• Beautiful collection of sled dog photos from the around the world.
• Just so we’re clear, minors who send explicit photos of themselves to other minors get hit with child porn charges. Cops who send explicit photos of themselves to minors get probation.
• Noel St. John’s “Snowlapse” video, first linked here, now has over 300,000 views! Nice job, Noel!
• It’s funny to see a PIRG organization complaining about corporations that take political positions without first consulting shareholders. Shareholders can sell. College students forced or tricked into donating to PIRG, on the other hand, don’t have that option.
• Obama administration wants the government to be able to track you via your cell phone without first obtaining a warrant.
• Forbes now has a blog dedicated to booze.
• Interesting article on Michigan Gov. Jennifer Graholm granting clemency to elderly prisoners.
• Striking new aerial photos of the World Trade Center collapse.

President Obama has now gone 387 days into his presidency without issuing a single pardon or commutation. He trails only George Washington, John Adams, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush for longest pardon drought to start a presidency.

The ACLU is mounting a campaign to make Hamedah Hasan Obama’s first executive clemency. Hasan was given a 27-year mandatory minimum sentence for playing a relatively minor role in her cousin’s crack cocaine operation. The long sentence was due to the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity. It was Hasan’s first offense, and the acts that led to her conspiracy conviction were all nonviolent. The judge who sentenced Hasan is also asking for her release. So far, she’s served 16 years of her sentence. Only an act of executive clemency can prevent her from serving out the remaining 11 years.

More about Hasan’s case here.

Meanwhile, pardon power scholar P.S. Ruckman points to a CBS News story about Obama’s pardon drought, and says an administration aide’s explanation for the lack of clemency action—that first-year presidents get overwhelmed with pardon petitions—simply isn’t true.

Last month, California Superior Court Judge Andrea Bryan ordered the release of convicted child molester Augustin Uribe due to “numerous acts of misconduct” by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office. Uribe’s conviction was overturned in 2008 after a videotape taken during a physical examination of the alleged victim called into doubt whether she had actually been assaulted. The video was never handed over to defense attorneys. The alleged victim has since recanted her accusation.

Shortly after Judge Bryan’s decision, Santa Clara County DA Dolores Carr put out a press release announcing her office would be boycotting Judge Bryan’s courtroom, a move a San Jose Mercury News editorial called “extreme, highly unusual, and broadly criticized by experts in legal ethics as a direct challenge to the independence of the court.”

Carr, who was elected in 2006 on a platform promising to reform the DA office’s win-at-all-costs mentality, lost sight of that objective rather quickly. I wrote a short piece last July about several related incidents:

In 2007 the San Jose Mercury News revealed that Deputy District Attorney Jaime Stringfield of Santa Clara County, California, had introduced a fake DNA report into evidence in a sex abuse case. In February, responding to the revelation that the district attorney’s office had failed to turn over thousands of videotaped interviews with suspects, many of which contained exculpatory information, the county public defender’s office announced that it would review 1,500 sex abuse cases for possible wrongful convictions. Later that month, a state bar judge suspended Deputy District Attorney Ben Field’s law license for four years based on misconduct in four criminal cases dating back to 1995. And in March, the Mercury News reported that in hundreds of cases, officials at the county crime lab didn’t tell prosecutors or defense attorneys when their experts couldn’t agree on fingerprint matches…

At a February meeting of county prosecutors, Carr vowed that none of her staff would be “thrown under the bus” as a result of the scandals. Immediately after the state bar’s decision to suspend Field’s license—the harshest penalty imposed on a state attorney in 20 years—Carr announced that Field would continue working for her office while he appealed the ruling. She also vowed to help limit the ability of the state bar to punish prosecutors for misconduct.

Since that piece ran, the number of tapes the DA’s office should have turned over to defense attorneys but didn’t has risen to more than 3,300.

I’ve written before about how rarely bad prosecutors are disciplined for their mistakes, even when those mistakes send innocent people to prison. It’s probably not surprising, then, to see some who hold the position come to view that lack of discipline as an entitlement. Carr seems to have lots of invective for the people who want to hold her deupties accountable, but little for the prosecutors who actually broke the rules.

