Wolfe’s attorneys to “fabricate a defense around what is provided.” Ebert is the longest serving prosecutor in Virginia. He also leads the state in capital convictions, with 13.

Grant County, Wisconsin, District Attorney Lisa Riniker

You charge a 6-year-old boy with first-degree sexual assault for playing doctor with a neighbor girl, then yeah, you’re gonna’ make this list. When asked why the hell she’d charge a 6-year-old with a sex crime, Riniker responded, “the Legislature could have put an age restriction in the statute . . . the legislature did no such thing.” You know, I’d be willing to bet the legislature didn’t also specifically exempt breastfeeding from . . . well, let’s not give Lisa Riniker any ideas.

Bonus mendacity points: Riniker generously offered the boy’s parents a “deal” in which the kid would still have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

Texas 31st Judicial District Attorney Lynn Switzer

Since Gov. Rick Perry appointed her in 2005, Switzer has done her damndest to make sure Hank Skinner is executed before he ever gets the chance to have DNA testing on key pieces of evidence from his trial. Switzer didn’t even convict Skinner, which makes her stubbornness all the more troubling. Skinner was once less than an hour away from execution before the U.S Supreme Court intervened. Then, earlier this year, he was days away before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stepped in.

It’s bad enough that Switzer wants a man executed when there is still key DNA to be tested, including a rape kit taken from one of the victims, scrapings from under the same victim’s fingernails, and the presumed murder weapon itself. But after the Supreme Court stepped in last year to stay Skinner’s execution, the Texas legislature passed a bill allowing defendants like Skinner to obtain post-conviction DNA testing even if they didn’t request it at trial. (Skinner maintains he did request it, but his court-appointed attorney—a disgraced former prosecutor and friend of the judge—thought Skinner was guilty, so didn’t ask for the testing.) The sponsor of that bill explicitly said that Skinner was the inspiration for the bill.

Nevertheless, within hours of the bill becoming law, Switzer’s office hurried to Skinner’s trial judge to request an execution date. She was trying to have Skinner killed before he could take advantage of the new law passed explicitly in response to his case. And the trial judge agreed.

Fortunately, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals intervened, and postponed Skinner’s execution to get this all settled. Despite the new law, here has still been no order for DNA testing. But at least they aren’t going to kill the guy before they even have the discussion. That’s what Lynn Switzer wanted to happen.

Cook County, Illinois, State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez

After her election in 2008, Alvarez first distinguished herself by defending Illinois’ asset forfeiture law—one of the most onerous in the country—all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court dismissed the case because the defendant and county had already settled the matter. So the law is still in effect.

The Medill Innocence Project at Northwestern’s journalism school has freed 11 wrongly convicted men from death row in Cook County. So in 2009, as Cook County’s chief law enforcement officer, Alvarez naturally took aim at the school—she subpoenaed the student participants’ grades, class syllabus, and personal e-mails.

In the Dixmoor cases, Alvarez fought the DNA tests that eventually cleared five teens accused of raping a 14-year-old girl. Even after the tests, Alvarez’s office tried to play down the significance of the results. Three of the men had served over a decade in prison when they were finally exonerated in March. In the Englewood cases, Alvarez is still fighting the exonerations of four teens convicted of raping and killing a 30-year-old woman in 1994, despite DNA tests conducted in May that found the semen of a known rapist/murderer at the time in her body. A judge overturned the convictions in November, but Alvarez has yet to dismiss the charges.

But Alvarez most distinguished herself for this award this year in the case of Tiawanda Moore. In July 2010, Moore says a police officer called to her home on a domestic complaint asked to speak to her in her bedroom, then grabbed her breast and slipped her his phone number. Moore says that when she went to a Chicago PD station to file a complaint, the Internal Affairs officers threatened her, and attempted to dissuade her from completing the report. That’s when she switched on her cell phone to record the conversation. She was promptly arrested for violating the state’s wiretapping law, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Normally in these cases, prosecutors negotiate a plea or drop the charges, mostly because just about everyone realizes the law is insane. Or, if you’re more cynical, the charges never make it trial because police and prosecutors know that if anyone is ever convicted and sentenced (to my knowledge, no one yet has), the law will be challenged, likely overturned, and police will no longer be able to use it to harass citizens who record them on the job.

