People of our present era like to believe that they are sophisticated, intelligent, and incapable of engaging in the kind of witch hunts that made Salem, Massachusetts, famous, yet in the past 30 years American law enforcement and prosecutors have pursued what only could be described as witch hunts, as they have railroaded innocent people into prison for crimes that clearly have not occurred. There are the more famous witch hunts, such as the McMartin and Kern County cases in California, the Little Rascals Case in North Carolina, the Grant Snowden case in Florida, the witch hunt of Wenatchee, Washington, and many more.

In each of these cases, people have been accused of the most sordid and horrible kinds of child molestation, from outright rape to shoving swords into the rectums of children (and, amazingly, leaving absolutely no trace of injury), cooking babies in microwave ovens, engaging in Satanic rituals in the middle of the day at day care centers, throwing children into shark-infested waters, and more. We would like to think that there at least would be some physical or corroborating evidence for such actions, but these “crimes” were pursued even though nothing seemed changed about the children.

Often, the charges seem to be absolutely contrived. In Dade County, Georgia, for example, Brad Wade was accused of sexually molesting a minor on a very short stretch of I-59 while simultaneously driving more than 60 mph. (While he had been driving in from Alabama, the alleged molestation took place only in Georgia.) That might seem a bit strange, but when one realizes that Alabama authorities had recognized that the accusations and their backgrounds (yet another child custody fight) simply did not make sense, so Northwest Georgia authorities, which push nearly every sexual abuse accusation (as long as the accused is not politically-connected), eagerly jumped on the charges and Wade is serving a lengthy sentence in a Georgia prison.

When one steps back and takes a hard look at these cases, it is apparent that the authorities have depended upon mass hysteria and a news media that soaks up every story, no matter how contrived it might be. Because I have no expertise in psychology (except in dealing with four internationally-adopted teenagers in my home), I am reluctant to deal with psychological aspects of witch hunts except to say that people really do come to believe things that physically seem to violate laws of time and space.

I turn, instead, t0 those things where I do have more formal experience, the cost and benefit patterns that accompany these witch hunts, patterns that would interest an economist like me. Accompanying that curiosity are some questions that never seem to be asked when the hysteria breaks out:

• Why is corroborating evidence ignored, even when it absolutely points to the falsity of the charges?
• Are there any overt patterns that are seen time and again when authorities go after people accused of these horrific things?
• Does anyone benefit, financially, professionally, or otherwise, from the pursuing of these charges?

If we can answer these questions, then we also are able to get a clearer picture of why these charges are levied and why the authorities are hellbent on bird-dogging them, even in the face of corroborating evidence that absolutely debunks the accusations. Furthermore, we might get a better sense of why jurors in such cases are likely to convict innocent people.

In the situation of bogus child molestation charges, there really is a Ground Zero: the Child Abuse Protection and Treatment Act of 1974, commonly known as the Mondale Act. If ever there were an outright federal assault on the Rights of the Accused which came out of Anglo-American Law, it was this law. Congress passed it, of course, because Sen. Walter Mondale (who was up for re-election) claimed that child abuse was epidemic and the federal government had to step in to put an end to this horror.

Now, Mondale was right in saying that there always are horrific cases of child abuse and molestation, and I can say, as one who has been involved in four international adoptions, that such outrages occur inside and outside the USA. No one will dispute that fact. However, the federal “solution” to this problem has been to create huge incentives and moral hazards for false accusations. This is a law that not only eviscerated the Rights of the Accused, but also created incentives for local and state governments to make money and for individuals employed in that system to enhance their own personal prospects.

Economists are fond of saying that incentives matter, and CAPTA and similar laws passed in its wake (including the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 and beyond) created numerous financial and personal incentives for police and prosecutors to emphasize these kinds of cases. At the same time, CAPTA lowered the legal threshold for prosecution and denied defendants the right to bring corroborating evidence that might prove exculpatory.

For example, authorities claimed that molested and abused children would be traumatized by having to be in the same courtroom with their alleged abuser, so children often would testify from the judge’s chamber via a closed-circuit television. Such an arrangement only served to make the defendant look to be such a monster that he or she had to be guilty. (The U.S. Supreme Court struck down this practice, saying that it deprived the defendants of the Sixth Amendment right to face one’s accuser.)

The Mondale Act also told states receiving federal money to eliminate the requirement for corroborating evidence, which mean that the accusation itself would constitute all of the proof needed for a conviction, which lowered the legal standard in criminal cases to something akin to preponderance of the evidence, the civil standard, instead of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The Rape Shield laws, which also have applied to sexual abuse cases, encouraged judges to disallow evidence such as the accuser having a history of making false charges, and the courts also permitted the admission of hearsay evidence, especially when it would benefit the prosecution’s case.

We should not be surprised at the results, as numerous people have been wrongfully convicted for something that never happened. Because American courts tend to overturn convictions on issues of procedure and not guilt or innocence, one can say with certainty that in the United States of America today, actual innocence no longer is a legitimate defense, at least in some kinds of cases. Furthermore, the appeals courts constantly are looking for reasons to impose “finality,” which means that they wash their hands of the evidence and the hard fact that those appealing their convictions might well be innocent.

While it almost is impossible statistically to trace the patterns of accusations and convictions, nonetheless we have seen the development of cost and benefit patterns that have followed in the wake of the changes in how such cases proceed. We should remember that witch hunts don’t occur because people mysteriously become hysterical en mass. They happen, instead, because individuals benefit from making and pursuing these charges, and in the case of so-called sex crimes, the benefits can be huge.

Before looking at the benefits, however, let us examine who bears the costs. People who are accused either must depend upon a public defender or must pay for legal representation from their own resources, and it does not take long for the money spigot to run dry. Tonya Craft literally had close to a million dollars to spend on her defense, and she still ran out of funds before the case even came to trial. In the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case, each of the three defendants had to spend more than $1 million apiece just to try to debunk what were transparently-false charges.

In cases involving child molestation or rape, an ordinary criminal defense attorney usually is not enough, as these are very difficult cases to defend because the accused already has been demonized in the media and by prosecutors, and the laws governing such cases are different than most laws regarding alleged criminal conduct. For example, if one is charged with robbery or murder, an actual robbery or murder must take place, and then the question for the jury is whether or not the defendant is the guilty party.

The sex crime cases, however, have such a low threshold of proof that real-live evidence of such an assault actually having occurred is not needed; all that is necessary is an accusation, and the law provides plenty of incentives for people to make false accusations for purposes of revenge or, in child custody cases, to get the other person out of the way.

The costs can be substantial. I know one attorney who specializes in such cases who requires a down payment up front of $100,000. Since few people keep $100K in spare change, getting the funds is very, very difficult. Then there a experts in forensics, interviewing, and the like who also do not testify for free. One of the reasons that so many people plead to something in such cases is that they do not have the personal resources to fight the charges.

On the benefit side, one only has to think of Janet Reno, Ed Jaegels, Scott Harshbarger (who prosecuted the notorious Fells Acres Case in Massachusetts), and Gary A. Riesen, the Chelan County, Washington, district attorney who was re-elected until his retirement last year by voters despite his “witch hunt” prosecutions. Reno rode her wrongful convictions to the position of U.S. Attorney General, Jaegels has been a conservative icon in California, and Harshbarger rose to prominence in national Democratic Party circles.

Nancy Lamb, who pursued the Little Rascals Case — the most expensive criminal case in the history of North Carolina — was lionized in the media and even now, according to North Carolina’s Judicial District 1 website, remains as a prosecutor who “specializes in child abuse.” In all of these cases, the individual prosecutors benefited from prosecuting innocent people. None had to face lawsuits, and none were brought up before their various state bars for discipline.

Their actions wasted millions of dollars, destroyed individual lives and families, and unnecessarily created real victims. None paid anything resembling a personal price. Likewise, those employed by the various Child Protective Services agencies and the Children’s Advocacy Centers — all of which were created by federal legislation — are immune from lawsuits and face almost no legal scrutiny for their aggressive questioning that literally demands that children “disclose” abuse, even when the children being questioned vociferously deny that any abuse even happened.

When patterns of costs and benefits are so skewed, and when taxpayers are forced to fund witch hunts while individuals are forced to pay for their own defense, we should not be surprised that witch hunts continue to occur on a regular basis. Witch hunts are just one more example of how the political classes of Washington, D.C., in the name of “doing something” actually create situations in which the so-called cure is worse than the disease.

