The thing that’s most troubling about the Lacey Act is that it doesn’t require an actual complaint from the offended country for U.S. officials to investigate. In fact, it doesn’t even matter if the country whose laws you’re alleged to have broken actually believes you broke its laws. So in order to comply with the Act, you not only have to know all of the laws of the country from whom you’re importing, you also need to be able to anticipate how the various U.S. federal agencies who might claim jurisdiction over your imports might interpret any given law of any of those countries.

Indeed, in all three cases mentioned the video, the three countries in question—India, Madagascar, and Honduras—all found that the party targeted by the U.S. government hadn’t actually broken any of the country’s laws. In fact, the attorney general of Honduras filed a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit of on behalf of the lobster guys, stating that they hadn’t violated any Honduran law. It didn’t matter. The court ruled that the U.S. government officials know the laws of Honduras better than the Honduran government.

• Jake Tapper calls out Obama press secretary Jay Carney on the administration’s free press hypocrisy.
• “To have a passport is privilege, it’s not entitled to you by citizenship.” In other words, the government can bar you from freely leaving the country, for any reason it pleases. In this case, one child of a vacationing family had a passport with a crease that a federal bureaucrat determined disqualified him from the privilege of crossing the border.
• I must be a nihilist, death-obsessed liberal, because I’m actually okay with most of the worst-case scenarios in this article. In fact, the only accusation against the Dutch that I find unsettling—that Dutch doctors may be euthanizing infirm patients without their consent—is the scenario with little to no empirical evidence to support it.
• Five reasons you should never agree to a police search, even if you think you have nothing to hide.
• The war on food trucks continues.
• Headline of the day. (Here’s the runner-up.)
• The truth about pot.

• Man handcuffed to a bench, pepper sprayed, severely beaten in Tioga County, New York jail. No criminal charges.
• How Target knows your kid is pregnant.
• Good liberals should send their kids to a crappy public school to show their support for crappy public schools. Or something.
• Not sure what to make of this one. Except that if the roles were reversed, it seems unlikely that he’d be facing charges.
• An interactive map showing where the Simpson family has traveled.
• Headline of the day.
•  “I said, ‘F—- you, you son of a bitch, now it’s my turn.’”

• Betsy Philips of the Nashville Scene has a couple kind write-ups of my talk last night at Vanderbilt.
• Police dog bites jogger. Outcome considerably different than if the headline had been “Dog Bites Police Jogger.”
• A Day for Loving.
• Osabam bin Laden loved Whitney Houston.
• Bon Iver and Bonny Bear.
• Stranger breaks into home, folds the laundry, sweeps the floor, cooks some chicken and onions.
• Here’s a good piece on eyewitness identification. In the lead anecdote, the eyewitness points to a juror as the murderer. They convict the guy, anyway.
• As the federal government scolds you for eating snack food . . . it is also subsidizing potato chip companies.
• Interesting take on the crime rate — it could be significantly higher if there were more of an effort to document crimes committed in prisons.
• Cop caught on tape telling a suspect he can “make up” evidence to frame him for a robbery.

• The police union defending deputy in a shooting was able to shield him from questioning for nearly two weeks.
• Space Nazis.
• Judge allows prosecutors to seize a defense attorney’s phone. The affidavit to get the warrant for the seizure was sealed, and the investigation is secret.
• The Frank Lloyd Wright doghouse.
• “False Fears About a Nuclear Iran”
• Via the comments, This American Life looks at those drug stings in which attractive young cops pose as high school students, flirty with teen boys, then talk them into buying pot.
• Weird Internet thing.
• Baltimore PD has told its police officers that they can no longer arrest citizens for recording them while on the job. So instead, it looks like they’re threatening to arrest camera-wielding citizens for “loitering.”

Incredible story from Scott Henson at Grits for Breakfast. (Note: Henson is white, his granddaughter is black.)