Yet with a jaw-dropping lapse in prosecutorial discretion, Alvarez moved ahead with the felony charge against Moore. Never mind the alleged harassment. Never mind the allegations that Chicago IA cops were attempting to talk a citizen out of filing a complaint. Given Chicago PD’s dismal record investigating complaints against officers, and that at the very time all this was happening, a federal lawsuit against the department alleged a pattern of ignoring and covering up sexual misconduct by Chicago cops, Alvarez’s pursuit of Moore sent a troubling message to any woman legitimately harassed by  Chicago cop. No one is going to help you. Not internal affairs. Not her office. No one. And if you try to create an independent record of your attempts to report the harassment, Anita Alvarez will send you to prison.

In what appears to be a laudable act of jury nullification, Moore was acquitted in August. Alvarez is still pushing on with another felony wiretapping charge against Chicago artist Christopher Drew.

Williamson County, Texas District Attorney John Bradley

John Bradley isn’t the prosecutor who wrongly convicted Michael Morton of beating his wife to death in 1987. His mentor and predecessor Ken Anderson did. Anderson is now a state district judge. But Bradley fought like hell to deny Bradley the DNA testing that exonerated him after 24 years in prison. Anderson withheld reams of exculpatory evidence from Morton’s attorneys over the years. Once he left office, Bradley kept up the tradition. From the Texas Tribune:

Beginning in 2005, [Morton] pleaded with the court to test DNA on a blue bandanna found near his home shortly after the murder, along with other evidence.

For six years, the Williamson County district attorney, John Bradley, fought the request for DNA testing, based on advice from Anderson, his predecessor and friend. In 2010, however, a Texas court ordered the DNA testing, and the results showed that Christine Morton’s blood on the bandanna was mixed with the DNA of another man: Mark A. Norwood, a felon with a long criminal history who lived about 12 miles from the Mortons at the time of the murder. By then, Morton had spent nearly 25 years in prison.

Norwood has been arrested and charged in Christine Morton’s death and is a suspect in a similar murder from 1988.

Which means that had they not fixated on Morton, they may have found the right guy, possibly preventing another killing.

In 2007, the Grits for Breakfast noted that Bradley gave some unusual advice to a fellow prosecutor on an Internet discussion board. The other prosecutor was asking about how to construct a plea agreement in a way that would forfeit any future right to DNA testing. Bradley lamented, “Innocence, though, has proven to trump most anything.” He then added:

A better approach might be to get a written agreement that all the evidence can be destroyed after the conviction and sentence. Then, there is nothing to test or retest. Harris County regularly seeks such agreements.

Got that? Let’s be sure those innocents never get the chance to prove us wrong.

Finally, showing once again that when it comes to the criminal justice system there’s no level of incompetence too revolting to be rewarded, you may remember that in 2008, just as it was about to launch an investigation into the Cameron Todd Willingham case, Rick Perry replaced several members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission with more prosecution-friendly appointees. He appointed John Bradley to replace chairman and defense attorney Sam Basset. Bradley immediately suspended the Willingham investigation, then restructured the commission in a way that allowed him to skirt Texas open meeting laws.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood

Hood is another repeat nominee. Rather than add a couple dozen paragraphs to an already-long post, I’ll just direct you to my write-ups for his 2008 and 2010 nominations. Read those, then read here, here, here, and here to see how Hood further distinguished himself over the last year.

Then sit in sad contemplation of the fact that in November, Mississippi voters elected Hood to another term. And by a considerable margin.

Colorado District Attorney Carol Chambers

Another repeat nominee. Last time Chambers made this list, it was for a single case in which DNA testing showed that the biological evidence found in an eight-year-old victim of sexual assault didn’t match the guy Chambers wanted to charge. Chambers dismissed the tests on the interesting theory that young girls dress really slutty these days, so anyone’s DNA could, completely by happenstance, drop into their pants. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Chambers has made a name for herself in a number of other cases. To begin, she’s Colorado’s death-happiest prosecutor, seeking the ultimate punishment against six defendants over a span in which there was only one other capital case in the entire state. She has also issued a veiled threat against a judge who ruled against her, and allegedly threatened an attorney with a grand jury investigation for seeking to collect a debt against a powerful figure in Chambers’ Republican party. A memo leaked to the Denver Post in March detailed how Chambers offered conviction bonuses to her assistant DAs.