– William Anderson

As child molestation charges last year began to swirl around Robert Adams and the school where he was headmaster, the Creative Frontiers School in Citrus Heights, California, Joy Terhaar, the executive editor of the Sacramento Bee, wrote a column claiming that the “lessons of the past” in child molestation cases served as a guide to the newspaper’s present coverage. She declared:

The shadow of the McMartin Preschool fiasco hung over Sacramento law enforcement and media last week.

You likely followed the news of the abrupt closure Monday of a private elementary school in Citrus Heights because of allegations the principal molested students beginning in 1997.

Just as law enforcement learned from the McMartin molestation allegations in the 1980s, and changed its investigative approach in such cases, the media learned to be more skeptical.

Unfortunately, the column was little more than self-serving rhetoric and when Adams was indicted and charged, the Bee ran a number of articles and columns inferring that Adams really was guilty, including this one by Marcos Benton that lumped Adams with convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State football defensive coordinator and did not even offer the possibility that Adams might be innocent. Because I will be writing on the Adams/Creative Frontiers case in future posts, I don’t want to go into detail except to say that I strongly (very, very strongly) believe this case is yet another sickening hoax in which the media glorifies police and prosecutors while innocent people are charged with “crimes” that never occurred.

I have been involved as an observer, a blogger, or an adviser in cases where people have been charged with rape or child molestation, including the Tonya Craft trial (she was acquitted) and the infamous Duke Lacrosse Case (in which the charges were dropped after North Carolina Attorney General found “no evidence” that a rape or any other crime had occurred). There also are others and if I have found one common thread in all of them, it has been the role of the mainstream news media. With only very, very few exceptions, the pack mentality of mainstream journalism has come to the fore and journalist after journalist has written or broadcast stories that assume that charges automatically mean guilt.

Meanwhile, despite the Bee’s claim that the McMartin and other notorious cases of false accusation have helped to steel coverage of cases involving such accusations, I find that simply to be untrue. This unfortunate thread runs from the local media all the way to the top national entities. For example, the Duke Lacrosse Case found two newspapers that inferred guilt and purposely ignored all exculpatory evidence all the way to the bitter end: the local Durham Herald-Sun and the New York Times. (Even after “60 Minutes” eviscerated the charges in an October 2006 broadcast, the H-S and NYT continued to hold to the Party Line.)

(American Journalism Review ran a scathing review of how the media covered the Duke case, and I will say that the writer, Rachel Smolkin, pretty much got it right.)

There is a lingering question here, even as we see media people engaging in the same angst over how they cover these kinds of cases and claiming that they have “learned their lessons,” and the question is this: Why does the mainstream media continue to run over the same cliff time and again?

People have any number of answers ranging from the “liberal media” to outright ignorance. Yes, most mainstream media people are politically liberal and, yes, a lot of them are bright yet ignorant on many things. (Don’t get me started on reporters and economics.) Yet, I believe that the reason we see the same patterns repeated over and over again is institutional, and this goes back to the days of Progressivism and the Progressivist 1922 Canons of Journalism.

In 1922, broadcast media was in its infancy, so newspapers tended to be the organizations that hired the most journalists. As an institution, the news media was decidedly Progressive, and it featured people who believed that the role of the press should be to foster “good government” at all levels. That meant that reporters would spend much of their time covering the various governmental entities from the local police and city hall to the U.S. Presidency. Although reporters were claiming to be the “watchdogs” of government, in reality, they became an arm of the individuals in government.

This has developed innocently enough. For example, when the local courthouse reporter goes on his or her beat each weekday, the reporter speaks almost exclusively with government agents, from clerks to judges. While the journalist might talk to individual defense attorneys, they are not going to be able to have the same relationships with reporters as do the government employees because a defense attorney is more likely to keep important information at bay. (There are exceptions, such as the Raleigh News & Observer’s Joe Neff uncovering a number of illegal acts such as strong arming witnesses by one of DA Michael Nifong’s investigators, along with other documents that demonstrated conclusively that Duke accuser Crystal Mangum was not telling the truth. Yet, Neff was an exception, not the rule, in the Duke case.)

As the relationships develop, the skepticism seems to disappear. After all, prosecutors and police tend to be more forthcoming with what they claim to know than are defense attorneys, and delivering information tends to help cement relationships.

In the “sex crimes” cases, the situation is worse. First, states are required to investigate all claims no matter how specious they may be, and news of investigations into these kinds of cases always will be heavily sought by reporters, even if the claims are not true. Second, and I NEVER have seen this fact reported in a mainstream publication or broadcast, government agencies from the police to prosecutors to Child Protective Services receive federal money whenever they pursue charges in such cases, which increases the incentives to charge nearly everyone no matter how bogus the charges might be.

Third, “sex crimes” always are “hot news.” They just are. People are curious, they have instant opinions, and are much more likely to rush to judgment when such accusations are made than they might be in other kinds of cases. Furthermore, political ideology heavily filters the interpretations. For example, the vast number of “they must be guilty” accusations in the Duke case came from the political Left, including much of the Duke faculty and administration, and organizations such as the NAACP. The Marxist blogs such as Counterpunch automatically assumed guilt, and even after the charges were dropped, Counterpunch ran a piece that claimed the charges might have been true and that Nifong was being mistreated.

Daniel Okrent, a former ombudsman for the NYT, told New York Magazine about the Duke case: “You couldn’t invent a story so precisely tuned to the outrage frequency of the modern, metropolitan, bien pensant journalist.”

However, while the “liberalism” bogey certainly has truth, I believe that the situation is institutional, or as the late Warren Brookes once wrote about the mainstream media, the press tends to lean toward the “statist quo.” Not only do media Progressives tend to have a strong faith in the ability of the State to “fix” problems in society, but most of the important professional relationships that reporters have tend to be with government officials. There is a symbiotic relationship between journalists and people in government (and not just elected politicians), as they depend heavily upon each other for news and favorable publicity.

The problem is that when prosecutors and journalists develop symbiotic, mutually-beneficial relationships, due process of law and the rights of the accused often are eviscerated. While various state bar rules for prosecutors specifically prohibit them from making inflammatory public statements that declare someone to be guilty even before trial, prosecutors rarely are disciplined for breaking that rule and for breaking others. Because individuals actually harmed by prosecutorial misconduct are not permitted to sue, the only way for redress is for the prosecutor’s peers to act either through the state bar or by charging the rogue prosecutor with actual crimes. In reality, neither happens very much.

Thus, prosecutors are given free reign and are virtually assured that they will not be held responsible for illegal conduct. Not surprisingly, the media rarely holds them responsible, either. I believe that is because a reporter can benefit when prosecutors illegally leak material to them, an act that is a felony, but is protected by the courts and the media.

One of the worst examples came more than 20 years ago when Rudy Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was pursuing Wall Street finance whiz Michael Milken. Giuliani was able to keep Milken and his defense team off balance by illegally leaking testimony and other grand jury material to favorite reporters, and especially James Stewart of the Wall Street Journal. What Stewart and Giuliani did was criminal (as opposed to Milken’s acts which a federal prosecutor later admitted had never been regarded before as criminal), but it was Milken who went to prison and Giuliani and Stewart who went to fame and fortune.

Thus, when journalists act in a reprehensible manner, they are rewarded, and that means it is unlikely reporters are going to change their behavior. What we see in sex crime accusations is that all of these issues come together, and individuals who are accused have virtually no chance with the legal system. With the media trumpeting that the accused always are guilty and with reporters having close ties to the prosecutors, the accused cannot get their story in print or in broadcasts.

In the Tonya Craft case, the prosecutors and police had almost limitless access to the media and quickly pronounced her guilt. When Craft tried to fight back by appearing on a radio talk show, Judge Brian House, who presided at her trial (and made it clear he was in the hip pocket of the prosecutors) slapped her with a gag order that remained until after her trial ended. (A similar thing happened in the Duke Lacrosse Case, when the NAACP demanded that the court impose a gag order. The irony was that the NAACP has long been officially opposed to gag orders because they hurt black defendants, but because of the racial politics of the Duke case, the NAACP was willing to overturn its own positions.)

