In San Diego, a woman is pulled from her family and two kids, extradited to Michigan, and will likely spend the next nine years of her life in prison because 32 years ago she escaped from prison. She had been convicted of drug distribution. There’s no evidence she’s committed any crimes since she escaped. In fact, it looks as if she started her life anew, and had put things back together. I’d be pleasantly surprised if authorities showed her any mercy.

Meanwhile, there are now early reports that “D.C. Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey has committed suicide. She was facing 55 years in prison for the crime of matching consenting high-end prostitutes up with the consenting rich, powerful men who wanted to have sex with them. Moral crusader and Palfrey client David Vitter remains a member in good standing of the United States Senate.

Sad story in the Washington Post on how difficult it is for people wrongly convicted to get their lives back together. Probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that a big part of the problem is foot-dragging by politicians and bureaucrats.

In Illinois, to regain a certifiably clean record and collect compensation–a lump payment of $60,150 for five years or less in prison, or $120,300 for six to 14 years–an exonerated inmate must obtain a “pardon based on innocence” from the governor. A 15-member state review board interviews the petitioners and makes a recommendation, but the governor is not obligated to make a decision.

“The governor is not acting on them,” said Karen Daniel, senior staff lawyer with the Center on Wrongful Convictions, which is pressing [Gov. ]Blagojevich to decide on Pollock’s case and others. “In most of these cases, it’s really not a hard decision. Sometimes there’s still some controversy left after the conviction is thrown out, but in most of these cases there is no disagreement.”

You’d think that a state like Illinois–which is where this whole wrongful conviction movement started–would be leading the country on this stuff, not lagging it.

Five the jurors in the Cyril Wecht trial held a press conference yesterday to say that (a) the jury was no where near convicting Wetch, (2) the prosecution was political, and (3) they don’t support a retrial.

I guess if there’s one benefit to all of this, it’s that with each day that Buchanan insists on retrying this case, she’s exposed a bit more for the power-hungry, convict-at-all-cost prosecutor she is.

Several people have asked me what I think about the acquittal of the four New York City police officers who shot and killed unarmed groom-to-be Sean Bell. I guess I don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been said elsewhere. We’ll never know exactly what happened, but I’d wager to guess that if four men not wearing badges were to unload 50 rounds into another, unarmed group of men, killing one and sending stray bullets all over the neighborhood, they wouldn’t have escaped without being convicted of a single crime.

On the other hand, I’m having a hard time seeing how…uh…capitalism is to blame. This is what happens to people who read too much Naomi Klein.

I ask because I’m going to be there this weekend. First there was this. Now this:

If you’re caught with a prostitute, local authorities plan to seize your car.

That was the message conveyed at a press conference Tuesday afternoon, where officials with the Memphis Police and the District Attorney General’s Office announced the arrests of 64 people in a three-day prostitution sting.

As a result of those arrests, authorities will attempt to seize 42 cars: 39 from those charged with soliciting prostitutes, as well as one from a suspect facing drug charges and two because the owners had revoked driver’s licenses.

“They were used in the commission of a crime. Under state law, they are subject to seizure,” Dist. Atty. Gen. Bill Gibbons said, when asked if the seizures seemed excessive. “I think it’s a good law. But if you think it’s too stringent, talk to your legislators.”

Added Memphis Police director Larry Godwin: “I’d say seize every dadgum vehicle and send a message.”

To be fair to Memphis, this isn’t new, or unique to the city. Lot’s of cities do it, despite the fact that it punishes suspected Johns before they’ve so much as seen the inside of a courtroom. Even if you’re acquitted, in most places you have to go to court to get back your car, and you can forget about asking the government to reimburse you for attorney fees and court costs.

Argentina has decriminalized the consumption of illicit drugs. That seems like good news.

And Alaska’s appeals court says it will no longer tolerate “implicitly coercive” searches during traffic stops. That’s good news, too.

Both places, by the way, are marvelous vacation destinations.

The U.S. Supreme Court deals another blow to the Fourth Amendment, ruling that evidence seized during arrests that are illegal under state law (but legal under the Constitution) can still be used against a suspect at trial.

During arguments, Ginsburg spoke for several colleagues when she pointed out that if a summons had been issued in Moore’s case, any incriminating evidence would have been excluded. “Would you explain the logic to saying that when the police violate state law, then the evidence can come in, but when they comply with state law, it can’t,” she asked.

But that didn’t stop her from voting with a unanimous majority.

Some interesting commentary from Orin Kerr on the case here.