Unfortunately, the political process doesn’t appear capable of holding Carr acountable, either. She’s favored to win reelection this year.

• Virginia college students caught throwing snowballs at an unmarked police car charged with “throwing missiles at occupied vehicles,” a felony. I’m sure terrorism charges are on the way.
• The Mayans are messing with us.
• Lede: “A Torrance police sergeant will not be charged in an off-duty hit-and-run collision, although he admitted he fled because his “judgment was impaired by alcohol,” according to prosecutors.”
• Jessica, Tony, and Kevin get an A+!
• More felony, child porn charges for “sexting” teens.
• Studies find that race, gender of judges have significant impact on rulings.

Kudos to Mississippi State Rep. Bob Evans, who astute readers will also recognize is Cory Maye’s chief counsel.

Evans has introduced a bill (PDF) in the Mississippi legislature explicitly making it legal to videotape or record an on-duty police officer, firefighter, or conservation officer.

So I am quite literally snowed in right now. Front door won’t open. It’s been crazy. Photos and videos of puppy snow frolicking forthcoming.

In the meantime….

• Actual sentence from an actual news story: “It’s designed for young girls ages 8 and older, but some say the mysterious product is a “dangerous spiritual game” that opens up anyone, particularly Christians, to attacks on their soul.”
• Because anything that tastes good is obviously an appeal to children.
• Looks like the former DA Texas Gov. Rick Perry appointed to head up the state’s forensics panel is doing all he can to make sure the panel does nothing to help the state’s forensics system.
• Here’s a good cop story: Bozeman, Montana cop buys food for man caught shoplifting school supplies for his kids.
• Time to renew my ACLU membership.
• Gun-free snowball fights. Novel idea!
• Twelve-year-old Queens girl hauled out of school in handcuffs for writing on desk.

Indiana boy, 12, and girl, 13, charged with felony child exploitation and possession of child pornography for sending one another naked pictures of themselves via cell phone.

The idiots charging them out to be tarred and feathered.

MORE: A commenter points to this passage, which is even scarier:

“Illinois legislation is pending to make it illegal to upload on the Internet or disseminate a video of someone without their consent or with the intent to cause harm.”

I really hope the law isn’t as vague as implied here.

My crime column this week looks at the boneheaded logic behind treating “sexting” teens as if they were child pornographers.

Gene Weingarten—for my money the best writer in journalism—was recently called for jury duty. He served on a case in which a D.C. man was charged with selling $10 worth of heroin to an undercover police officer. Weingarten was sure the man was guilty. He was also sure the cops were lying. In the Washington Post, Weingarten explains that, consequently, he was prepared to exercise his right to jury nullification.

As a juror, I was skeptical. As a citizen, I was angry. For one thing, I was mad about the whole case — the bewildering amount of police time and taxpayer money spent on prosecuting one guy for selling $10 worth of narcotics. But as a juror, I felt it was not my business to object to that. I would have been willing to convict a defendant despite those misgivings.

The police testimony was another matter. As witnesses, the officers had been supremely self-assured, even cocky; clearly, they’d been through this hundreds of times. As they passed the jury before and after testimony, they greeted us winningly. One of them winked at us, almost imperceptibly. Their testimony was clear, concise, professional and, in my view, dishonest.

I believe they feel themselves to be warriors fighting the good fight against bad people who have the system stacked in their favor. I believe they knew they had the right guy and were willing to cheat a little to assure a conviction.

I believe they had the right guy, too. But the willingness to cheat, I think, is a poisonous corruption of a system designed to protect the innocent at the risk of occasionally letting the guilty walk free. It’s a good system, fundamental to freedom. I think a police officer willing to cheat is more dangerous than a two-bit drug peddler.

In his charge to the jury, the judge made it clear that if we found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — which I had — it was our duty to convict. I was prepared to defy these instructions and acquit, in the interest of a greater good. There is actually a term for this: “jury nullification.” I was going to nullify.

Good for him. As it turns out, Weingarten was selected as an alternate. But it appears a good number of his fellow jurors felt the same way. The jury hung, with 10 in favor of acquittal, two in favor of conviction.

D.C. jurors also appear to have engaged in nullification in a gun case early last year.