There is one more factor as to why the media never seems to learn: sheer laziness. When an issue arises, a typical reporter will go to the Rolodex and call up the Usual Suspects. In cases involving alleged child molestation and rape, one often sees Wendy Murphy interviewed, and, as Radley has pointed out, Murphy has a history of telling whoppers. She is not an expert in any sense of the word, but because she is inflammatory, reporters will seek quotes from her.

I recently saw a Discovery Channel broadcast dealing with crimes, and the reporter interviewed Steven Hayne, who claimed that the position of the body would let him know if the murderer was right-handed or left-handed, a preposterous position. Nonetheless, Hayne was available and ready to give a quote. That he was a fraud did not seem to matter, and it took repeated efforts by Radley to expose him.

Likewise, journalists are enamored with people they deem to be experts, and most of them believe that government bureaucrats, from the interviewers at CPS to prosecutors are experts just like the folks at CSI. By not scrutinizing their comments or spending the time to seek out real experts, journalists not only deprive their readers and listeners of facts, but they also further imperil people who are innocent but have been falsely accused.

Given this set of circumstances, I believe that real reform is not possible. The modern media is so tied to government and its stable of “experts” that it is impossible for others to break into that mix. What that means is that every time someone is falsely accused of a sex crime, we can expect the mainstream press to run over the cliff — and then declare after the debacle that journalists have learned their lesson and won’t make that same error again. And again. And again.

– William Anderson

Hi Folks — It’s Lenore from Free-Range Kids, where I get letters like this one with shocking regularity (check my blog and you’ll see a new one there right now!).  CPS must do some good. I’m sure it has saved a lot of kids in danger. But it also has a lot of power, which sometimes it uses to threaten, or even destroy families. Parents who are confident in their kids, their community and their own parenting often allow their children to have some independence. They even — if you can believe this — allow them to play outside! For this, they are sometimes (too often!) hounded. – L.

Dear Lenore: A neighbor of mine called the Texas CPS (Child Protective Services) and the Police on my wife and I because we allow our children, ages 6 and 8, to play in the courtyard directly in front of our apartment. CPS has been investigating my family since April 4th 2012, it is now August 12 2012, and all they have come up with is the one report to Police about my 6-year-old being outside in front of his home. Now we are dealing with the courts in a “Negligent Supervision” case, which makes absolutely no sense because my child wasn’t hurt or asking anyone for help. I was outside with my son when the Police arrived, but the CPS caseworker insists that I take drug tests and parenting classes. People are not neighbors anymore, they are just @$$holes. – A Texas Dad

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, juvenile authorities in Meridian, Mississippi, have been following a policy in which children suspended from school, even for minor infractions, find themselves being incarcerated:

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has released investigative findings determining that children in predominantly black Meridian, Miss. have had their constitutional rights violated by theLauderdale County Youth Court, the Meridian Police Department, and the Mississippi Division of Youth Services in what civil rights investigators allege is a school to prison pipeline with even dress code violations resulting in incarceration.

The report declares:

“The system established by the City of Meridian, Lauderdale County, and DYS to incarcerate children for school suspensions ‘shocks the conscience,’ resulting in the incarceration of children for alleged ‘offenses’ such as dress code violations, flatulence, profanity, and disrespect.”

The report continues:

“By policy and practice, [the Meridian Police Department] MPD automatically arrests all students referred to MPD by the District. The children arrested by MPD are then sent to the County juvenile justice system, where existing due process protections are illusory and inadequate. The Youth Court places children on probation, and the terms of the probation set by the Youth Court and DYS require children on probation to serve any suspensions from school incarcerated in the juvenile detention center.”

Because Meridian has a black population of about 62 percent, it is almost inevitable that many of the adults involved in this outrage also are black, and I have doubts that it is a situation of whites automatically victimizing blacks. Instead, this seems to be yet another example of the Pavlovian response of American authorities to see incarceration as a first option for just about everything. Nonetheless, as Radley has demonstrated in his articles about Cory Maye and fraudulent forensics by prosecutors in Mississippi, little has changed in the Magnolia State from the days when jurors acquitted the murderers of Emmett Till because they didn’t believe a white person should be punished for murdering someone who was black.

By Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform

Charles B. Frye, Attorney at Law in Houston, Texas, has written an excellent discussion on the government’s fallacious rationales for seizing cash during traffic stops at the Americans for Forfeiture Reform blog. I excerpt this portion and encourage you to read and share the rest:

By Eapen Thampy, cross-posted at Americans for Forfeiture Reform (AFR on Facebook).

Journalist Angela Bacca has a recent article in Skunk Magazine titled “Child Snatchers: How a small Northern California County has manipulated medical marijuana laws and made a lucrative business out of kidnapping children”. I’m excerpting the section where Bacca discusses both the role of asset forfeiture and the predatory use of Child Protective Services by Butte County government (and where yours truly is quoted):

Since the passage of Prop 215 in 1996 small Northern California counties like Butte have been reaping the profits of the gray areas presented in the discrepancy between local and federal marijuana laws, predatory asset forfeiture policy and a failing school system.

Nearly 20% of Butte’s population lives below the Federal poverty line, more than twice the state’s rate and significantly higher than the national average. The cashstrapped school system is notoriously poor and many in the area have not completed a high school education. While the entire state is facing major slashes to the budget, Butte is no exception.

Since the recession began in 2008, the Butte County Board of Supervisors have been forthcoming about their anger, particularly in their fiscal reports, at the state for cutting funding and are scrambling to find additional sources of revenue. Schools and roads in Butte County have lost their upkeep and a once surplus budget in 2008 threatens to be a $2 million deficit by the end of fiscal year 2012, a staggering number for a county population of only 200,000, many of which are not permanent residents but students at nearby Chico State University.

Butte and its surrounding counties have seemingly found the answer to their budget woes. They have manufactured a crisis—the public menace of small, private marijuana farms in remote communities—in order to apply for Federal funding to address it. The system has become so corrupted that the county governmental agencies now work together in symbiotic collusion to exploit legal, compliant marijuana growers.

“Butte County law enforcement have closed their budget gap in part through the revenue generated by the seizure of property,” says Eapen Thampy, Executive Director of Americans for Forfeiture Reform, “With this incentive structure driving the priorities of Butte County law enforcement, it is no surprise that citizens find themselves victimized by the aggressive tactics of their own public agencies.”

Butte County has the last remaining narcotics task force north of Sacramento, the Butte Interagency Narcotics Task Force (BINTF). BINTF has become such a reliable source of revenue that the police, judicial and child protective services have morphed into a parasite, feeding off is own constituency for profit. Amid tight budget woes, last year Butte County purchased a $200,000 armored vehicle complete with turret and battering rams.

According to Thampy, police or task force officers who work these types of raids are able to increase their hourly salary through hazard Pay, overtime or holiday benefits—doubling or tripling their normal hourly rate. For local law enforcement in these small counties a marijuana raid could be as good as a holiday bonus.

Last year, the state eliminated the Campaign to Eradicate Marijuana Production (CAMP), which led exploratory helicopter flights throughout the forests in the northern part of the state to scout of marijuana gardens. CAMP had been in existence since President Nixon escalated the War on Drugs in the 1970s.

Butte County, however, applied for and received Federal funding for BINTF with the original mission of combating rampant methamphetamine production and use in the area. Marijuana proved to be not only more profitable, but a far easier target with the legality of medical marijuana.

Using BINTF helicopters, which fly overhead seven days a week, suspected marijuana grows are mapped out using Google Earth. BINTF, in cooperation with the County Sheriff, perform what they refer to as “compliance checks,” more commonly known in the area as “knock and talks.” They approach properties, private or otherwise, and politely gain entry from growers eager to appease them and evade raid and arrest. Often but not in every case, warrants are issued thereafter and the garden is raided and any property of value is seized and the value distributed through the seizing agencies and often the Federal Department of Justice, through a program called Equitable Sharing.

Furthermore, this particular county has found a way to even make child removal profitable during medical marijuana raids.

“Child Protective Services (CPS) – known as Children’s Services in Butte County—operates under a veil of secrecy and privilege,” states Meredith J. Cooper a journalist with the Chico News and Review. In 2010 she authored an article exposing the corruption and financial incentive in child removal in Butte County.