Our story began at the Millennium Youth Center in central east Austin, which is a city-owned rec center just a few blocks from my home of 22 years. Ty, age 5, often spends the night with us on Fridays to give Mom and Dad a night off, and we’d taken her there to go roller skating after dinner out as a reward for a week’s worth of excellent behavior scores in kindergarten.

Perhaps at 7:40 p.m. or so, after she’d had her fill of skating (if the event were put to music, the appropriate theme song would have been “Slip Slidin’ Away”), I asked Ty if she’d like to walk home and let Grandma take the car. It was cool but pleasant out, and we were just a short distance from the house, with a city-bike path where we often walk dogs together taking us most of the way there. She was elated: This sounded like a big adventure, and within moments she was bouncing off the walls with excitement, making me think a walk home was just the thing to burn off some energy before bed time.

This was a terrible mistake on Grandpa’s part. Not because we live in a relatively rough neighborhood. I know many of my neighbors, saints and scoundrels alike, and I did not and do not fear becoming a crime victim walking that route, even with a five year old in tow. No, apparently the only folks Ty and I had to fear were in uniform . . .

Then behind us I heard someone call out, though I couldn’t make out what was said. We stopped to look back, and there was a dark silhouette crossing the street who Ty thought was calling out to us. We waited, but then the silhouetted figure stopped, crouched down for a moment, then took a few steps back toward the rec center, appearing to speak to someone there. I shrugged it off and we walked on, but in a moment the figure began walking down the path toward us again, calling out when she was about 150 feet away. We stopped and waited. It was a brown-suited deputy constable, apparently out of breath from the short walk.

She told me to take my hand out of my pocket and to step away from Ty, declaring that someone had seen a white man chasing a black girl and reported a possible kidnapping. Then she began asking the five-year old about me. The last time this happened, Ty was barely two, and I wasn’t about to let police question her. This time, though, at least initially, I decided to let her answer. “Do you know this man?” the deputy asked. “Yes,” Ty mumbled shyly, “he’s my Grandpa.” The deputy couldn’t understand her (though I did) and moved closer, hovering over the child slightly, repeating the question. Ty mumbled the same response, this time louder, but muffled through a burgeoning sob that threatened to break out in lieu of an answer.

The deputy still didn’t understand her: “What did you say?” she repeated. “He’s my Grandpa!,” Ty finally blurted, sharply and clearly, then rushed back over to me and grabbed hold of my leg. “Okay,” said the deputy, relaxing, acknowledging the child probably wasn’t being held against her will. (As we were talking, a car pulled up behind her on the bike path with its brights on – I couldn’t tell what agency it was with) Then she pulled out her pad and paper and asked “Can I get your name, sir, just for my report?” I told her I’d prefer not to answer any questions and would like to leave, if we were free to go, so I could get the child to bed. She looked skeptical but nodded and Ty and I turned tail and walked toward home . . .

As soon as we crossed the street, just two blocks from my house as the crow flies, the police car that just passed us hit its lights and wheeled around, with five others appearing almost immediately, all with lights flashing. The officers got out with tasers drawn demanding I raise my hands and step away from the child. I complied, and they roughly cuffed me, jerking my arms up behind me needlessly. Meanwhile, Ty edged up the hill away from the officers, crying. One of them called out in a comforting tone that they weren’t there to hurt her, but another officer blew up any good will that might have garnered by brusquely snatching her up and scuttling her off to the back seat of one of the police cars. (By this time more cars had joined them; they maxxed out at 9 or 10 police vehicles.)

I gave them the phone numbers they needed to confirm who Ty was and that she was supposed to be with me (and not in the back of their police car), but for quite a while nobody seemed too interested in verifying my “story.” One officer wanted to lecture me endlessly about how they were just doing their job, as if the innocent person handcuffed on the side of the road cares about such excuses. I asked why he hadn’t made any calls yet, and he interrupted his lecture to say “we’ve only been here two minutes, give us time” (actually it’d been longer than that). “Maybe so,” I replied, sitting on the concrete in handcuffs, “but there are nine of y’all milling about doing nothing by my count so between you you’ve had 18 minutes for somebody to get on the damn phone by now so y’all can figure out you screwed up.” . . .

