• More evidence that ban on texting while driving make the roads less safe.
• I mean, who among us hasn’t faked cancer, pretended to be a doctor online, contacted a friend online while posing as said doctor, then persuaded that friend to have sex with us as a way of treating the fake cancer?
• Another good piece on the overuse of solitary confinement.
• The chair of the DNC didn’t know Obama had a kill list. That, or she’s feigning ignorance. Which would be even worse.
• The Chattanooga Times-Free Press endorses Gary Johnson for president. I suspected one-time Agitator guest blogger Drew Johnson had something to do with this.
• Politics really seems to bring out the classiness in us.
• Obama’s drone assassination program is now dropping sharks on people from the sky. Or maybe it was just a bird.

In this week’s issue of Huffington, they’ve published an updated version of my March article on Terrance Huff, drug dog searches, and asset forfeiture.

If you aren’t familiar, Huffington is the tablet magazine spinoff of Huffington Post, focusing on long-form journalism. If you have a tablet computer, I’d encourage you to check it out. One of the main complaints I hear about the Huffington Post site is its clutter and busyness. The magazine is very clean. No ads, no extras.

Anyway, while researching my book I recently came across the passage below from The New York Times Magazine. It has almost on-the-nose relevance to the issues at play in Huff’s case.

See if you can guess when it was published. Answer in the comments.

 . . . a number of judges [have begun] questioning police testimony that relie[s] on such legal passwords as “in plain sight” and “furtive gesture.”

“The difficulty arises,” New York Criminal Court Judge Irving Younger wrote last year, “when one stands back from the particular case and looks at a series of cases. It then becomes apparent that policemen are committing perjury at least in some of them, and perhaps in nearly all of them . . . Spend a few hours in the New York City Criminal Court nowadays, and you will hear case after case in which a policeman testifies that the defendant dropped the narcotics on the ground, whereupon the policeman arrested him. Usually the very language of the testimony is identical from one case to another. This is known among defense lawyers and prosecutors as “dropsey” testimony. The judge has no reason to disbelieve it in any particular case, and of course the judge must decide each case on its own evidence, without regard to the testimony in other cases. Surely, though, not in every case was the defendant unlucky enough to drop his narcotics at the feed of the policeman. It follows that in in at least some of these cases the police are lying.”

In California, where many drug arrests are made during highway patrols, Judge Stanley Mosk of the State Supreme Court recently questioned the police reliance on furtive gestures in justifying arrests.

“The furtive gesture,” Mosk wrote, “has on occasion been little short of subterfuge in order to conduct a search on the basis of mere suspicion or intuition.” In so doing, he said, policy imply guilty significance to gestures that are no more illegal than reaching for one’s driver’s license or turning off a car radio.

• It appears that a Utah state trooper has been falsifying arrest records for DUI cases. Bonus: Higher-ups probably knew, covered it up. Double bonus: In 2007 she was named “Trooper of the Year.
• Attempted puppycide.
• Mark Bittman wants food labels to include what mood the workers were in when it was picked and manufactured. Okay, not quite. But awfully close.
• Headline of the day. For your amusement, please note the improbable name of one of the two researchers.
• I’m pretty sure that if anyone who didn’t happen to be a cop responded to a colleague’s teasing by taking out a gun and shooting toward colleague’s feet, they’d be charged with some sort of crime.
• Milwaukee cop charged with sodomizing people performing several illegal body cavity searches is let out on $0 bail. Chief Ed Flynn referred to the officer’s actions as “noble cause misconduct.” You remember Ed Flynn. He’s the one who instructed his “troops” to tackle, detain anyone carrying a gun in the city, even though it’s allowed under state law.
• Houston Police Department admits to pre-writing traffic violations.

This story is a year-and-a-half old, but I missed it when it came out.

I’ve posted about Nashville’s News 5 before. They’ve been all over the forfeiture story. Can’t praise them enough for bucking the local news cliche and performing real, relevant acts of journalism.