In the courtroom? Last January, Chambers charged a 10-year-old with felony arson for a fire he and a friend accidentally set while playing with matches. She’s known to enforce the state’s habitual criminal statute to an extreme, seeking lengthy sentences for petty crimes. In 2009, a judge found that her office had withheld a large cache of exculpatory documents in the murder trial of David Bueno that were consistent with Bueno’s defense. In fact, by the time her office fully complied with the judge’s order, Chambers’ office had released more documents to Bueno’s attorneys a year after conviction than they had released before his trial. Bueno’s conviction was vacated last year.

Chambers was the first DA in Colorado to bring criminal charges against a doctor for writing a marijuana prescription that her office deemed medically unnecessary (she lost).

Mitigating factors: Chambers has been known to take on bad cops. She has also set up a juvenile diversion program that has won praise from the sorts of activists who normally oppose tough-minded prosecutors. She also declined to bring charges in one high-profile rape case, and even fought a judge’s order to appoint a special prosecutor to pursue the case. Whether this is a plus or a minus I guess depends on how strong one might have found the evidence in that case.

Philadelphia District Attorney R. Seth Williams

In February, Pennsylvania resident Mark Fiorino walked through the city of Philadelphia openly carrying a gun, as he is permitted to do under Pennsylvania law. Fiorino was stopped by Philadelphia police, who repeatedly threatened to kill him. Once the police looked up the law they found that, as Fiorino had by then told them repeatedly, he had done nothing illegal.

We know all of this because Fiorino recorded his conversation with the cops, which he then posted YouTube. This also is perfectly legal in Pennsylvania. The state’s courts have repeatedly found that the wiretapping laws do not bar the recording of on-duty cops, even without their consent, because on-duty cops have no expectation of privacy.

Yet DA Williams decided to charge Fiorino with “reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct.” Fiorino’s real crime was embarrassing the city’s cops, who threatened to kill a man because they were ignorant of state law. I’ll just repost a bit of what I wrote at the time:

What Williams has done . . . is premeditated. Much more than the cops, Williams should know the law. Moreover, even if he didn’t know the law at the time, he has since had plenty of time to research it. By now, Williams  does know the law. (If he doesn’t, he is incompetent.) And he knows that even if Fiorino did deliberately provoke the cops to test their knowledge of Philadelphia’s gun laws, that also is not a crime.

Yet he’s charging Fiorino anyway . . . A spokesperson for Williams said Fiorino was “”belligerent and hostile” to police who were investigating a possible crime. Read the transcript of the audio in the linked article above and tell me who is “belligerent and hostile.” Read it knowing who was breaking the law, who was following it, and while remaining cognizant of which party was threatening to put a bullet in the head of the other.

Note that nothing Fiorino did was on its own illegal. Willliams is attempting a striking, blatantly dishonest bit of legal chicanery. His theory goes like this:  If you undertake a series of actions that are perfectly legal and well within your rights, but that cause government agents to react in irrational ways that jeopardize public safety, you are guilty of endangering the public . . .

It’s a blatant abuse of office. Williams is using the state’s awesome power to arrest and incarcerate to intimidate a man who exposed and embarrassed law enforcement officials who, because of their own ignorance, nearly killed him. Exposing that sort of government incompetence cannot be illegal. And it isn’t illegal.

Fiorino was acquitted in October, and is expected to file a civil rights claim. This is just one offense. But it’s so egregious, and the message it sends is so dangerous, that I think it merits a nomination.