Ty was understandably shaken by the incident, and as we walked home she told me all about her interactions with the officers and peppered me with questions about why this, that, everything happened. She said she tried to be brave because she knew I’d get into trouble if the police didn’t believe her (she was right about that!) and she was especially scared when she thought they weren’t going to accept her word for it. Poor kid.

Smart kid, though. And it isn’t the first time something like this has happened to Henson and his granddaughter.

In related news, after mistaking an old episode of Nick at Nite for security camera footage, Austin police have issued an Amber Alert on Arnold and Willis Drummond.

There’s much, much more over at Grits.

• Teen hit, killed by car while playing hooky. Parents sue the school.
• Interpol helps Saudi Arabia catch writer who could be executed for Tweets about Muhammad.
• Strangely compelling group of old-ish photos of famous people.
• If I own an NBA team, I’m giving this guy a job.
• Texas judge recommends Court of Inquiry for Ken Anderson, the prosecutor who wrongly convicted Michael Morton.
• Movie poster cliches.
• Georgia bill would require a thumbprint, ID, and set up a state database for anyone who wants to recycle metal. It would also ban cash transactions for metal.

Illinois moved once step closer to making it legal to record police officers in public. But not before some absurd protestations from law enforcement organizations.

From the Chicago Tribune:

The Illinois Fraternal Order of Police warned the bill could scare witnesses who fear their conversations at a crime scene would be monitored by organized crime.

From Gatehouse news service:

“Because of the Illinois eavesdropping statute, officers cannot record that conversation without a court order. This is not leveling the playing field,” Coughlin said. “This is giving more rights to private citizens to collect evidence of a crime than officers have.”

One concern of law enforcement groups is that the legislation would allow criminals and gang members to record the police’s interactions with potential witnesses and informants.

“It may have a chilling effect on victims coming forward if they know that a person that’s not a member to that conversation can come up and record whatever they say to the police,” Coughlin said.

The Illinois law already provides an exception for police to record conversations in public, which is why some police departments in the state can require officers to wear microphones on their uniforms.

As for the mob or gang members or al-Qaeda recording witness conversations with cops, police already have the authority to secure a crime scene. And if you’re talking to a potential witness against the mafia, I’m not sure why you’d be doing it in an open, public space, anyway. It isn’t as if this new law gives anyone permission to put bugs in squad cars or police stations.

In the past, prosecutors and the police unions have claimed allowing the recording of cops could pose a threat to homeland security, and may make cops hesitant about shooting people.

To his credit, Chicago police superintendent Gary McCarthy supports the new law.

• Newt or Schrute?
• Why constitutional law professors shouldn’t be president.
• PETA’s latest exercise in self-parody.
• Corporatism vs. free markets.
• Alabama discovers the unintended consequences of angry immigration policy.
• 50 powerful images from the Civil War.
• Asset forfeiture outrage of the day: Immigration edition.

• Photography Is Not a Crime blogger Carlos Miller was recently arrested at an Occupy Miami rally. The police deleted the videos on his camera. He has since recovered them. So who at the police department will now be charged with a crime for attempting to destroy Miller’s videos?
• NYPD’s shooting of Ramarley Graham is looking more and more like a murder.
• Headline of the day.
• Arizona. Just. Arizona.
• That “Detroit Comeback” commercial from the Super Bowl wasn’t actually filmed in Detroit.
• Anonymous Obama administration official suggests the journalist who broke the “double tap” drone story probably supports al-Qaeda.
• Former prosecutor, frequent fabricator, and serial slanderer Wendy Murphy, best known for going on cable news and making shit up . . . apparently teaches journalism seminars at Poynter.
• Congressman duped by The Onion.
• Woman stopped, searched, arrested, convicted, and now faces a year in jail after driving from Mississippi to Alabama to buy cold medicine.