Last May, Sarasota, Florida Sheriff’s Deputy Dominic Fornal followed Joseph McNeal’s Jaguar out of a parking lot, then pulled McNeal over. The reason? Dep. Fornal claimed he could smell marijuana coming from the car. Even though the car was traveling at 35 mph. And the windows were up. Oh, and there was no marijuana in the car. Fornal did arrest McNeal and charge him with a DUI, though, even though McNeal’s BAC was about half the legal limit.

Fornal’s dash cam and wireless microphone clearly show McNeal, denying the search. More deputies arrived. They brought in a drug dog, which miraculously didn’t alert. They searched the car anyway, based solely on Dep. Fornal’s obvious olfactory gifts. He must have some bloodhound in him.

It was a thorough search. They went through all the stuff McNeal and his girlfriend had in the car. They made McNeal take off his shoes and socks. They made him turn the socks inside out.  They ripped up the interior of McNeal’s car. They pulled down trim and fabric lining. They found nothing. They then brought in another dog. They searched a second, third, and fourth time. Still no sign of the drugs that beckoned Dep. Fornal’s nose like a fresh chess pie cooling on the neighbor’s windowsill. For some reason, Dep. Fornal then turned off his wireless microphone. Shortly thereafter—we’re a good 90 minutes into the stop, now—another deputy miraculously found a single burnt marijuana cigarette in the trunk. They had missed it during all of those prior searches. They must have been distracted by Dep. Fornal’s live mic. I mean, that’s the only explanation I can imagine.

The state’s attorney later dropped all charges against McNeal. Once he was released, McNeal was free to pick up his car, which the deputies had graciously left in a muddy field. They didn’t bother repairing the damage.

And what about Fornal?

Fornal’s supervisor, Maj. Kevin Kenney, described that search as “going a little too far,” though overall, he stands by the deputy’s actions that night. Kenney said his deputy operated entirely within department policy.

Everyone together, now: Then there’s something wrong with your goddamned policy.

On the plus side, that admission could help McNeal establish “pattern or practice” in his inevitable lawsuit.

But don’t think the sheriff’s department didn’t learn anything from all of this. In fact, they learned a pretty darned important lesson about how to prevent an embarrassing incident like this from happening again:

Fornal will no longer have a camera in his car.

–Radley

• 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.)

• 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.)

• Headline of the day.
• For a glimpse at the absurd reach of the regulatory state, take a look at the federal regulations for miniature golf courses.
• Here’s an update on the case of Virginia death row inmate Justin Wolfe, who is only still in prison because of Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul Ebert, a three-time nominee for TheAgitator.com’s Worst Prosecutor of the Year award.
• “This is the most transparent administration in the history of our country.”
• You know we’re losing ground when the Berkeley campus gets a Bearcat. Oh, and Stop & Frisk may be coming to San Francisco.
• Houston woman jailed for 12 hours for warning motorists about a speed trap.
• Another forensics scandal is brewing. This time it’s in Dallas, over a drug testing specialist who is alleged to be a fraud.
• Another survey, this time of 2,000 retired NYPD officers, suggests that commanding officers regularly pressured their subordinates to manipulate crime data.
• Popehat has more on the outrageous censorship of Massachusetts blogger Dan Valenti.

• The latest in the increasingly surreal Charles Carreon saga, here and here.
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo tries to decriminalize pot, citing the stop and frisk problem in New York City. The bill is killed by Republican state senators from the suburbs.
• Obama asserts executive privilege in Fast & Furious hearings the same day his campaign demanded more transparency from conservative Super PACs.
• New York City police ticket motorists who ride share to get around bridge tolls. The problem? It isn’t illegal.
• Exhaustive new report finds zero evidence that immigration harms the economy or public safety.
• Brilliant.
• Home invaders in St. Petersburg, Florida pose as a raiding SWAT team to get inside a home.
• First super-tasters. Now, super-seers.
• Photo to your right was sent by a reader, who says it’s from a summer police camp for kids in Cumberland, Maryland.