Possibly also worth mentioning: Williams’ office defended one of the few prosecutors in the country to be stripped of qualified immunity. Over the summer, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied immunity for Philadelphia ADA Gina Smith, who had arrested and jailed a material witness in a rape case, then left the witness (who had done nothing wrong) in jail for nearly two months while the trial was delayed. The city settled with the witness in October. (Williams’ office was also able to rope in the city’s public defenders system to pay part of the damages.)

In fairness to Williams, Smith’s transgression occurred well before Williams took office, and Smith no longer works for the DA. I’m not familiar with how Pennsylvania law works in these sorts of cases, so it could well be that Williams was obligated to defend the former employee, particularly since the city would ultimately be paying the damages.

• Scott Greenfield rounds up the best criminal law blog posts of 2011.
• Roundups of funny/obnoxious Tweets and Facebook posts from the past year.
• And yet 90 percent of them will still get reelected in November.
• Here’s a video of a guy making iced tea. It’s better than it sounds.
• Mayan apocalypse watch: Hundreds of blackbirds drop dead from the sky in Arkansas; Ohio has an earthquake; Vanderbilt played in a bowl game.
• Obama says he won’t enforce detention provisions of defense bill he just signed. Funny thing is, he’s using a signing statement to get around enforcing them. Which he promised during the campaign he wouldn’t use. And of course now that the bill is law, future presidents won’t be bound by Obama’s signing statement.
• The DEA continues its obstinacy on the Adderall/Ritalin shortage. Sort of typical of them to fight “abuse” by limiting overall supply, which really just punishes the people who need the drugs. (I take Adderall w/ prescription. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to find.)

And that’s all you’re allowed to know.

• Headline of the day. Article is actually from September. But wow.
• More wine?
• This photo? Just the latest evidence that we’re really, really close to winning.
• Zero tolerance + anti-bullying hysteria + Internet = criminal charges for teen’s innocuous Facebook post.
• A Ron Paul-touted conspiracy that turned out to be true.
• One of the sadder year-end lists you’ll read.
• Back in 1956, you’d have needed one of these to store each of your iTunes songs.
• Some great space-related time-lapse videos from the past year.
• An undiscovered Ron Paul newsletter.

Put your nominations in the comments. I’ll pick a half dozen or so finalists, and we’ll vote on Monday.

Past winners Forrest Allgood and Tanya Treadway are no longer eligible. Qualifying misdeeds needn’t all taken place this year. They can be cumulative, or have just come to light this year.

I highlighted a few good prosecutors in a piece for Reason earlier this year. If you have other suggestions of someone to highlight this year, please leave that in the comments as well.

• Puppycide. 
• And another one, this time a ferocious Jack Russell Terrier.
• Why Ken White matters. Be sure to read White’s excellent dissection of the culture of prosecutorial misconduct in the criminal justice issue of Reason.
• How many things wrong with this picture can you find?
• Police union fights to reinstate cop who was driving 143 mph with a .089 BAC.
• I always thought this was a joke. It apparently really exists. (It’s also available in a can, but only on your birthday.)
• How to make a Thing in a Jar.
• Headline of the day. (Bonus points: Santorum retweeted it.)
• 2012 will bring the end of Happy Hour in Utah.
• Indiana lawmaker wants to hand out fines for poor renditions of the national anthem.

• My Huffington Post colleague Ryan Grim on how Ron Paul has been one of few politicians to talk about the racist origins of the drug war.
• Popehat is asking you to vote for the “Censorious Asshat of the Year.” So many nominees, so devoted to their cause.
• Sen. Chuck Schumer assails new caffeine product before it comes to market.
• L.A. County Sheriff’s Department has jailed hundreds of innocent people due to misidentification.
• “When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead . . . The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled.” These are estimates, because the government won’t say how many innocent people its drones have killed.
• Federal worker pay saw lowest increase in 10 years last year, but even with the Obama “freeze,”  it was still more than the increase in the private sector. According to USA Today, one in five federal employees now makes over $100,000 per year. The recession isn’t exactly crippling members of Congress, either.
• Comedienne-turned-conservative-activist Victoria Jackson serves up a hot plate of crazyburgers.
• Headline of the day.
• New York Times attempts to paint conceal carry permit owners as crazy gun nuts with an itchy trigger finger, accidentally publishes data suggesting they’re  far less likely to commit crimes than the general population, but runs with the narrative anyway.