A new Cato study finds 5,000 incidents from 2003-2008 in which a gun was used in self defense. But the authors point out that even that figure likely low-balls the real number.

The data set supporting this paper is derived from a collection of news stories published betweenOctober 2003 and November 2011.

There is a selection bias problem withthe method of gathering news stories. Many defensive gun uses never make the news.Sometimes that is because the person us-ing a gun in self-defense saw no need to callthe police—he or she scared off the bad guy.In some cases, the victim might not wantto explain to the police that he has a gun,perhaps because he is a felon, or perhapsbecause he lives in a jurisdiction with very restrictive gun control laws. Sometimes thepolice do get called, but the officers do notfind the circumstances sufficiently impor-tant to issue a press release. After all, “ManScares away Burglar, No Shots Fired” is notparticularly newsworthy, unless you live in a  very small town.

I found this part interesting.

For a very long time, gun control propo-nents would insist that having a gun was a mistake, because many people (especially women) would not be willing to shoot a person who was attacking them—and thecriminal would then take away the victim’sgun and use it on the victim. Oddly enough,while the authors have recorded a large num-ber of incidents where someone has their guntaken away from them, it is usually the otherway around. In 227 incidents, a criminal’sgun was taken away from him by the victim.This does not necessarily mean that the victim shot the criminal, but it does mean thatthe victim successfully disarmed the crimi-nal and then threatened the criminal withit in order to make him leave, or make himremain on the scene until the police could arrive. Often, these were situations where the victim, at the start of the attack, did not have a gun . .

. . . By comparison, the data set contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal tooka gun away from a defender; the reverse, aswe have seen, was reported more than 20times more often.

• Iran is planning to execute a Canadian-born software developer because his product was used by a pornographic website. (NOTE: Per the comments, the Guardian article linked in the Reason post actually say the Iranian high court quashed the death sentence. But it has since been reinstated.)
• More on how Stephen Colbert’s Super PAC isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 
• Judge allows Houston residents to become party to lawsuit between the city and a red light camera contractor.
• Feds end criminal investigation of Lance Armstrong, but “sources close to the investigation” continue to smear him in the press, anyway. Don’t hold your breath waiting for a criminal investigation into who is leaking grand jury testimony.
• Houston TV station bites on the vodka-soaked tampon story. Favorite quote from alleged expert on teen drinking habits: “More often than not, it’s happening in a lot of the Houston area.” More often than not? What could that possibly mean?
• Attempted puppycide.
• French court fines Google for providing a free map service, which is apparently an anti-competitive act of aggression against French companies that charge money to use their maps.

• Maiz Szalavitz takes questions from Reddit about “tough love” anti-drug boot camps for teens.
• Seems like this would be the ideal situation for the Taser. Instead, the dog-walking guy gets the Taser, and this kid gets a bullet.
• San Francisco man who was wrongly convicted and spent 18 years in prison sues over the use of perjured testimony in his case.
• Another TSA agent arrested for stealing from passengers.
• Facebook is the new heroin.
• The fruit fly chuckles at your inadequacy.
• Surveillance drone industry wants to “paint a more positive picture” of government spying on its citizens.
• Guy loses a bunch of weight, no longer diabetic. Starts a website to help others do the same. He’s now under criminal investigation for providing nutritional advice without a license. This is in North Carolina, the same state that went after a guy last year for practicing engineering without a license when he did some math for a citizens’ reports requesting a couple traffic lights.