• Witnesses shocked after Vista, California deputy shoots broomstick-wielding man.
• New New Jersey law will fine motorists for not putting seat belts on cats and dogs.
• Headline of the day. 
• Daytona’s police chief is outraged that Judge Joseph Will dared to call his lying police officers liars.
• Things cats won’t do.
• Bloomberg’s defenders speak out: “But might there come a day when the New York City Department of Health mandates that burgers be limited to, say, four ounces? Indeed there might. And why not? Eight- and ten-ounce burgers are sick things.”
• Alternate headline: “Drug warriors to chronic pain patients: GFY.”
• Oh. Hi. So you’re home.
• Man arrested for spitting on the sidewalk.
• RIP, Richard Dawson. The only man who ever pulled off the pinky ring.

Wait. You mean when we give cops more excuses to pull people over, we also give them more excuses to harass people, profile, and conduct illegal searches?

I mean, who could possibly have known?

Here’s what happened:

The U.S Supreme Court has refused to grant cert in an appeal by Seattle police officers who say they did not use excessive force when they used a Taser stun gun on a pregnant woman.

The court denied cert today, report SCOTUSblog, Reuters and CNN.

The woman, Malaika Brooks, was seven months pregnant when she was pulled over for going 32 miles an hour, 12 miles an hour over the limit in a school speed zone. She refused to sign the ticket and refused to exit her car.

But check the last sentence:

The en banc San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that police used excessive force, but they had immunity because the law was unclear.

So these cops were already off the hook for damages. They appealed anyway (with support from a number of police organizations), because they wanted the Supreme Court to forever preserve a police officer’s power to Tase pregnant women who drive 12 miles per hour over the speed limit and refuse to sign their speeding tickets.

• How deep things are.
• Kentucky Supreme Court bars the unfortunately named town of Liberty from setting up roadblocks for sticker inspections.
• Supermoon photos.
• Police brutality cases crack up the town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania.
• Fun photos of New York City rooftops.
• “I was abducted by aliens.”
• The physics of spilled coffee.
• But for video, Broward County, Florida edition.

• Federal judges rules that excerpting articles on a website is “fair use.” I would hope so.
• Obituary for an otter.
• Hockey game breaks out at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
• Lawsuit: Minnesota school forced student to reveal her social networking passwords.
• Here’s a to-scale model of the solar system. Prepare to scroll.
• Iowa Washington puppycide case heads to court.
• Former LAPD detective finally convicted for 1986 murder.
• Wyoming road’s speed limits determined in part by average speed of drivers. We need more of this.

This actually happened a few hundred feet from where I live, though I don’t remember hearing about it at the time. An intoxicated man apparently struck and killed two pedestrians at a roundabout, then collided with a taxi.

It’s a really poorly designed intersection. There’s a smooth, three-lane, one-way road that runs for about a mile, then stops abruptly at a roundabout with quite a bit of pedestrian traffic, especially at night. So people fly up the road, then zip around the circle without looking out for people crossing. It’s especially bad late at night when people coming home from the strip of bars on the street where this happened are probably in a state where they’re less prone to be looking out for cars. (I mean, so I’ve heard.)

Of course, poorly designed or not, it doesn’t excuse the this guy, who was apparently pretty drunk. He was been charged with vehicular homicide. I’m not sold on the appropriateness of that charge for drivers in these cases (although this guy didn’t help matters by fleeing the scene—twice).

But what happened to the guy’s girlfriend seems way over the top.

Erin Brown’s boyfriend was charged with vehicular homicide and assault. She had been in the passenger seat. But in a rare use of the law, police also are charging Brown with the same crimes.

She faces as many as three decades in prison.

Police and prosecutors says Brown violated a part of the highway safety section of the Tennessee Code that makes it unlawful for the owner of a vehicle to direct, require or knowingly permit the operation of a vehicle in any manner contrary to the law.

Allowing someone to drive your car when you know they are drunk, prosecutors say, makes you criminally responsible for their actions.

The District Attorney’s Office commonly charges vehicle owners with driving under the influence for allowing a drunk person to drive their car.

But the vehicular homicide charge, a felony, against Brown is the first of its kind in Nashville.

Brown apparently was drunk too, and in her state of intoxication,she improperly gauged the level of her boyfriend’s intoxication before handing him the keys.

I’m okay with finding some civil liability for Brown, here. But it seems awfully excessive to take this woman’s life away from her for a split-second error in judgment that indirectly led to her boyfriend unintentionally striking and killing two people.