My crime column this week looks at Maricopa County, Arizona’s nutty chief prosecutor.

Commenting on Martha Coakley’s role in the Gerald Amirault case, M. LeBlanc at Bitch, Ph.D. writes:

So, what’s the moral status of advocating that someone who is likely innocent remain in prison? It’s a tough question. As far as I known, it’s something that’s routinely done by prosecutors everywhere…

I don’t have a major problem with prosecutors who lobby for people to serve more time in prison, whether it’s at the indictment, sentencing, or parole stage. My main concern is with systems that are overly deferential to prosecutors, that disadvantage defendants, and that make it extremely difficult for convicts to make the case for their own parole. I do think the criminal justice world would be a lot more just if more prosecutors declined to prosecute more often. Particularly in high-profile or embattled cases, where it seems that all evidence points to innocence, but the prosecutors insist on, for example, re-trying a case after a trial has been thrown out years after the fact by a judge. You see this all the time: prosecutors’ stubborn insistence that they’ve got the right guy in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Nevertheless, being a prosecutor who is stalwart when presented with evidence of innocence or prosecutorial misconduct is so common as to be banal. Which is why I think her lobbying for Amirault’s continued incarceration isn’t, in itself, enough to make her a morally suspect choice for senator…

A lot of the criticism of Coakley’s involvement in the Amirault case seems to center on the fact that she was clearly stepping up the pressure on the governor for her own political gain. Being seen as a law-and-order sort is almost uniformly a political advantage, no matter where you hold office. Hardly anyone ever fails to be elected because they were too hard on criminals. Take, for example, Joe Arpaio (extremely popular!) vs. Michael Dukakis (Willie Horton!). But it’s not really enough to blame politicians for exploiting this tendency of Americans to thirst for more and more justice-blood. And I’m not particularly moved by allegations that people are behaving in politicized ways. Justice is political, and the more we recognize and appreciate that, the better we can be honest with ourselves as a society and government about how we want to proceed.

I’m floored by this reaction. A leftist could make a respectable argument that even though Coakley was grievously out of bounds in the Amirault case the need for her vote on health care reform, filibuster prevention, and other issues is more important than the troubling decisions she made as a prosecutor. A leftist could also plausibly argue that when it comes to actually making criminal justice policy as a senator, Coakley isn’t likely to be any worse than her opponent, and therefore she deserves support because she’s more progressive on everything else.

But LeBlanc isn’t arguing either of those positions. She’s arguing something far more repugnant: She’s conceding that the Amirault case was a travesty of justice, and that Coakley was wrong for her extraordinary efforts to keep Gerald Amiralut in prison. But she’s then arguing that Coakley deserves a pass specifically for her actions in the Amirault case, anyway, because all prosecutors do it, and because it’s what Coakley had to do to accumulate political power and move on to higher office.

That is one hellaciously disturbing statement of values. LeBlanc is either arguing that she believes the accumulation of power and advancement of one’s career is more important than justice—more important than ensuring that innocent people don’t rot behind bars—or that she’s willing to give a pass to politicians who do.

Actually, not just a pass, but a promotion.

I’m also not convinced LeBlanc’s assumptions about the political pressures Coakley faced in the Amirault case are accurate. The parole board voted 5-0 to free Gerald Amirault in 1999. That came three years after Dorothy Rabinowtiz won her Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her columns exposing the case against the Amiraults and other sex abuse injustices. Recovered memory therapy; the leading, repeated, and persistent questioning of children; and the various other tactics prosecutors used in the sex abuse hysteria cases of the 1980s and early 1990s had been exposed and debunked. Coakley had plenty of political cover to do the right thing in this case.

LeBlanc is right that generally speaking, prosecutors fight like hell to protect convictions, even when there’s overwhelming evidence of innocence. But not all of them do. There are plenty of cases where prosecutors have dropped charges and freed the wrongly convicted. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins is actively seeking out innocence cases, and he’s doing it in a jurisdiction that’s a hell of a lot more conservative than Middlesex, Massachusetts. Perhaps it’s too much to expect Coakley to have Watkins’ moral courage. But then, she isn’t being criticized for not going as far as someone like Watkins. She’s being criticized for going well above and beyond the call of duty the other way, including fighting outside the courtroom by orchestrating a PR campaign to persuade then-Gov. Jane Swift to keep Amirault in prison. Coakley wasn’t bowing to political pressure, she was creating it.