Cooper’s article goes further, outlining information cited from the Federal Grant’s Wire, Adoption Incentives program. For every foster child-adoption the county receives $4,000 in federal grants, a number that doubles to $8,000 if the child is then adopted after the age of 9. Children who remain in CPS custody represent a federal revenue stream for the county, so much so that Butte ranks #1 in the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform’s rate-of-removal index. Nearly 37% of impoverished children in the county are taken into protective custody in Butte County every year—more so than even the more notoriously dangerous and densely populated parts of the state like Oakland, Stockton and Los Angeles.

People like Radley Balko and others have directed a lot of criticism toward the U.S. Supreme Court for its rulings on “absolute immunity” for prosecutors and judges, and in my view, that criticism is valid. The various SCOTUS rulings, made supposedly to protect these officers of the court from others who supposedly abuse the system, actually create even worse conditions in which conduct occurs. Nature abhors a vacuum, and SCOTUS has created the Mother of All Vacuums by giving blanket protection to their own.

The high court has justified its rulings by claiming that although individuals that have been wronged cannot receive redress from the people who wronged them, those alleged miscreants still can be punished by the system, including the various state bars and also can face criminal charges. While all of that sounds good, the reality bumps into the simple fact that government employees tend to protect their own.

After the Tonya Craft acquittal, I spoke to an official of the Georgia State Bar about the conduct of prosecutors Len Gregor and Christopher Arnt. In a letter to the bar, I outlined specifically how these two men repeatedly violated the Standards of Conduct for prosecutors laid out in the bar’s regulations. The official, however, told me that she really didn’t care how they acted because, in her view, “They were just doing their jobs.”

After I asked her if suborning perjury, lying to jurors and the public, and hiding exculpatory evidence fell into the “doing their jobs” category, she hung up. Nor was the Georgia State Bar the only government agency that has been unresponsive. The FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were given mountains of evidence about prosecutorial and judicial misconduct that crossed the line into criminal behavior, yet they, along with the attorney general of Georgia, ignored everything.

This hardly is unusual. In fact, it is the norm. Lawsuits are the only means of redress that can be initiated by private individuals that are not employed by the justice system, so by blocking this one avenue of justice the SCOTUS essentially has blocked justice itself. Thus, in order for any kind of justice to prevail against prosecutorial and judicial wrongdoing, the very peers and friends of those who violate the law and standards of conduct are then expected to initiate proceedings against their peers and friends. That just does not happen.

When Michael Nifong was disbarred in 2007 for his obvious criminal — yes, criminal — actions in pursuing the charges in the Duke Lacrosse Case, people involved in the legal system prattled on about how such procedures were unprecedented and even amazing. Yet, Nifong got off easy. He lost his law license and his job, but still receives a large pension from North Carolina taxpayers. He also has his freedom. One should never forget that he and friendly judges in Durham had created and maintained an atmosphere in which three young men faced 30 years apiece in prison for something that Nifong and his peers knew never had occurred.

The sad thing is that it was extraordinarily easy for Nifong to gain indictments, and had not the North Carolina State Bar done what it never had done before — intervene in an ongoing criminal case (and the charges passed by just one vote) — Nifong would have been able to bring this farce to trial. Furthermore, a jury in Durham would have been under tremendous pressure to convict these young men, even though there literally was no evidence they even had touched Crystal Gail Mangum.

Despite the fact that Nifong openly broke numerous federal and state laws, authorities refused even to investigate his actions. So, if the authorities are not going to pursue a prosecutor whose lawbreaking was obvious and who had lost his political cover, why should we expect them to do anything in cases where lawbreaking might be harder to prove? As I see it, the failure by law enforcement officials in the Nifong-Duke case is proof that those who personally benefit from the criminal justice system are not going to do anything to rock the boat. If that means that injustice rules, then so be it. Those who run the system understand perfectly that they are invulnerable, and people who are not held accountable for wrongdoing eventually will run off the rails.

By Eapen Thampy, cross-posted at Americans for Forfeiture Reform (Facebook here).

Last Friday, the ACLU announced it had reached a settlement with officials in the East Texas city of Tenaha and Shelby County in a class-action lawsuit (Morrow v. City of Tehana, et al)  filed over some 140 traffic stops that resulted in illegal forfeitures of property by law enforcement. From the ACLU’s press release:

“…it is estimated police seized $3 million between 2006 and 2008 in at least 140 cases. Police officers routinely pulled over motorists in the vicinity of Tenaha without any legal justification, asked if they were carrying cash and, if they were, ordered them to sign over the cash to the city or face charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

Almost all of the stops involved Black and Latino drivers. None of the plaintiffs in the case were ever arrested or charged with a crime. The seized assets were used to enrich the defendants’ offices and themselves.

“This was a brazen case of highway robbery, plain and simple,” said Elora Mukherjee, a staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program.  “Law enforcement needs to focus on protecting the communities they serve, not on policing for profit.  This far-reaching settlement radically alters how officers in Tenaha and Shelby County can go about their daily duties and protects all motorists driving along Highway 59.”

One of the constant themes in both movies and television shows dealing with crime and the courts is the use of shortcuts by the authorities to nail someone who obviously is guilty. Messy things like due process of law and rights of the accused are so 1787 and have no place in modern society where outcomes are more important than the way one reaches those ends.

The ends can be frightening. The New York Times reports that one of the reasons that more than 94 percent of criminal charges in both state and federal cases end in plea bargains is that prosecutors can hang the prospect of stiff sentences over the heads of anyone who decided to go to trial and is found guilty, a situation that led Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to note that the American criminal justice system has become “a system of pleas, not a system of trials.”

Innocent people often are swept up on that tide of guilty pleas. Regular readers of this blog may understand this is so, but most Americans are incredulous. Why in the world would innocent people agree to plead to something they had not done? Is it not the situation in the USA that if you have done nothing wrong, you don’t have to worry about being charged or convicted?

Unfortunately, one of the things I hear most from people wrongfully accused of crimes has been, “I didn’t know this was happening in America.” Well, it does and much more often than one would think, especially with federal prosecutors, who have weapons at their disposal that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would have considered utterly barbaric.

Not only has federal criminal law essentially done away with the bedrock of Anglo-American law, the mens rea requirement, but federal prosecutors can pile charges upon charges, taking the same alleged act and fashioning multiple offenses from it. For that matter, federal prosecutors are not even required to know the laws they supposedly enforce and prosecute and when they are wrong, they pay no price and innocent people remain in prison.

In a shocking article, USA Today recently reported on a horrific situation in North Carolina in which federal prosecutors went after “scores” of innocent people for acts that were perfectly legal. According to the newspaper:

Terrell McCullum did not commit a federal crime by carrying a shotgun and a rifle out of his ex-girlfriend’s house.

But he is serving a federal prison sentence for it. And the fact that everyone — including the U.S. Justice Department— agrees that he is legally innocent might not be enough to set him free.

A USA TODAY investigation, based on court records and interviews with government officials and attorneys, found more than 60 men who went to prison for violating federal gun possession laws, even though courts have since determined that it was not a federal crime for them to have a gun.

Many of them don’t even know they’re innocent.

Lest one think that prosecutors even care about what they have done, think again. While the U.S. Department of “Justice” worked hard to put them into prison (mostly on plea bargains, of course), it refuses to lift a finger to right the wrong:

Still, the Justice Department has not attempted to identify the men, has made no effort to notify them, and, in a few cases in which the men have come forward on their own, has argued in court that they should not be released.

Justice Department officials said it is not their job to notify prisoners that they might be incarcerated for something that they now concede is not a crime. And although they have agreed in court filings that the men are innocent, they said they must still comply with federal laws that put strict limits on when and how people can challenge their convictions in court.

“We can’t be outcome driven,” said Anne Tompkins, the U.S. attorney in Charlotte.

For Tompkins to make that quote is especially rich, because federal prosecutors in the federal Western District of North Carolina for years have been nothing but outcome-driven. After her office secured a counterfeiting conviction against Bernard Von NotHouse, who had minted silver coins, Tompkins announced that NotHouse was a “terrorist” who threatened “the economic stability of this country.” (One is left asking how the inflationary policies of the U.S. government create stability.)