Brown apparently set herself up for the charge by telling police she gave her boyfriend the keys because he seemed “less drunk” than she was. So she basically admitted she knew he was intoxicated. (Again—never, ever talk to the police. Get an attorney.) But I wonder. What if she hadn’t made that statement? Could she have been charged if she should have known her boyfriend was drunk? How obviously drunk would he have needed to be? What if he was, say, just a hair above the legal limit? How much of a duty do you have to determine someone’s sobriety before you allow them to drive your car?

Seems to me that this is a pretty good example of “just because you can charge someone with a crime doesn’t mean you should.”

• Last week, the Keene, New Hampshire city council voted 9-4 in favor of purchasing the Lenco, Bearcat.
• 11-year-old handcuffed, taken to a holding facility for having a “bad attitude.”
• U.S. government says it can seize any .com., .net, or .org domain, no matter where the company that owns it is incorporated.
• Good bit of contrarianism from Michael Kinsley: The case against the case against Rush Limbaugh.
• Housing for hipsters.
• San Francisco police haven’t been conducting accuracy tests on breath test devices used in DUI cases. They’re supposed to conduct them every 10 days. They haven’t conducted any in six years.
• Michigan State will offer a course on surviving a zombie apocalypse.

• Thank goodness we’re finally securing the border from the menace of high school valedictorians.
• Two more aggressive police raids over suspected pot offenders: Here and here.
• Orlando police make use of sweet gadgets seized as evidence from a robbery.
• One of the more amusing press releases related to tax policy that you’re likely to see.
• How one bureaucrat almost succeeded in banning car radios.
• How to build a speech jamming gun.
• This looks to be a very cool blog of archival New York Times photos.
• Woman ticketed for resting her injured leg on the seat of a non-operational subway train.
• More taxi protectionist nonsense.

• Three very good posts from Jacob Sullum illustrating the absurdity of hate crimes laws: one, two, and three.
• Coming to California: A new law inspired by a dead person.
• The U.S. Secretary of Transportation enjoys driving around to find drivers talking on their cell phones, then honking his horn at them.
• Federal court bars Mississippi from putting children in solitary confinement.
• U.K. police raid the wrong house after stolen iPhone pings to the wrong address: “Nottingham Police refused to reimburse Kerr for the repairs to his door — because officers ‘reasonably believed’ an offender was in the house.”
• The state of Utah has stopped the family of Matthew Stewart from raising funds for his defense. They say the family must first get a permit.
• Two years after he was stopped and illegally searched, Raleigh man just wants an apology. He hasn’t received one.

• So this is fairly terrifying. But remember — debt doesn’t matter!
• More coverage of Keene vs. the Bearcat from the local college paper.
• Rutherford County, Tennessee hires anti-Islam group to “train” deputies at a seminar run in an vocally anti-Muslim church. What could possibly go wrong? More here.
• Toronto head of DUI enforcement (allegedly) comes to work drunk.
• Ignorance of the law is no defense. Unless you’re in law enforcement.

A Highway Patrol trooper enters the scene first, gun drawn, and kicks the driver’s window of Greene’s four-door sedan. After several moments, the trooper opens the door.

The trooper, his gun still raised, then gives Greene conflicting commands. He first tells him not to move, then tells him to come forward.

A second trooper quickly cuffs Greene’s wrist and pulls him from the car, which rolls forward until an officer stops it.

Greene flops to the ground, clearly dazed as five officers rush him. A sixth officer, with Henderson police, enters the frame late and delivers five well-placed kicks to Greene’s face.

“Stop resisting mother (expletive)!” one officer yells.

Greene doesn’t scream until a second Henderson officer knees him in the midsection — and then does it three more times. Greene was later treated for fractured ribs.

Police suspected Greene was intoxicated as he weaved among lanes about 4 a.m. on Oct. 29, 2010, and finally stopped his car near Lake Mead Parkway and Boulder Highway in Henderson.

But that wasn’t the case, which they soon discovered after they searched Greene.

“Call in medical,” one officer says in the video. “We found some insulin in his pocket. … He’s semiconscious.”

“Let’s get medical out here. He’s a diabetic, he’s probably in shock,” the officer later tells dispatch.