Broadly speaking, LeBlanc’s also right that “hardly anyone ever fails to be elected becasue they were too hard on criminals.” But I don’t know of a single incident in which a prosecutor suffered bad publicity or was attacked politically for failing to fight the release of an innocent person. “Tough on crime” positions on parole, sentencing, the death penalty, and so on are policy positions on which reasonable people can disagree. Obstinacy in the face of overwhelming evidence of someone’s innocence is a moral failing, regardless of motivation.

Moreover, Coakley’s also being criticized for failing to bring charges against a man who sexually assaulted his young niece with a curling iron. Coakley’s successor put him away for two life terms. Why would Coakley—so aware of the political pressure to be tough on crime, so protective of her own ambition for higher office, and who carefully cultivated an image for herself as a defender of children—not throw the book at a man accused of raping a toddler with a curling iron? I’m just guessing here, but it may have something to do with the fact that Keith Winfield was also a police officer. That suggests a blind allegiance to law enforcement that we should find troubling in a U.S. Senator who will be making and voting on criminal justice policy.

There’s a broader point here, too. Even the left—even the far left—seems to find it difficult to hold bad prosecutors accountable, at least when they happen to be Democrats. So long as prosecutors are rewarded for aggressiveness and never punished when they overstep, we’ll continue to see the very sort of behavior LeBlanc claims to find troubling.

It’s worth noting that the person who actually convicted the Amiraults was Coakley’s predecessor in the Middlesex County DA’s office, Scott Harshbarger. How was Harshbarger punished for his mistakes? For starters, like Coakley, he went on to become Massachusetts Attorney General. In 1998, well after the injustice in the Amirault case was well known both in and out of Massachusetts, he was the Democratic nominee for governor. He was later hired to head up the liberal interest group Common Cause. Of course, there’s also Janet Reno, who went on to become U.S. attorney general, despite her own history of dubious sex abuse convictions.

I’m glad LeBlanc believes “the criminal justice world would be a lot more just if more prosecutors declined to prosecute more often,” and that she’s troubled by “prosecutors’ stubborn insistence that they’ve got the right guy in the face of overwhelming evidence.” But frankly, she’s part of the problem. If even a leftist blogger like LeBlanc is unwilling to hold overly aggressive prosecutors accountable, is willing to overlook a grave injustices so long as they’re committed out of political ambition, and can later support the same bad actors’ election to higher office, how does she expect the criminal justice system’s flawed incentive structure to change?

In the Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on dubious sex abuse cases, lays out Martha Coakley’s role in the notorious Fells Acres convictions.

Rabinowitz concludes:

Attorney General Martha Coakley—who had proven so dedicated a representative of the system that had brought the Amirault family to ruin, and who had fought so relentlessly to preserve their case—has recently expressed her view of this episode. Questioned about the Amiraults in the course of her current race for the U.S. Senate, she told reporters of her firm belief that the evidence against the Amiraults was “formidable” and that she was entirely convinced “those children were abused at day care center by the three defendants.”

What does this say about her candidacy? (Ms. Coakley declined to be interviewed.) If the current attorney general of Massachusetts actually believes, as no serious citizen does, the preposterous charges that caused the Amiraults to be thrown into prison—the butcher knife rape with no blood, the public tree-tying episode, the mutilated squirrel and the rest—that is powerful testimony to the mind and capacities of this aspirant to a Senate seat. It is little short of wonderful to hear now of Ms. Coakley’s concern for the rights of terror suspects at Guantanamo—her urgent call for the protection of the right to the presumption of innocence.

If the sound of ghostly laughter is heard in Massachusetts these days as this campaign rolls on, with Martha Coakley self-portrayed as the guardian of justice and civil liberties, there is good reason.

Lefty criminal justice blogger Jeralyn Merritt chimes in here, and states in an earlier post of Coakley, “I wouldn’t vote for her for dog catcher.”

My article on Coakley’s record as a prosecutor here.