Tompkins and her colleagues in the Western District also have another weapon they use to try to force innocent people to plead guilty: the Mecklenburg County jail in Charlotte, which also is used as a federal lockup. To put it mildly, conditions in that jail are horrific, and they violate all human decency, and that works to the advantage of prosecutors.

Prisoners there get only a small cup of water each day, the food is especially bad, with dinner in some cases being nothing but a stale piece of cornbread. Authorities do not give prisoners underwear changes, deny them soap, and because bathrooms are not located in cells, prisoners must ask permission to use the facilities, requests that routinely are denied. Forget having soap for showers, and prisoners who are on prescription medications often find those meds either withheld or given in irregular doses at irregular times.

It is not difficult for federal prosecutors to find ways to hold people in lockups indefinitely. They can claim flight risk, or danger to society, or a thousand other things, most of which are not true but federal prosecutors long ago decided that truth was irrelevant to their outcome-driven missions.

Not surprisingly, people held for any length of time in these conditions become malleable to plea agreements. When someone is denied medications, thought processes may become irregular or skewed, and by actively working to destroy both the physical and mental health of people accused of committing federal crimes, prosecutors are easily able to hold out promises of better living condition — as long as the accused give prosecutors what they want.

It is difficult for someone to maintain innocence while being brutalized by the system, and when prosecutors are able to hold out the unhappy prospects for someone to face such horrific living conditions for decades, we should not be surprised that so many people will plead to something — anything — just to get out of their present circumstances.

Such conditions are not limited to Charlotte, although federal prosecutors in the Western District are notorious for using any tricks, including lying to judges and the media, in order to get what they want. The culture of lying and brutality that has been embedded in the U.S. Department of Justice for many decades is alive and well in North Carolina.

This month’s issue of Cato Unbound is about mental health and the law, and the strange place of power that our legal system gives to psychiatry. Prof. Jeffrey A. Schaler writes the lead essay, in which he draws on the pioneering work of Dr. Thomas Szasz. Schaler notes that mental illness isn’t like physical illness at all:

“Mental illness” generally refers to how certain people behave. It can also be used to explain why people behave the way they do. It is a fact that there is no literal disease identified by pathologists as mental illness, be it a thought disorder, personality disorder, affective or mood disorder, and/or anxiety-based disorder. In the world of psychiatry and clinical psychology, there are multiple disorders included under each of those rubrics. Mental “disorder” is synonymous with mental “illness.” These are terms used by members of the mental health profession to do and not do certain things to certain people.

The problems here are obvious. Properly speaking, “mental illness” can’t both consist of behavior and also propose to explain that very same behavior. A thing is never adequately explained just by reference to itself. There are diseases of the brain, of course, and Schaler doesn’t deny them. But diseases of the mind are another question altogether. Despite great advances in brain science, it remains the case that the analysis of organic defects of the brain can’t yield a fully satisfying account of irregular or disordered behavior.

Note one other thing Schaler isn’t saying: He’s not claiming that people never behave in strange, inappropriate, disturbing, or violent ways. Obviously they do. He’s claiming only that our explanations for these behaviors, whether in law, medicine, or popular understanding, are conceptually flawed and altogether inadequate.

And yet, on the basis of these same flawed understandings, we excuse some criminals from punishment, and we confine some individuals who have done nothing to harm anyone. This ought to be a cause for concern.

A breaking story this week from Jonesboro, Arkansas, concerns the death of 21 year old Chavis Carter, a black man who was shot to death while handcuffed in the back seat of a Jonesboro Police Department squad car. Carter had been stopped while driving last Saturday night and a search of Carter’s vehicle had allegedly turned up marijuana. The Jonesboro police say Carter committed suicide with a stolen .380 Cobra semi-automatic that somehow wasn’t found during the search or arrest of Chavis; Chavis’s family and supporters say that Chavis was murdered, and that the police are involved in covering up what appears to be a racially motivated crime. Here are stories from the Huffington Post, Charles Blow at the NYT, and KAIT8 News.

The family has put up a Facebook page “Justice for Chavis (ASAP) Carter“. I would also suggest that Arkansans who think that marijuana prohibition gives an already inequitable justice system an additional degree of inhumanity be aware of the final 9 days of the signature drive by Arkansans for Compassionate Care, who are seeking to put a medical marijuana bill to the November Arkansas ballot.

-Eapen Thampy

by William Anderson

For most of my life, I was a fairly typical law-and-order conservative, although there were times I questioned some police tactics. For example, nearly 40 years ago one of my college friends was severely beaten by the Knoxville, Tennessee, police in a situation considered serious enough for the FBI to investigate. After seeing Jake’s face two days after the beatdown and knowing the circumstances behind it, my long-held faith in the police certainly was shaken. Still, I wanted to believe that the police were “on our side.”

Today, I no longer hold to that illusion. Yesterday, I met with a woman about my age whose son, a Marine veteran, was found dead in his Dade County, Georgia, jail cell earlier this year, allegedly due to suicide. Not long before that arrest, he had been picked up for DUI by those same police and was severely beaten and tased by six officers, much of the beating coming after he was prone on the pavement with his hands cuffed behind his back. He had broken ribs, a ruptured eardrum, numerous burns from the taser repeatedly used on him, and bruises all over his body. Naturally, he was the one charged with felonies.

If police officers ever believed in their “protect and serve” mottos, that time is long past. As this post from Will Grigg demonstrates, the police today are obsessed with “officer safety” and their pay. He writes:

Police departments exist to enforce the will of the municipal corporations that employ them. Any actual service they render with respect to the protection of person and property is incidental to that mission.

As a recovering law-and-order conservative, I never believed I would be writing anything like this, and I would love to be proven wrong. I no longer buy the “few bad apples” argument; as I see it, the few “good apples” left in police departments either are driven out by fellow officers or they are cowed into silence.

This should be a very familiar topic for Agitators:

This paper develops the political economy of the militarization of domestic policing. We analyze the mechanisms through which the “protective state” — where the government utilizes its monopoly on force to protect citizens’ rights — devolves into a “predatory state” which undermines the rights of the populace. We apply our theory to the U.S., where we trace the (failed) historical attempts to establish constraints to separate the military functions and policing functions of government. In doing so we emphasize the role of crises in the form of perpetual wars — the “War on Drugs” and the “War on Terror” — in the accelerated militarization of domestic policing.

This is from Coyne and Hall at the economics department of George Mason University. SSRN here.

-Eapen Thampy, Americans for Forfeiture Reform

Hat Tip: Abhi Sivasailam

by William Anderson

This morning I spent time with a some men aged 80+ at a small roundtable discussion, and the topic dealt with the modern application of Claude-Henri de Rouvroy Saint-Simon’s dictum that “the government of men must be replaced by the administration of things.” While the topic of discussion dealt mostly with the Obama administration’s health care law, nonetheless I could see how it fits exactly into the modern American “justice” system and how it swallows millions of people while many of us watch in horror.

Saint-Simon believed that modern society should be governed by bureaucracies guided by the principles of science, and he certainly found kindred souls within the Progressive Movement in the United States about the turn of the 20th Century. Progressives pictured a state in which wise, science-guided bureaucrats led a system that would replace the entrepreneurial, commerce-driven American society, placing administration into the hands of selfless “experts” who would “professionalize” various occupations and rid the economy and greater society of the messiness that presently engulfed it.

The system of justice did not escape the desire of Progressives for “the rule of things,” and over the years, the “experts” have “captured” the governing apparati. Professional prosecutors supposedly trained in all things pertaining to “scientific justice” rule the grand juries, trials, and then are “promoted” to the office of judge. For the most part, things are long decided any case ever goes to a jury (if it ever is heard by a jury), as juries tend to be “ignorant of scientific principles” and are anachronisms at best. While the district attorneys in the state system are elected and U.S. attorneys are appointed by the president, the nuts-and-bolts of criminal justice is in the hands of assistant prosecutors who essentially have lifetime tenure, are protected from liability from any wrongful actions that might victimize innocent people. If any group of people reflect Saint-Simon’s “the rule of things,” it is the assistant prosecutors that relentlessly grind the gears of the system and grind people into oblivion in the process.