• Your latest Hollywood-colluding-with-government copyright outrage.
• Amazing photos from an abandoned New York leper colony.
• British court rules that composing a photo the way someone else has could be a violation of copyright.
• Here is a dog jumping on a trampoline.
• Red State founder and CNN commenter tells radio audience that watching someone he disagrees with politically writhe in pain until the guy requires hospitalization is “made of awesome.”
• Despite promises from politicians, NYC continues with its ridiculous pot arrests.
• “Why more than a dozen teenage girls are exhibiting Tourette’s-like symptoms.”
• Headline of the day.
• Dahlia Lithwich on how Illinois awful recording cops law might affect this year’s G8 summit in Chicago.
• Good post on leash law Tasering: “‘Protect and Serve’ does not mean “you have to win every argument ever.’”

• Breaking Bad as a retro video game.
• FDA monitored the personal email accounts of suspected whistleblowers.
• Gary Johnson gets a standing ovation after speaking to an ACLU convention.
• TSA agents get a case of the Mondays, accidentally leave some suspected pipe bombs lying around.
•  . . . so it only makes sense to expand the agency to start policing “cruise ships, at NASCAR races, on buses, and at train stations.“
• Federal judge in Oregon rules that recording police is protected by the First Amendment.
• Similarities between SOPA and Europe’s proposed “right to be forgotten.”

You may remember Gwinnett County, Georgia from such hits as “Where Did the Coke Go?,”  “Smothered, Covered, and Tasered,”   “The I Accidentally Entered the Wrong House and Killed a Dalmatian Blues”  “Disabled Guy and a SWAT Team,”  “No-Knock, Wrong Wouse,”  and the follow-up just a few months later, “Sorry We Pointed Our Guns at Your Baby (We Got the Wrong House Again.)”

Now, Sheriff Butch Conway has entered the world of web video, teaming up with a Bail Bonds outfit to bring you a video roundup of Northeast Metro Atlanta’s biggest dirtbags*, complete with a bitchin’ guitar soundtrack and bad-ass crime reenactments. Enjoy!

(*Note: All suspects are presumed innocent until proven guilty. You pussy.)

Great bit of reporting by my HuffPost colleague Elise Foley:

 On a single day this past fall, the United States government held 13,185 people in immigration detention who had not been convicted of a crime, some of whom will not be charged with one, according to information The Huffington Post obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Instead, at a cost of roughly 2 million taxpayer dollars per day, the men and women were detained while immigration authorities sorted out their fates.

This case stands in stark contrast to the stated goal of immigration policy under the administration of President Barack Obama: to detain and deport unauthorized immigrants who’ve been convicted of crimes.

“ICE is focused on smart, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes the removal of convicted criminal aliens, fugitives, recent illegal border crossers and egregious immigration law violators, such as those who have been previously removed from the United States,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Nicole Navas said in a statement. “ICE’s enforcement approach is enhancing public safety in communities around the country.”

The FOIA request for information on all immigrants in detention on Oct. 3, 2011, turned up a list of nearly 32,300. Forty percent of those held by ICE had not been convicted of a crime, nor were they awaiting criminal trial. Despite what the term “illegal immigration” implies, simply being in the country without status is a civil, not a criminal, offense.

Rapists and murderers, frequently cited as the main unauthorized immigrants ICE is trying to remove, made up a far smaller percentage of those held that day than the innocent, traffic violators or low-level drug offenders, according to ICE’s crime breakdown.

“The fact is, we’re not deporting huge numbers of rapists and murderers,” said Emily Tucker, director of policy and advocacy for the Detention Watch Network, which pushes for limiting detention and deportation. “They would like us to think that, but that isn’t what is going on.”

Locking people up is big business. The Corrections Corporation of America, which gives heavily to both parties, is explicit about the connection between immigrant detention policy and the private prison company’s bottom line. “[T]he demand for our correctional and detention facilities and services … could be adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws,” the company wrote in an analysis for investors filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “Immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal, state and local level also could materially adversely impact us.”