I have an article up at Politico today looking at the unsettling criminal justice record of the Democratic nominee to replace Ted Kennedy.

The Boston Globe reports that police n Massachusetts are using the state’s wiretapping laws to arrest people who record cops on the job. Massachusetts is one of 12 two party consent states, which cops are interpreting to mean you can’t record them without their permission.

The state’s supreme court upheld such a conviction in 2001, finding that “Secret tape recording by private individuals has been unequivocally banned, and, unless and until the Legislature changes the statute, what was done here cannot be done lawfully.” I’d think you could make a strong case that a public employee entrusted with the power to forcibly detain and kill falls outside the scope of a “private individual.”

According to the Globe, subsequent cases have turned on whether the recording was done secretly (in which case convictions are usually upheld), or openly (in which case the charges are usually dropped).

Boston police are claiming that recording them while on duty violates their privacy rights and may interfere with their ability to make arrests.

Harvey Silverglate wrote about one Massachusetts case for the Boston Phoenix in 2008. My argument for ensuring that it’s always legal to record on-duty cops here.

Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Peyton Thomas has emerged as Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s book-learnin’ alter-ego, working with Arpaio to criminally investigate, indict, and otherwise legally intimidate anyone who dares to question the fearless lawman (as well as, now, anyone who dares to question Thomas). Thomas has gone after members of the Maricopa county council, journalists, even judges. Last month, after two prosecutors in neighboring counties publicly criticized Thomas and Arpaio’s surreal, bumbling attempt at tyranny, Thomas threatened to criminally investigate them, too, calling their comments part of “an orchestrated campaign to pressure law enforcement in Maricopa County to drop charges against influential criminal defendants and suspects.”

As it turns out, before running for county attorney, Thomas was an author and pundit, penning clenched-fist screeds on a variety of hot-button culture war squabbles for the usual roster of conservative outlets, including National Review, AEI, the Weekly Standard, and The Wall Street Journal. My favorite: Thomas once called parents who put their children in daycare “more respectable, less violent versions of Susan Smith.” Smith, you may remember, was the woman who drowned her two sons in a lake in North South Carolina in 1995 . . . then told everyone a black guy did it.

Thomas has also written a couple books, one of which lays out his plan for restoring order to lawless America. Among Thomas’s ideas: conscripted snitches. Per the Phoenix New Times:

“All able-bodied men without a criminal record should once again be subject to obligatory service for community crime surveillance.”

Those men, he said, should patrol neighborhoods, armed with walkie-talkies. “Their sole duty would be to inform police of crimes in progress,” he went on. “Women should not be subject to such conscription for the same reasons that they have traditionally been spared combat duty.”

Then came the kicker: “Properly strong criminal penalties would deter those who might be tempted to dodge this draft [to patrol the neighborhoods] by committing a crime and acquiring a criminal record.”

But Thomas saves the brunt of his ire for . . . well . . . you, Agitator readers. Back in 1997, legal guru Walter Olson wrote a piece for Reason dissecting a particularly smirk-inducing article Thomas published in the Weekly Standard in which Thomas explained why libertarianism keeps him up in a cold sweat at night. Here’s Olson:

The root cause of everything from street muggings and gang delinquency to rudeness at traffic lights to excessive lawsuit filing has finally been found, and it’s…libertarianism. At least that’s the view of Andrew Peyton Thomas, an attorney with the state of Arizona and a frequent contributor to conservative magazines. Writing in the August 26, 1996, Weekly Standard, Mr. Thomas referred to the above woes as “the libertarian-created problems of Southern California and elsewhere.” Readers who hadn’t known that libertarians got to run things in Los Angeles may rub their eyes, but Mr. Thomas isn’t kidding one bit. He blames crime, rudeness, and litigiousness on the “live-and-let-live urban lifestyle” as spawned by “the moral laissez-faire disorder of libertarianism.” Mr. Thomas, author of Crime and the Roots of Order, has made a momentous discovery: “The root of our crime problem,” as he informed Standard readers on March 17 of this year, “is a rights-happy radical individualism.”

Thomas is right. God help us if libertarians ever get any power in this country. Imagine, for example, the irreparable damage to the rule of law if a libertarian were ever elected Maricopa County prosecutor.