Social scientists have various theories to explain why systems created with checks and balances ultimately degenerate into something a bureaucratic near-dictatorship that supposedly was to be prevented by those same checks and balances.  As I see it, we are observing an extension of what economists call “Capture Theory,” in which the regulatory apparati are “captured” by the very entities that are supposed to be regulated. Economist Murray N. Rothbard and others from the Austrian School have added that monopolies tend to be “captured” by their employees, and government certainly qualifies as a monopoly. (I do find it interesting and disconcerting that many economists even today stubbornly believe that the monopoly called government can effectively regulate what it calls economic monopolies and force them to operate as “competitive” entities. Just step back and think about it.)

Prosecutors have had plenty of help as they have quietly and brutally “captured” the “justice” system. Anglo-American law that was here at the founding of this country, with its emphasis upon “due process of law” and “the rights of the accused,” not always is effective at nailing those who are guilty of wrongdoing. The public has dealt with the perception that “loopholes” in the law allow some guilty people to go free by making it harder all accused people to be able to fight charges against them. Politicians, who have found that being “tough on crime” also enhances their changes of be elected and re-elected, have created thousands of new “crimes,” most of them fitting in the category of the failure of an individual to carry out a “public duty” — as defined by politicians and other Progressives.

Obviously, when politicians eliminates the checks and balances and hand authority to tenured and careerist bureaucrats, the system that will come about is one that ultimately will benefit the bureaucrats, and we clearly see that in American justice today. People who are charged with crimes either must use their own resources to fight charges or depend upon court-appointed lawyers who more than not are going to want to curry favor with prosecutors and judges. The monies these lawyers are allotted generally cannot come close to covering the cost of a trial, so the only way for these attorneys to cover their own costs is to quickly plead out their clients, which is one reason that 97 percent of federal cases and 95 percent of state cases end in plea bargains.

Prosecutors, on the other hand, tend to capture the personal benefits of a conviction or guilty plea. (No, it is increasingly rare that “society” shares the benefits, unless one believes that incarcerating non-violent offenders such as drug users confers a “benefit” upon a society that now must pay to house and feed them.) High conviction rates lead to increases in salary, promotions and prestige. Often, they lead to higher political office or a slot with a prestigious (and well-paying) law firm.

As for the “experts” that were supposed to “modernize” investigations and enable prosecutors to better pinpoint proof of guilt, all too often we have seen agents of the government who supposedly were “doing science” actually engage in outright quackery. Radley’s exposure of Mississippi “forensic pathologist” Steven Hayne and “forensic dentist” Michael West as being people who would come up with unbelievable theories to support whatever prosecutors wanted is only a tiny part of the fraud that government “experts” have perpetrated. The highly-publicized problems with the FBI Crime Lab, and corruption in state and even private labs demonstrate once again that the so-called “experts” are not what Progressives want us to believe that they are.

In the end, what occurs is an outright conviction machine that swallows the guilty and the innocent. The Progressive vision was not supposed to turn into this sort of thing, nor was the “administration of things” supposed to morph into a system of institutionalized injustice. Yet, here it is.

I also would like to comment on Lenore’s earlier post on the woman’s conviction because her child drew images with chalk. A bureaucratic system based upon “the administration of things” is going to employ people in positions of authority who operate with a bureaucratic mentality in which rules become those things of highest order. A rule was broken; someone must be punished. Unfortunately, the few people who wish to take a hard look at the wreckage created by this mentality are written off as being “soft on crime.”

Throughout this month, I will highlight cases in which I have been involved that I believe have become travesties of justice. Along the way, I will explain how federal prosecutors use horrific conditions in the Mecklenberg County, North Carolina, jail and federal lockup to pry guilty pleas from people who are in near-shock after being arrested and incarcerated before trial. Yes, there are “good” people in the justice system, but, to paraphrase the great economist F.A. Hayek, in governmental systems, the worst tend to rise to the top.

Hi Folks — It’s Lenore from Free-Range Kids, alerting you to the fact you should set down your coffee cup before reading any further, lest you feel compelled to take a bite out of it in sheer frustration. That’s because a mom in Richmond, Va. was just given 50 hours of community service (which really sounds like more than 50 hours if you listen to what she is expected to do) for letting her kid draw with chalk on some rocks in the park.

Apparently chalk is the gateway drug to graffiti.

“It is all the same thing,” said James River Park Systems Park Manager, Ralph White. “A couple of weeks ago, I was covering over pornographic drawings done in chalk. It doesn’t matter what the medium is. It’s offensive.”

Yes, he just compared chalk to paint…and a 4-year-old’s drawings to porn. Here’s the rest of that article.

I wrote a little bit more the case on my site. What I forgot to add there that I’ll add here is that the mom is not even allowed to enter a park until she completes her service. As if she’s a terrifying criminal.

I guess in the eyes of the law, she is. Anyway, the debate raging over by me is about the fact that the mom was convicted two years ago of doing REAL graffiti– with paint — on the same rocks. So maybe that makes her a recidivist? And also the fact that when the cop came to arrest her for the chalk crime this time she allegedly said, “You must hate your f***ing job.”

Does that really equal the punishment? – L.

He failed a key exam, and a few hours later, he bought a high-powered rifle. I think you can guess who “he” is — the accused “Dark Knight” madman, James Holmes. But can you guess why he did it?

The explanation haunting me is this: He’s a product of the “everyone gets a trophy” generation.

Now, let me hasten to say that I have no degrees in psychology, nor have I examined the man. Let me add that the vast majority of kids, even those with shelves full of meaningless trophies, do not end up shooting theaters full of people.

Nonetheless, as founder of the book and blog “Free-Range Kids,” I’ve spent a lot of time watching our culture trying to convince today’s kids that they have not failed at anything, ever.

There are schools that have outlawed using red pens for corrections, for fear it’s too traumatizing. In Canada, a veteran science teacher was just fired for giving kids a zero on homework they didn’t hand in. Closer to home, my own son brought home a bright, shiny trophy for coming in eighth place in his bowling league.

Out of nine teams. (See below!) Apparently, the league hoped my boy never would notice that when it comes to bowling, he stinks.

Our generation is shielding our kids from failure because we don’t think they can handle it — even though kids always have. Sure, it feels bad to lose a game or get a bad grade, but it is only recently that teachers, parents, principals and coaches decided that kids are too sensitive to bounce back from a single setback.

And then we wonder why kids can’t bounce back from a single setback.

In no way am I excusing James Holmes of the heinous crimes he will be charged with. But we do our kids no favors by shielding them from the fact that they’re not always winners. In fact, we may be turning them into losers.

Hi Folks — It’s Lenore here, from Free-Range Kids. So why am I posting about a sex offender and a dog? It’s sort of a long story, but it boils down to this:

At Free-Range Kids we LOVE safety…we just don’t believe that our kids are in constant danger. Lately, though, a lot of society has decided they are. That’s why, for instance, many schools won’t let the school bus drop a kid off at the bus stop unless there is a PRE-APPROVED GUARDIAN waiting there to escort him or her home. Even if the parents say, “It’s ok! I trust my kid to walk a block!” — no dice.

That same kind of fear of everyday life has come to pervade many adult-child interactions. The idea being: WHY does this adult want to be around a child? PERHAPS HE’S A PERVERT! In this state of panic, our country has passed laws that have little to do with keeping our kids truly safe and lots to do with suspicion of adults. Particularly egregious is the Sex Offender Registry. Instead of it listing adults who pose a big threat to kids, it is littered with people who did things like peeing in public, or going to a prostitute. You can get on the list if you’re a high school senior, age 18, and you sleep with your freshman girlfriend, age 14. Here’s a great article about the whole mess. 

And here, at last, is the article about a man on the registry for coming to help a neighbor with an ailing dog.It’s from 2010 but I just saw it today. And wept.

I feel the way this guy looks.

• The apes are rising.
• Welcome to our world.
• Six important sci-fi ideas that were invented by a hack.
• Marines catch “deserter” – five years after his honorable discharge.
• Louisiana teachers’ union threatens to sue private schools that accept vouchers.
• “Before being arrested and charged with these offences, Simon was a successful professional and politician in the City who, amongst other things, prosecuted police officers accused of disciplinary offences.”
• Do 3-D printers make prohibitions impossible?
• Today’s edition of “never call the cops for any reason whatsoever.”
• The most important trade agreement that we know nothing about.
• Cop chastises man for not being grateful that said cop harassed and humiliated him and frightened his daughter.
• Federal judge strikes down attempt to make websites liable for user-generated content.
• In today’s Q & A column on my blog, I answered several questions with a plethora of links to older columns that a number of you may find interesting.