Tennessee Sen. Rosalind Kurita has an idea:

Defense attorneys would be banned from advertising their expertise with drunken driving cases under a bill advancing in the Senate.

Sen. Rosalind Kurita, a Clarksville Democrat, successfully added the provision to a bill that would create an online registry of repeat DUI offenders in Tennessee.

Kurita says officials have a hard enough time convicting drunken drivers without lawyers advertising their expertise in the field and offering discounts to DUI defendants.

Hat tip to Rick Davis.

The momentum against U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan is growing. New developments:

A friend and formal federal prosecutor writes with an interesting possible consequence of allowing district attorneys and U.S. attorneys to be sued for poorly managing their subordinates that I hadn’t considered.

He says that allowing prosecutors to be sued under the supervisory role with only qualified immunity protections might make some prosecutors less willing to offer legal guidance to the people investigating a case, for fear of subjecting themselves to the possibility of being labeled “investigators” and, therefore, subject to qualified instead of absolute immunity. This may actually cause more civil rights violations on the part of investigators (read: law enforcement) in some investigations, because they won’t have access to regular legal counsel throughout their investigation.

It’s a fair point, and worth considering in the Goldstein case. I thought the Goldstein case might be a small step in the right direction, but as is often the case, sometimes only going half way is worse than doing nothing at all. Looks like the only real solution here is to drop the concept of absolute immunity altogether, and instead subject all prosecutors to the qualified immunity we give most other government employees. For that to happen, Congress would have to overwrite the Supreme Court’s decision in the Imbler case, and make Section 1983 suits explicitly applicably to prosecutors.

I don’t see why they shouldn’t. Qualified immunity is still a high hurdle. Merely deciding to bring charges in a questionable case wouldn’t be enough. You’d still have to show that a prosecutor withheld exculpatory evidence, knowingly or recklessly put on false evidence, encouraged a witness to lie, or committed some other egregious violation.

But regular readers of this site know that there are plenty of examples of such behavior. And as of right now, there isn’t much of anything the victims of these prosecutors can do about it.

That would at least open the door to possible compensation for the people wronged. But how do we do more to prevent abuse in the first place? The former federal prosecutor mentioned above suggests more bar disciplinary action. He says prosecutors are more likely to fear losing their license or reputation than they are the distant possibility of a civil rights suit.

That’s the topic of my Fox column this week.

Various voices on the D.C. libertarian scene tell me that a uniformed Park Police officer recently paid a visit to the home of Brooke Oberwetter, the Jefferson Memorial dancer arrested last weekend (there were several other people there at the time).

They’re apparently now adding a second charge of “demonstrating without a permit,” and they’re bumping her case from D.C. court to federal court. They’re also expunging the arrest from her record.

I sort of assumed the case would be in federal court anyway, given that the arrest took place on federal property. But I really have no idea if that’s the reason for the change. I’m also not sure why they would expunge the arrest. It isn’t as if they’re cutting her a break–they’re still pressing ahead with charges. It’s as if they’re pretending the handcuffs, escort to the police station, and five hours in police custody didn’t happen.

The second charge is ridiculous–the Memorial guidelines clearly say a permit is only necessary if there are more than 25 people in the group. This event didn’t break 25 people.

But it also makes sense why they’d include it. It isn’t exactly clear what “interfering with an agency function” means, but it sounds something like “refusal to follow a lawful order.” If that is indeed the gist of the charge, the police have to lay down a reason why the order to disperse was lawful in the first place. If the dancers had indeed been demonstrating without a permit, failure to disperse after being ordered to do so would probably amount to a crime. But if they weren’t breaking any laws in the first place, the order to disperse was unlawful, in which case Oberwetter’s arrest for not following it would be unlawful, too.

I am completely speculating, here. If someone with expertise in, er, national park law has any other ideas, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

More: Also looks like the Washington Post has corrected its error about Oberwetter repeatedly returning to the chamber after being asked to leave.

In Memphis this week, it was a "terrorism sweep" that failed to catch any terrorists. In Akron, police embarked on a citywide "gun sweep" that didn’t turn up any guns.

But like the authorities in Memphis, they did find plenty of other ways to stay busy:

Authorities arrested 72 people in the third night of a Gun Violence Reduction Sweep on Friday night and Saturday morning, Akron police Lt. Rick Edwards said.

Edwards said 115 charges were filed. Of those charges, five were felonies, 35 were misdemeanors and 75 warranted arrests for people with outstanding warrants, Edwards said. Of the warranted arrests, seven were felonies and 68 were misdemeanors.

Authorities also issued 88 traffic citations, including four for operating a vehicle under the influence.