• Not The Onion: Californians will vote on whether porn stars should be required to wear condoms.
• It’s all just going to get dumber and dumber until November.
• Gene Healy: the five worst op-eds of 2011. His delightfully Friedmanesque closer: “And so, my friends, we roll up our sleeves and limp forward, hunkered down to face what 2012 holds, our boats borne back ceaselessly into the past, yet always, always, twirling toward freedom.”
• Alternet publishes article calling for government monitoring of doctors and their pain patients, a crackdown on prescription painkillers, and generally expanding the drug war, all because . . . corporations are evil. And Florida’s governor loves the Tea Party. Or something.
• A list of all the new reasons for which governments will send you to jail, starting on Sunday.
• Woman says she was arrested, had her phone confiscated after trying to record a police beating in North Carolina.

• Jacob Sullum on the “isolationist” smear: “The implicit assumption that violence is the only way to interact with the world reflects the oddly circumscribed nature of foreign policy debates in mainstream American politics.”
• Some clear thinking on Citizens United.
• The most vile thing you’ll read today. That fifth paragraph is just stunning.
• Cop accidentally shoots another cop while trying to kill a dog during a drug raid.
• Gingrich’s unwitting endorsement.
• Former federal prosecutor endorses jury nullification in a New York Times op-ed.
• Obama’s drone war shrouded in secrecy.

So I was looking at that new study showing that 1 in 3 Americans has been arrested by age 23. There’s another study that came out last month showing a big uptick in the number of police officers assigned to patrol school hallways in recent years. I also found lots of stories and activist sites about the alleged school-to-prison pipeline. I’ve also pointed to several stories on this site about arrests of appallingly young children for appalling minor offenses. So I was ready to take all of those bits of evidence and run with a trend piece about how we’re criminalizing childhood.

But while researching the piece, I looked up juvenile arrest data for the U.S. It turns out, juvenile arrests are down over the last 20 years, and pretty significantly. That didn’t make sense. So I went back and looked at those school-to-prison pipeline articles. Yep. Lots of anecdotes, but most all of them lack hard data about school arrests. National statistics for school-based arrests just don’t exist, though there have been some localized studies that suggest there could be a problem.

In any event, the resulting article is a somewhat middling piece, which is now up at Huffington Post. My thesis? Juvenile arrests are down significantly. There may or may not be an increase in arrests on school campuses, which may or may not be caused by bad policies like zero tolerance and assigning cops to patrol in schools. But there’s just not enough evidence to say. (Of course, both could be bad policies regardless of whether they’re leading to an uptick in student arrests.)

That’s a complicated article with a fairly boring premise. (There’s no evidence this is a problem. But it might be!) But it’s one I think was still worth writing. There seems to be a perception out there that there’s been a big surge in juvenile arrests in recent years. I certainly thought that was the case. It turns out it isn’t true.

The real problem I think is that the government creates these programs and pushes policies to address alleged problems before there’s any hard evidence that the problems actually exist. That’s how we got zero tolerance and cops in schools in the first place. (Both were in response to fact-free hysteria over school shootings and “super predators.”)

And at least in the case of zero tolerance and the School Resource Officer program, after the policies were passed, there was no effort to collect more data to gauge their effectiveness or to see if the policies were having unintended negative effects. Now, the government is forging ahead with yet another program to address the alleged bad effects of those policies, again with little evidence that the bad effects are actually happening. All the while, the government continues to push and fund the same policies it’s now attempting to counteract.

And they say we libertarians are crazy.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, when asked about a recent DOJ report alleging that he has essentially institutionalized mass civil rights violations, says that he is the real victim . . . and the perpetrators are protesters.

“We don’t go after anybody. Actually, they go after me. They’re demonstrating in front of my building, calling me every kind of name. If you want to talk about civil-rights violations, what about that?”

Adam Serwer suggests this bizarre understanding of the law might explain why Arpaio has been known wage criminal investigations against the people who criticize him. More likely: Arpaio is shamelessly posturing.