I’ve poked fun at the HuffPost commenters for faulting private prisons for nearly everything that’s wrong with the criminal justice system. But the connection between private prisons, detention policy, and the odious immigration laws in states like Arizona is pretty hard to deny. I’ve never really been comfortable with private prisons. Whether they’re more efficient or cost effective is less important to me than the fact that I don’t like having a government-created industry whose bottom line is dependent on keeping as many people behind bars as possible. (I have similar feelings about defense contractors, though there are some important differences.) They also tend to be less transparent, and in many cases aren’t covered by open records laws.

Last July’s criminal justice issue of Reason also had  a good feature by Jesse James deConto explaining the odd legal space occupied by immigration detention centers.

• Weird.
• Son of New York City police commissioner is accused of rape.
• “We have little hard evidence for this, but we’re pretty sure your kids might be hooked on heroin.“
• Our human rights victory in Libya.
• Headline of the day.
• U.S. drops to 47th in world press freedom index.
• Dear Tennessee Tea Party: What the hell are you doing?
• Obama promised in the 2008 campaign that he’d post every bill to the web five days before signing them. Three years later, he’s running at about 50 percent.
• Criminal justice outrage of the day.

• Sniffing oxytocin could turn you into an extrovert. (That’s tocin, not contin.)
• Judge seals all the search warrants in that fatal Ogden drug raid.
• It’s astounding that after all the DNA exonerations we’ve seen in recent years, politicians will still grandstand about limiting death penalty appeals.
• The latest example of how preventing the “abuse” of controlled drugs often comes at the expense of people who need them.
•  Moronic libertarian-bashing of the day.
• Skip Oliva tells me that a former architect of Plan Columbia now owns the company that runs this creepy service. Seems appropriate.
• Police officer who admitted to snorting hydrocodone on the job, including in his cruiser, won’t face criminal charges.

I’m currently working on a piece for Huffington Post on the latest prescription painkiller hysteria. In researching the piece, I found this 2010 Time piece by Maia Szalavitz on how post-mortem overdose diagnoses may be overstated.

The problem is that it’s difficult to isolated a particular drug as cause of death. So the rise in opioid-related overdose deaths that the CDC and numerous media outlets have been screaming about for the last few months could be the result of lots of people ODing on painkillers, or it could merely be that because more people are taking painkillers, more people are likely to have painkillers in their systems when they die. Hence, the use of the term “opioid-related” to describe these deaths. That allows panic-sowing without the need to establish any causal connection. (It’s similar to the way the government calculates “marijuana-related emergency room incidents.)

But the problem gets more urgent when we start using these diagnoses in court, as the government has done in the trials of doctors accused of contributing to a patient’s overdose death.

It’s here that the opinions of one of  Szalavitz’s sources seem particularly troubling.

Given the state of the science, then, should it be used in court? Ed Cheng, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and expert on scientific testimony, says, yes, noting that more research is still needed. “If we were to require studies and statistical assessment on every assertion, almost nothing would be able to be used in court. My view on this is that the question here is not throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” says Cheng. “It’s clear that the forensic sciences do not have as much of an empirical basis as we would like them to have. The question becomes how do we motivate them sufficiently to come up with the empirical basis that we want?”

In the Schneider case, which entered jury deliberations on Wednesday, the defense team sought and failed to prevent the jury from hearing testimony that it believed did not have sufficient scientific foundations. But according to Cheng, it may be preferable to let the jury hear both sides of the scientific dispute and make up their own minds. “I myself have floated between the poles on this,” he says. “I’m currently more on the ‘Let the jury hear it’ side. I’m not convinced that good science and bad science is always cut and dried.”

“Let the jury hear it” sounds great on its face. But there’s more to it than that. If the science linking a particular drug to a particular overdose isn’t established–if the scientific community is split over whether you can make that connection–then the jury shouldn’t hear it. (If nothing else, that would seem to establish reasonable doubt.)