During the sweep, authorities also conducted bar checks at the Bank Lounge at 1078 Kenmore Blvd., where patrons were arrested on drug charges, and at the Boulevard Lounge at 995 Kenmore Blvd., where liquor violations were issued against the liquor permit holder and several patrons were charged with drug offenses, Edwards said.

During the citywide sweep, officers confiscated 5.2 grams of crack cocaine, one-tenth of a gram of powdered cocaine, 13.1 grams of marijuana, 9 Oxycodone pills and 19 Percocet pills, Edwards said.

No guns were confiscated during the Friday-Saturday action, Edwards said.

These allegedly-regulatory "alcohol inspections" of bars that include searching patrons for drugs are becoming increasingly common.

A couple of rare Fourth Amendment victories. And both related to the drug war.

Last week, federal, state, and local police in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas conducted a massive sweep, including raids of businesses, homes, and boats; traffic roadblocks; and personal body searches. They say they were looking for “terrorists.” They didn’t find any. They did arrest 332 people, 142 of whom they describe as “fugitives”. They also issued about 1,300 traffic tickets, and according to one media account, seized “hundreds” of dollars.

Coverage here, here, and here.

A Florida prosecutor has decided not to press charges against a guy arrested for videotaping an undercover police officer:

In declining to prosecute Sievert, the state pointed to a decision in a federal lawsuit in which a judge awarded a man damages for his arrest for videotaping police.

[...]

“The activities of the police, like those of other public officials, are subject to public scrutiny,” a federal judge wrote. “Robinson’s right to free speech encompasses the right to receive information and ideas.”

The police, the judge wrote, citing a case in Texas, do not have “unfettered discretion to arrest individuals for words or conduct that annoy or offend them.”

That language could apply in all sorts of contexts.

Kudos to the prosecutors in this case for showing proper restraint.

Via Volokh.

David Bernstein expresses his admiration for the Innocence Project, then his shock that of all people, Janet Reno would be on the organization’s board of directors. I share both sentiments.

I had similar feelings when the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers gave Reno an award a couple of years ago. Perhaps Reno has changed from her days as a prosecutor in Florida and her time as attorney general. But to my knowledge, she has never acknowledged her error or apologized for the innocent people she convicted of child abuse in the 1980s, which was a big reason why she got her job in the Clinton administration. And then there’s that whole Waco thing.

Until she does, it’s unfortunate that these otherwise admirable groups would honor her with awards and board positions.

Police arrested, cuffed, and hauled her away in front of her kid–all because a man in a restaurant mistook the glasses of water she was drinking for wine, then called the police. The comments to the story are rather interesting, too. Read them and draw your own conclusions about this mysterious man who was watching her in the restaurant.

The reporter finds another case in which a woman was charged with DUI after blowing .03 on a breath test, because the cops were convinced she was on drugs. When lab tests proved them wrong, prosecutors pushed ahead with the charges anyway.

In both cases, the women eventually beat the charges, but incurred thousands of dollars in legal bills. That seems to be the choice in these cases. Even if you’re completely innocent, your options are to plead guilty and accept your punishment, or fight the charges, in which you risk the wrath of the judge if you’re convicted, and spending thousands of dollars you won’t get back even if you’re acquitted.

Here’s the fun part:

But I was struck by something as I talked to Sifford. She begged me not to read too much into the police report — in the officer’s account of her field sobriety tests, she was sniffing constantly, her pulse was above normal, and she swayed. Reading that, without the results of the urine test, you might assume she was coked-up.

But that’s the thing about these reports. You can see it on Shannon Wilcutt’s, too.

Shannon Wilcutt had a 0.02 blood alcohol content, but the police report notes a “moderate” odor of alcohol on her breath. How is that possible? It also says that her speech was “slurred” and she had dried blood on her lips. That couldn’t possibly be related to dental surgery, could it?

The cops were building their cases; it was up to Wilcutt and Sifford to find lawyers willing to ferret out the truth.

The officers are only doing their job, but their job is to bust drunk drivers. That’s what the Legislature wants, what the governor wants, and what the public wants. From the minute the cops pull you over, they assume you’re drunk.

It’s your job to prove yourself innocent.

These aren’t even the worst cases. The California Highway Patrol was recently exposed for using standard, cut-and-paste boilerplate about “the scent of alcohol” and “slurred speech” in all DWI arrests. Some defendants whose blood tests came back negative filed an open records request, revealing the word-for-word descriptions on the arrest reports. Wouldn’t that be pretty good evidence that the officers had perjured themselves?