Greene’s lawsuit said officers then forced him to stand by a patrol car in handcuffs and blow into a Breathalyzer, despite being injured. Paramedics later arrived and treated him for low blood sugar.

Greene was released without a citation, and officers apologized to him for “beating him up,” the lawsuit said.

He immediately went to a hospital, where he was treated for the broken ribs and the bruises to his hands, neck, face and scalp, the lawsuit said.

One of the harsher moments in the video comes near the end of the clip, when one officer can be heard laughing loudly.

One officer notes that Greene “was not a small guy.” An officer laughs and says, “I couldn’t take him by myself.”

Several points:

• This certainly isn’t the first time cops have mistaken diabetic shock for intoxication—and with similar results. We’ve also seen a number of incidents where cops have mistaken epileptic seizures for aggressive behavior, often resulting in a Tasering. The root problem here is the same as that with the cops who mistakenly mistake a bounding or territorial dog with an aggressive one, and then kill it. The cops get excused because they made “honest mistakes.” (Though in this case, the honest mistake ended with mistaking low blood sugar for intoxication.)  But that means they haven’t been trained properly. At some point, enough of these stories should have made the news that departments across the country would begin to implement such training. That doesn’t appear to be happening.
• Note that at one point in the video, after they’ve just beaten a helpless man, one cop asks his fellow officers if any of them are hurt.
• Not only were none of these cops criminally charged, every one of them is apparently still protecting and serving the public. The story indicates one seargeant was “disciplined,” but we aren’t allowed to know what that discipline was. The department also claims to have changed some policies in response to the incident. But we aren’t allowed to know exactly what those changes are, either.
• We also aren’t allowed to know the names of any of the officers in the video. This is inexcusable. It seems pretty clear that there’s a culture problem, here. Mistaking a diabetic for a drunk is bad enough. Beating him senseless when he clearly posed no threat is criminal. And yelling “Stop Resisting!” at a man who is clearly not resisting is indicative of a police culture in which excessive force is common enough that the officers know what to say as they’re beating someone to give them cover later. Laughing after you’ve just beaten a man, and after you’ve just discovered he was a diabetic is straight-up pathological. All of which means there’s plenty of reason to doubt this particular department’s internal review process. These officers names need to be released, so journalists and police watchdog groups outside of law enforcement can look into their histories on the job.
• Greene and his family were given a $292,500 settlement, which of course will be funded by taxpayers, not the cops who beat him senseless. This too needs to change. The cops who beat green should be forfeiting a portion of their paychecks to him for the rest of their lives. And those paychecks should preferably be compensation for work other than police work.

MORE: Digby runs off a few other incidents in which police Tasered diabetics after wrongly assuming they were intoxicated.

• 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.

• Fox News contributor: Newt Gingrich’s three marriages could mean he’ll be a great president. But what happens when he leaves us for a younger, prettier country?
• Who says the GOP opposes assisted suicide?
• Condensed version of Newt Gingrich’s victory speech last night: I’m a millionaire, lobbyist, book author, academic, ex-House speaker, wannabe historian, Pericles-like statesman who has enough power to move the planet. And I’m here to take on those bastard elites!
• Gary Johnson: It’s time to end the war on drugs.
• Chris Christie (kind of) agrees.
• In defense of Warren Harding.
• This is a great idea. But it’ll cost the city revenue, which is why if it catches on, it will probably be banned.

• 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.

• Another sad story about a coerced confession, this time from a 12-year-old.
• Read the last one. Tastes like suffering.
• And here’s another odd thing they’re doing in France.
• Another study finds no benefit from red light cameras.
• ” . . . who was dressed as a gorilla.”
• William Anderson has the sad story of Carola Jacobson.
•  So . . . do you want to see my Klan robe? Chicks like that, right?
• “My fellow cows: It has begun.”

• Thomas Frank: Bush era represented “the golden years of libertarianism.”
• Sounds like a big sale.
• It isn’t zero tolerance if you call it something else.
• Horrible drug war death of the day.
• National Geographic photos of the year.
• Florida DOT covers up speed limit signs, then pays for extra state troopers to write speeding tickets.