(Thanks to Radley for the first two items, Jesse Walker for the third, Grace for the fourth, Walter Olson for the fifth and Brooke Magnanti for the sixth.)

I don’t have time to give either of these the attention they deserve—which they deserve for entirely different reasons. But I’ll leave them here for y’all to ponder, discuss, and dissect.

• The first is this article, which depicts a story so unbelievably outrageous on so many different levels, it may well shock even the jaded souls who read this site. It’s really astounding.

• The second is this facile, predictable Jonah Goldberg column on Aurora and the death penalty. Have fun with it.

–Radley

• New Bowling Green, Ohio law allows cops to give tickets to virtually anyone.
• The IRS demands $40 million in inheritance taxes for an item which is literally worthless.
• Girl faces jail time for naming the boys who sexually assaulted her.
• Your daily reminder that politicians are horrible people.
• Disabled man delayed so long by TSA the batteries on his oxygen machine run down.
• Wait, isn’t Cracked supposed to be a humor site?
• Headline of the day.
• Moronic cop moronically makes moronic statements about Chattanooga streetwalkers.
• My column from one year ago today:  ”You’re at work one day…when suddenly a bunch of armed police thugs smash the door down, start pointing guns at everybody, arrest your customers and boss, handcuff you and your fellow co-workers and shove you into a van…”

(Thanks to Radley for the first four items, to Amy Alkon for the fifth and to Mike Siegel for the sixth.)

A few other media outlets are now picking up on the massive drop in police fatality statistics this year. (Welcome to the story!) But so far, none of them have questioned what happened to all of those alleged trends (gun ownership, increasing contempt for cops, videotaping of police misconduct, anti-government sentiment, decreases in funding for police departments) they all reported were behind the non-existent “war on cops” they were all trumpeting last year. Or in the case of the New York Times, as recently as April.

If we use the numbers from the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund, there are 800,000 cops on the streets. There have been 53 on-the-job fatalities so far this year. But 21 of those were car accidents. There have been 19 firearms homicides against police. I looked through the descriptions of this year’s officer deaths by firearms at the NLEMF page. Two of the fatalities were from injuries sustained years ago (in one case, 30 years ago). That puts us at 17 for this year. I then looked through the 13 deaths classified as “other.” Four of those appear to have been homicides—three stabbings, and one officer who died from a blot clot resulting from an altercation with an inmate. So let’s add those to our 17. That gives us 21 homicides for the first half of 2012. (I’ll go ahead and count the two officers killed during SWAT-like drug raids, even though it’s possible the tactics themselves may have contributed to the officers’ deaths.)

By my math, that gives us a homicide rate of 5.25 per 100,000 officers. That’s not only a 50-year low, it’s only a hair above America’s overall homicide rate of 4.8. It’s also lower than the 2010 murder rates in 20 states. So in just a year, or just three months by the New York Times’ reckoning, all of those trends driving up violence against cops not only diminished, they practically vanished, to the point where we’ve had six months of historically low rates of police homicides.

How are the police organizations reacting to these figures?

Still, Mr. Floyd cautioned that the low fatality rate should not distract from serious threats to law enforcement agencies, many of which he said are facing severe budget cuts.

“We can’t look at these numbers and say that obviously, officers have everything they need to do their jobs safely — that’s simply not the case,” he said. “We are cutting back on officer strength, and that could very well spell trouble moving forward.”

Mr. Floyd said while many officers enjoy greater access to protective equipment and technology, criminal threats remain and reduced funding could put agencies at risk. He also said while fatality rated dropped, many more officers are still assaulted or injured.

Except that, as I’ve pointed out before, assaults against police officers have also been dropping for years.

“Even when the numbers are lower than normal, I still think it sends a chilling message,” he said.

Historic lows of violence against police officers “sends a chilling message?” No matter what the numbers say, law enforcement groups are going to claim they clearly indicate a need for more funding for police departments, and more power and less scrutiny for cops. Here, Mr. Floyd insists that despite the fact that the job is as safe as it has ever been, cops should still retain that “us vs. them” mindset.

“The bottom line is there is no such thing as a routine assignment.  Every assignment you go on is potentially life threatening, do not ever let your guard down.”

He needn’t worry. Incidents of police shooting citizens were up 70 percent up last year in Los Angeles (where 12 of the 54 victims in 2011 were unarmed). The numbers so far this year are lower than last year, but still higher than in years prior to 2011. In Chicago, police use of Tasers is up more than 300 percent in the last two years, while officer-involved shootings have also increased over the same period. That would seem to throw cold water on the idea that Tasers are used as a less-lethal substitute for bullets. Overall, crime in Chicago is up this year, but officer deaths are down. In Las Vegas, the crime rate and number of cops killed on the job have fallen dramatically since 1990, but shootings by cops have soared.

We can’t really compare violence against cops with cop violence against citizens on a national level, because police departments aren’t required to keep any data on officer-involved shootings. Nor do any federal agencies bother tracking those figures. This paragraph from the prior link is telling:

While the [FBI] collects, reports, and analyzes murders and assaults where police are the victim, Carr said budgetary concerns would likely preclude collecting such detailed data on shootings by police.

It’s all about priorities, I guess.

–Radley

• Headline of the day.
• Six policies economists love and politicians hate.
• Today’s edition of “Never call the cops for any reason whatsoever”.
• Holy conflict of interest, Batman!
• Washington judge rules it’s legal for cops to impersonate the owner of a seized cell phone in order to entrap people in the contact list.
• Two men detained for smuggling dangerous contraband candy across Canadian border.
• The Brady Campaign’s response to the Aurora, Colorado murders:  guns are bad.
• “A plea deal was struck because of concerns about whether a jury would be able to agree that a prostitute had been raped.”
• Once a month, I publish a short-short story (often fantasy or science fiction, but not always) in which one of the main characters is a whore of one sort or another.  These are not erotica; few even mention sex, and in those that do (such as this month’s) it’s both demurely-described and over in a sentence or two.  I suspect most Agitator readers might prefer the one from last July; if you enjoy both of those and would like to see more, here are all 25 which have appeared so far.

(Thanks to Radley for the first three items, Jesse Walker for the fourth and Agitatortot David for the fifth.)

Under the United States Constitution, prosecutors have an obligation to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence — whether it is evidence that is directly favorable to the accused and unfavorable to the government’s case, or evidence that undermines the credibility of the government’s witnesses.

But, as our kind host frequently discusses, there’s a broad gulf between what should happen and what does happen in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors withhold exculpatory evidence all the time, usually without consequence.

Given human nature, the cultural pressures of law enforcement, and the lack of supervision in some prosecutorial agencies, such behavior by “rogue prosecutors” probably doesn’t surprise readers of The Agitator. What might surprise you is that the suppression of exculpatory evidence is sometimes systematic and based on written policy from the highest levels of local government.

Last week the ACLU of Southern California and the firm Bird Marella filed suit seeking to prohibit the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office from enforcing its “Special Directive 10-06,” a policy memo dictating how the office’s hundreds of prosecutors are to treat exculpatory evidence in the tens of thousands of cases the prosecute. You can read it at the ACLU site or here.

The suit alleges that far from assuring compliance with constitutional obligations, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office policy, if followed, violates those obligations. In fact, it purports to require that line prosecutors violate the constitution. For instance:

Materiality: The policy purports to permit prosecutors to withhold exculpatory material that they deem not “material” — that is, not likely to change the outcome of the trial. But that’s not the standard for what prosecutors are obligated to turn over — it’s the appellate standard for determining when a discovery violation is so prejudicial as to require reversal of a conviction. Using that as the standard for what prosecutors should turn over is the equivalent of saying “you may withhold evidence if you can get away with it.” Moreover, speaking as a former prosecutor, I submit that prosecutors hold a very cramped and narrow view of what is exculpatory and what might influence a jury, and are culturally incapable of making a reliable call about what is likely “material.” No doubt that’s exactly why that’s not the standard for what they are supposed to turn over.