Yes, we do have an adversarial judicial system. But lay juries aren’t trained scientists. Most people don’t know what to look for  when evaluating the veracity of some science-based claim. Get two scientific-sounding witnesses pitching the jury competing or mutually-exclusive theories, and the winner will more often be not who advocated the best science, but who was a better expert witness. Or more bluntly, who was a better salesman.

We’ve seen this over and over again with bite mark testimony. Frauds like Michael West have sold crap science to juries for years, sometimes unopposed, but often opposed by more credible experts. Even now, with a solid consensus in the forensics community that you can’t “match” bite marks in skin to one person to the exclusion of everyone else, we still see appeals courts shoot down post-conviction petitions on the grounds that the defense already challenged the state’s expert at trial, and the jury found the prosecution’s witness more convincing. It doesn’t seem to matter that we now know the prosecution’s witness was spewing pseudo-science hokum.

I think you could make a strong case that West was able to persuade juries because he didn’t sound scientific. I’ve read more than a few trial transcripts where West and the prosecutor would actually use an opposing expert’s credentials against him, contrasting him as a fancy out-of-town hired gun with a bunch of letters after his name with West, the local dentist just trying to do the right thing, helping put bad guys away with intuition, common sense, and some self-taught expertise. The scary thing is that when you see West in action, he sounds convincing, even when you know he’s a fraud.

Of course, West is only one example (although he is one of the most egregious). I don’t know the best way to determine what science has reached enough of a consensus to be used in a courtroom, but leaving the decision to individual juries on a case-by-case basis seems like a bad idea. In the federal courts, and in much of the country, challenges to scientific evidence are currently resolved by the judge in what’s called a Daubert hearing. From my understanding, while those hearings have done a decent (but far from perfect) job keeping junk science out of civil cases, the process has been less successful at keeping it out of criminal cases.

Skeptical as I am of blue ribbon commissions, this may be one area where we’re best off having an established, accredited panel of specialists set policy.

I linked to a story about this case last summer. It’s another “but for video” case in which a citizen-shot video (shot by a priest, no less) pretty clearly show that the cops lied in their police report. Bonus points, they actually lied about the citizen-shot video.

The police report, David Cari, one of two arresting officers, states that he didn’t know what the New Haven priest was holding. He wrote that he saw an “unknown shiny silver object” that Manship had “cupped” in his hands, and was afraid for his safety. Read the police report here. . .

The police report alleges that Father Manship concealed the fact that he was videotaping the officers, by cupping his hands over “a silver object.”

“Not knowing if Manship was holding a camera or a possible weapon this officer asked Manship to show me what was in his hands,” Cari’s report reads.

In direct contradiction of Cari’s claim, the video from Manship’s camera shows Officer Cari twice verbally identifying the “silver object” as a camera.

“Sir what are you doing? Is there a reason that you have a camera on me?” says Officer Cari, in the video.

“I’m taking a video of what’s going on here,” Manship replies.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, what I’m going to do with that camera,” Officer Cari says, as he walks around a shelving unit to approach the priest.

Here’s the news:

The FBI has arrested four East Haven police officers on conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges following an investigation into alleged civil rights violations . . .

Federal law enforcement officials said in indictment papers that Officer Dennis Spaulding, Officer David Cari Officer Jason Zullo and Sgt. John Miller executed unreasonable searches and seizures and used unreasonable force and concealed their actions.

“At its core, this is an abuse of power case,” said Assistant US Attorney General Thomas Perez.

Mayor Maturo said the four men were arrested at about 6 a.m. Tuesday.

The officers are linked to the 2009 arrest of Father James Manship, who videotaped officers inside a store owned by Hispanics. Father Manship was arrested, but the charged were later dropped.

In a statement, Janice Fedarcyk, the Assistant Director of the FBI in New York, said “These officers have damaged the reputation of their department.”

“They behaved like bullies with badges,” she said.