Apropos of the post below, here’s a ruling from the D.C. Court of Appeals demonstrating just how powerless citizens are when accosted by police officers—even when the cops themselves are clearly in the wrong. What’s most troubling about the ruling is its mundanity. The law is established here. There’s really nothing to debate.  It’s just a matter of the government rattling off the appropriate precedents.

The appellant is Terrance Crossland, who is asking the court to overturn his conviction on two counts of assaulting a police officer. Last April, Crossland and his cousin were approached by two D.C. Metro officers on patrol “to gather information about a rash of recent shootings and drug sales in the area.” Crossland was mowing his grass while smoking a cigarette. The police acknowledge that neither Crossland nor is cousin were doing anything unlawful.  The two men were told to turn around, put their hands against a fence, and submit to a search. By both accounts, Crossland initially complied, then said, “Fuck this shit. I’m tired of this.”

Police say Crossland then elbowed one officer in the head, at which point he was punched, taken to the ground, kicked several times, and pepper sprayed. Both the trial court, the appeals court, and even the prosecution acknowledge that because Crossland was doing nothing wrong before the incident, it was illegal for the police to stop, detain, and search him. Nevertheless . . .

The legacy of Terry v. Ohio*:

One evening in August of 2006, I was celebrating my 18th birthday with my cousin and a friend. We were staying at my sister’s house on 96th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan and decided to walk to a nearby place and get some burgers. It was closed so we sat on benches in the median strip that runs down the middle of Broadway. We were talking, watching the night go by, enjoying the evening when suddenly, and out of nowhere, squad cars surrounded us. A policeman yelled from the window, “Get on the ground!”

I was stunned. And I was scared. Then I was on the ground — with a gun pointed at me. I couldn’t see what was happening but I could feel a policeman’s hand reach into my pocket and remove my wallet. Apparently he looked through and found the ID I kept there. “Happy Birthday,” he said sarcastically. The officers questioned my cousin and friend, asked what they were doing in town, and then said goodnight and left us on the sidewalk.

Less than two years later, in the spring of 2008, N.Y.P.D. officers stopped and frisked me, again. And for no apparent reason. This time I was leaving my grandmother’s home in Flatbush, Brooklyn; a squad car passed me as I walked down East 49th Street to the bus stop. The car backed up. Three officers jumped out. Not again. The officers ordered me to stand, hands against a garage door, fished my wallet out of my pocket and looked at my ID. Then they let me go.

I was stopped again in September of 2010. This time I was just walking home from the gym. It was the same routine: I was stopped, frisked, searched, ID’d and let go . . .

Last May, I was outside my apartment building on my way to the store when two police officers jumped out of an unmarked car and told me to stop and put my hands up against the wall. I complied. Without my permission, they removed my cellphone from my hand, and one of the officers reached into my pockets, and removed my wallet and keys. He looked through my wallet, then handcuffed me. The officers wanted to know if I had just come out of a particular building. No, I told them, I lived next door.

One of the officers asked which of the keys they had removed from my pocket opened my apartment door. Then he entered my building and tried to get into my apartment with my key. My 18-year-old sister was inside with two of our younger siblings; later she told me she had no idea why the police were trying to get into our apartment and was terrified. She tried to call me, but because they had confiscated my phone, I couldn’t answer.

Meanwhile, a white officer put me in the back of the police car. I was still handcuffed. The officer asked if I had any marijuana, and I said no. He removed and searched my shoes and patted down my socks. I asked why they were searching me, and he told me someone in my building complained that a person they believed fit my description had been ringing their bell.

And it’s all perfectly legal (provided the cops include boilerplate language about reasonable suspicion).  These stop-and-frisks happen about 50,000 times per year in New York. Someone at Twitter pointed out that if NYPD did stop-and-frisks on Wall Street around lunchtime, they’d probably find more drugs than they could process. That would also probably put an end to the practice in a matter of days.

*MORE: Via the comments, New York criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield writes:

Sorry to be a stickler about stuff like this, but the test in New York comes from People v. DeBour, 40 NY2d 210 (1976), which is more restrictive than Terry.

I appreciate the correction.