Impeachment Evidence: The policy regulates the DA’s “Brady Alert” system, a database that collects information impeaching the credibility of law enforcement officers and government witnesses. The DA’s Office touts this system as assuring discovery compliance, but the lawsuit — and the attached Special Directive 10-06 — suggests that in fact it is a systematic justification for withholding discoverable impeachment evidence (that is, for you non-lawyers, evidence that can be used to question the credibility of a witness). For instance, as the suit alleges and the Special Directive shows, the DA’s Office only includes information about witness credibility if it believes that information is supported by “clear and convincing evidence” — a higher standard somewhere between preponderance of the evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt. But that’s not the law — a prosecutor doesn’t get to withhold impeachment evidence because he or she doesn’t credit it. Prosecutors are culturally prone to believe government witnesses and disbelieve accusations against them; it’s patently ridiculous to make them the gatekeepers of what damaging information is sufficiently credible to be turned over to the defense. Moreover, the Special Directive requires prosecutors to withhold impeachment evidence about government witnesses if it is based on pending criminal or administrative investigations — that is, investigations that have not yet led to a result. Once again, there’s no basis in law for that limitation — if the government’s witness is under investigation for a crime, that goes directly to bias, motive, credibility, and any number of other relevant factors.

Read the lawsuit. This is what the government does openly, in writing, as official policy — so imagine what it does as a matter of practice, behind closed doors.

I’ll offer updates on the lawsuit as it proceeds.

Disclosure: I have litigated against the L.A. County District Attorney’s Office for 12 years, and currently represent defendants charged by them. Moreover, I know both Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU attorney on the matter, and Benjamin Gluck, the Bird Marella attorney on the matter, and think highly of both of them.

–Ken White

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”  -  Stephen Crane

• Now you, too can get a direct answer from the universe.
• Another way to magically turn a “child” into an “adult” without shouting “Shazam!”
• SOPA returns, on the back of a czar.
• Laws prohibiting “convicted felons” from voting now disenfranchise a record number of Americans.
• Under the currently-popular “lock ‘em all up” mentality, what will happen if abortion is re-criminalized?
• On Thursday I wrote about Polly Adler, a brothel madam in Prohibition-era New York City who was friendly with the Algonquin Round Table.

(Thanks to Radley for the first two items.)

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. - Thomas Paine

Every Friday the 13^th I ask my readers, especially those who are not themselves sex workers, to speak out for decriminalization of prostitution.  This is the third such occasion this year, but it’s also the last one for 14 months (until September 2013), so I want to make it a good one.

Though roughly 10% of modern women have taken money for sex at least once, the great majority of such cases are informal and  the payer an acquaintance; only about 1% of women actually work as hookers at some point in their lives, and less than a third of that (just under 0.3%) are thus employed at any given time.  That’s a pitifully small minority, smaller even than the fraction of the population who identify as homosexual (which is between 2-3%); in a more just world even the smallest minority would be treated fairly, but since that isn’t the case in this one it’s imperative we have help from outside our own group.  Gay rights activists drew bisexuals and transgender people into a coalition, but even that would have been too small a minority to matter without the help of friends, family, libertarians and others.

Sex workers, on the other hand, have allowed our already-small numbers to be divided by laws which make arbitrary distinctions between “legal” sex work (such as stripping, phone sex and in some places porn acting) and “illegal” sex work (such as some forms of prostitution; in most of the US it’s all prostitution).  But even if strippers, porn actresses and the various types of what I call “halfway whores” rallied together, I still can’t imagine that making up over 10% of the female population.  As with gay rights, we’re going to need the help of friends, family, libertarians and even true feminists (as opposed to the anti-sex crowd I refer to as “neofeminists”).

Perhaps the most important group whose support needs to be enlisted is men, who make up roughly half the population but much more than half of people in positions of power.  Kinsey found that 69% of men have directly paid for sex at least once in their lives; some recent studies have returned much lower numbers, but this probably has much more to do with increased social stigma in the past three decades and the construction of the questions (e.g. “have you ever procured a prostitute?” vs. “have you ever paid for sex?”) than with the material facts.  Since roughly 67% of men have cheated on their wives or girlfriends, the 69% figure seems highly credible to me; it also jibes with my experience and that of other working girls with whom I’ve discussed the issue.  Of those, fewer than half repeat the experience, and less than a tenth make a habit of it; roughly 20% of all men hire hookers occasionally (such as when they’re at conferences or on business trips) and 6% do so frequently.

Even if we assume that the 50% of men who never see a whore again after their first time were repelled by the experience, that still leaves a fifth of the male population who secretly support us (at least financially).  So why don’t they speak up?  Why are there so few prominent men who are willing to even support our rights as an abstract concept, much less actually admit to enjoying our company on occasion?  Obviously it’s mostly due to the deep-rooted moral hypocrisy of our culture, whose members are willing to crucify exposed “sinners” for “offenses” they themselves have committed many times in secret.  But there’s also the fact that a large fraction of the 90% of women who have not taken direct payment for sex labor under all sorts of illusions and delusions about harlotry, and even a dedicated contrarian who will enthusiastically fly in the face of social institutions may be (understandably) unwilling to risk the disapproval or even outright hostility of his wife, mother, sisters, daughters, etc.

These factors and others were mentioned in a comment by regular reader B.B. Wye on a column I wrote about the difficulties of “Coming Out”; he pointed out that as hard as it is for prostitutes to be “out”, it may be even harder for our clients, especially with “end demand” rhetoric in the ascendancy.  Wye is a musician who expressed his feelings about his favorite type of whore in the song “Midtown Asian Sex Spa”, and in his comment he wrote of his desire to admit authorship of the song and to openly speak out for the rights of women who have given him a great deal of happiness and pleasure.  Another reader who felt the same way wrote to ask me for suggestions on how he could find a middle path, speaking out for sex worker rights without admitting his personal interest in us; here are a few suggestions for him, for B.B., for other clients faced with the same quandary, for working girls who can’t come out themselves, and for men and women who have never bought or sold sex, but just care about human rights.

If you’re generally libertarian or civil rights-oriented in your politics it’s easy; all you have to do is argue for decriminalization from a perspective of “people have the right to do what they like with their own bodies”.  As I’ve pointed out in the past, every court decision (including Roe vs. Wade) which upholds abortion rights also upholds the right to sex on one’s own terms, even if money is involved (abortion isn’t free, after all); ditto court decisions overturning sodomy laws like Lawrence vs. Texas.  And obviously, the arguments for drug decriminalization  also apply to prostitution.  If you’re an atheist or skeptic, that’s easy too; in addition to the arguments above you can make statements like “prostitution laws are based on religion and xenophobia, not facts” and “the sex trafficking hysteria is a moral panic like the Satanic Panic and the Red Scare”.

The harm reduction perspective is another good one, and is the approach generally favored by advocates who have a human rights background or strong religious affiliation (including some members of the Catholic clergy):  Prostitution has always been with us and we can’t make it go away with laws any more than the “Drug War” has made drugs go away.  All the Drug War has done is to subject innocent people to invasion of their privacy and make drug users vulnerable to impure drugs, not to mention all those caught in drug-related violence; similarly, anti-prostitution laws help nobody and force prostitutes into the shadows where they can be harmed and exploited.  Furthermore, many governments (including those of New Zealand, New South Wales  and Brazil) have recognized that illegal prostitution invariably leads to police corruption, just as alcohol Prohibition did and drug prohibition still does.

Finally, there’s the feminist approach:  why does society have the right to tell women they can’t make a living with their natural sex-based attributes when it allows men to do so with boxing, bodyguard work, etc?  Furthermore, laws against prostitution invariably subject women’s dress and mannerisms to police scrutiny; women are accused of prostitution for dressing sexily, acting sexily, carrying condoms in their purses, being in certain areas, not wearing underwear, etc.  This is “slut shaming” with criminal consequences.

Even if you are unable to speak out openly you can post anonymous comments on anti-whore articles online (with links to my site and those of other rights advocates), you can donate money to advocacy groups, and you can of course vote (though there are pitifully few chances to employ that strategy in the United States).  Even though any one person’s influence is small, lots of buckets eventually fill a pool.  Readers, we need your help and that of every good man and woman, and anything you can do will be gratefully appreciated.

(Cross-posted from The Honest Courtesan, where it appears as “The Last Thirteen for Fourteen”)