Once again, all due credit to the Obama administration on this. The DOJ is not only backing citizens in lawsuits against police who violate the right to record, in the more egregious cases it looks like the agency will also hold police officers criminally accountable for—well—breaking the law.

• Here are 300+ photos of dogs looking out of windows.
• Headline of the day. 
• Heroes of the Concordia.
• One in 419 Americans must now register as a sex offender.
• Federal judge says you can be forced do de-encrypt your laptop.
• I may have had a minor heart attack while watching this video. It ends well, though.
• Jonathan Coulton on Megaupload.
• “Those who sat through the film in its entirety were given a . . . a black beanie hat and . . . a blood-splattered tampon in a tube.
• The 2012 horse race.

Great news. Even better, the ruling was unanimous, although there was a split on why warrantless GPS tracking violates the Fourth Amendment.

The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously ruled that the police violated the Constitution when they placed a Global Positioning System tracking device on a suspect’s car and tracked its movements for 28 days.

But the justices divided 5-to-4 on the rationale for the decision, with the majority saying that the problem was the placement of the device on private property. That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies.

The minority found the tracking itself to violate the Fourth Amendment, which I think is a more satisfying rationale. In her own concurring opinion, Justice Sotomayor went even further. (PDF)

More fundamentally, it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties. This approach is ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks. People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medi- cations they purchase to online retailers.

Perhaps, as JUSTICE ALITO notes, some people may find the “tradeoff” of privacy for convenience “worthwhile,” or come to accept this “diminution of privacy” as “inevitable,” post, at 10, and perhaps not. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the Government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year. But whatever the societal expectations, they can attain constitutionally protected status only if our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence ceases to treat secrecy as a prerequisite for privacy. I would not assume that all information voluntarily disclosed to some member of the public for a limited purpose is, for that reason alone, disentitled to Fourth Amendment protection.

I think it’s probably time for me to concede that I was wrong about Sotomayor. (See here, here, here, and here.) Not only has she not been a liability in criminal justice cases, you could make a strong argument that in her short time on the court she’s been better on these issues than any other justice. (Despite his libertarian reputation, you could also argue that Thomas is the worst.) She is definitely now the justice who is  most wary of the death penalty.

I don’t think it was unreasonable of me to be wary, given Sotomayor’s background and how she was sold to the public. (Remember, Biden told a gather of cops and prosecutors not to worry about Sotomayor, because “she’s got your back.”) But so far, it’s nice to be proven wrong.

MORE/CORRECTION: Orin Kerr points out that the court did not rule that the government needs a warrant before attaching a GPS device, which means my headline is wrong. (Actually, it was wrong even aside from that; the majority only ruled on the application of the device to a car, not the act of tracking.) The majority ruled only that the placement of the device constituted a search for Fourth Amendment purposes. They didn’t rule whether conducting such a search without a warrant would be unreasonable. So this looks to be a rather narrow ruling. Alas.

The Sotomayor portion of the post still stands, though.

MORE: Here’s an even more pessimistic take on today’s decision.

• Florida Governor Rick Scott has ordered a new investigation into the jailhouse death of Nick Christie.
• Christie’s story was also featured on the Today show last week.
• Mike Riggs finds other police brutality cases in which the prosecutor (now deceased) who looked into Christie’s case cleared other cops of wrongdoing.
• Less important, but somewhat amusing: The many similarities between my article on Christie and this article that appeared two days later in the Daily Mail. Christie’s attorney apparently gave both of us the same quotes, word-for-word.

• Virginia concert venue sues a new art center, claiming it has rights to the word “barns.”
• Daisy is starting her own occupy movement to protest.
• Other copyright laws in need of changing.
• Federal government gives Americans advice on . . . debt management.
• Pot activists get fined for collecting signatures for a ballot initiative.
• Tumblr of the week.
• Texas state senator admits he knew red light cameras had no effect on public safety, voted for them anyway.
• Nevada prostitutes endorse Ron Paul.