If anyone has connections to Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s office and would be willing to exploit them so I can interview him to help with a story I’m working on, please email me. It’s sorta’ last minute.
Also, I’ll be in Chicago this weekend. Thinking about doing a public Agitator.com meet-up Friday or Saturday. More details if and when that happens.
Tracy Ingle is the Arkansas man I wrote about last week. He was shot five times during a no-knock drug raid on his home. Though police found no drugs, they charged him with running a drop operation, anyway, due they said to a scale and some plastic bags they found in his home. He’s also charged with assaulting the police officers for pointing a broken gun at them when they broke into his bedroom and woke him. A few updates on his case:
• First, the good news. A couple of weeks ago while still researching the raid on Ingle’s home, I called Arkansas defense attorney John Wesley Hall to get his thoughts on the case. This week, Hall agreed to represent Ingle. Hall is one of the best defense attorneys in the country. He’s a former executive with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and argued the landmark no-knock raid case Wilson v. Arkansas before the U.S. Supreme Court. Ingle’s defense (and possible lawsuit) is in good hands.
• I also spoke late last week with the prosecutor in the case, John Hout. Hout wouldn’t go into the details of the case with me, but did confirm that (1) he plans to go ahead with both the drug and assault charges, (2) the officers who shot Ingle have been cleared of any wrongdoing, and (3) he can’t release the affidavits from the raid despite the fact that they’re public record, because the case is "an ongoing investigation." He did say the affidavits will be available to Ingle’s attorney through discovery. I also spoke with the information officer of the North Little Rock Police Department. He also told me that the affidavits are off-limits.
• Finally, members of Ingle’s family say the North Little Rock SWAT team visited Tracy Ingle again last week. This time, they came to his house asking for a man named Shawn Anthony Turner. Turner is Ingle’s cousin, and has had frequent problems with the law—he has actually served time on drug charges. When Turner was released from prison several years ago, Ingle’s mother agreed to have him released into her custody, mostly, she says, because no one else in the family would take him. For a short while, Turner lived in the home Ingle’s mother (Turner’s aunt) owned, along with Ingle and a few other roommates who came and went.. This is the same home the police raided in January. When Turner didn’t clean up his act, the family threw him out. Turner continued to pester Tracy Ingle about letting him move in, the family says, and Ingle continued to refuse to allow it.
Tracy Ingle’s family members now speculate that Turner somehow factored in to the January raid on Ingle’s home. Ingle’s house is Turner’s last known address, though he hasn’t lived there since mid-2006. Ingle’s sister and mother believe either the police mistakenly raided the house while looking for Turner, or that Turner told the police Ingle was making methamphetamine in retaliation for Ingle’s refusal to let Turner live in his home. Tracy Ingle’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on the search warrant for the raid.
Last week, when the police saw Ingle, they apparently recognized him, realized this was the same house they had raided months ago, realized Turner no longer lives at the address, and left.
A reporter asked President Bush what sacrifices he’s made for the war in Iraq:
For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families.
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
You send your kid off to die in the war he bungled, he agrees to stop playing golf. Sounds good.
Had those liberal hippies in Massachusetts not sanctioned gay marriage, we wouldn’t have this outbreak of inter-species copulation.
Also, I would support the idea of a sex offender list for wildlife.
Thanks to Jacob Grier for the link.
Last March, a woman in Albany, New York filed a lawsuit against the city police department after being subjected to a humiliating public search in which an officer inserted two fingers into her vagina. The police had no probable cause for the search, and they found no drugs on the woman. After her case went public, others came forward with similar stories. The case also exposed big problems with the city’s Civilian Review Board. Contrary to city law, the city’s police apparently believe cooperating with the board’s investigations is optional, and have intimidated people–including the woman above–who file complaints from taking those complaints to the board.
It now also appears that the city’s sheriff’s department has engaged in a routine of racial profiling, harassment, and illegal searches going back 20 years at Albany’s main bus terminal. The department is facing a lawsuit from a man named Tunde Clement, who it should probably be noted does have a long history of drug offenses. But in this particular case, Clement was clean. Sheriff’s deputies confronted Clement as he was departing a bus, took him to the men’s bathroom, and searched him. When they found no drugs, they arrested him for “resisting arrest,” a charge that was later thrown out, given that you can’t arrest someone for “resisting arrest” if they haven’t committed a crime that should have resulted in arrest in the first place.
The police then strip-searched Clement, and made him squat in front of them. The claimed to have seen white powder on his anus So they took him to a hospital. Without his consent, they then administered drugs to sedate him, induced him to vomit, put a camera up his rectum, and took x-rays of him. Such drastic measures against the consent of a patient usually require officials to show some sort of imminent emergency. There was no such emergency with Clement. And still, no drugs. The hospital later sent Clement a bill for $6,800, and diagnosed him as having “hemorrhoids.”
The Sheriff’s Department’s Drug Interdiction Unit was already under scrutiny. It’s also facing a lawsuit from another officer whose thumb was shot off during a botched drug raid. An internal affairs investigation found that the drug unit was mismanaged and poorly supervised, and recommended discipline against the unit and its leader, Inspector John Burke.
No such action was ever taken.
Hoffman was caught with marijuana and ecstasy in Florida after a raid on her apartment. After threatening her with prison time, the police then gave Hoffman the option of becoming an informant–without first consulting with her lawyer. They set up a deal with her connection. What happened in between isn’t yet clear. But they found her body late last week.
Proving once again that the most dangerous thing about illicit drugs like ecstasy and marijuana isn’t the drugs themselves. It’s what the government does to you after you’re caught with them.
Several of Hoffman’s friends and family have emailed me. They say the police told her to set up an a purchase of 1,500 ecstasy pills, two ounces of cocaine, and a gun that would have totaled well more than $10,000. They also say the amount and the inclusion of cocaine and the gun would have been unusual for Hoffman. If true, that’s a bush-league move that almost certainly tipped these guys off. The gun, I guess, was so the authorities could hit the dealers with an extra charge of using a gun in the commission of a drug crime, which sends the mandatory minimums through the roof.
The first thing the Tallahassee police did after announcing that they’d found Hoffman’s body was blame Hoffman for her own death. They then said they themselves “followed all the proper protocols.” Pardon my French, but maybe that’s a good indication that it’s time to change the fucking protocols.
Sad as it is to say, maybe the death of a young, pretty, white college girl with a promising future will finally draw some scrutiny to this absurd, shady, under-the-radar business of drug informants. I doubt it. But maybe.
MORE: The article has since been updated. Look like the setup came after the police executed a search warrant on Hoffman’s apartment, and found a little over 5 ounces of marijuana, six ecstasy pills, and some paraphernalia. That’s what they threatened her with to get her to turn into an informant. I’d imagine the thugs who killed her smelled the set-up from a mile away. The article also notes that not only didn’t the police let Hoffman’s attorney know they were wiring her up, they didn’t even bother to inform the prosecutor.
If you’ll remember, Justice Scalia argued in Hudson v. Michigan that the Exclusionary Rule isn’t necessary in the case of illegal no-knock raids because there are less drastic, more effective ways of deterring police officers from conducting illegal searches. The ruling was of course confined to the issue of wrongful no-knock searches, but it’s no secret that Scalia and other Federalist Society types want to do away with the Exclusionary Rule altogether. These other methods of deterring police from conducting illegal searches, Scalia argued, include a vague “new professionalism” in police departments across the country (which, the scholar Scalia improperly quoted has explained, is due to the fact that police have been held accountable when they do conduct illegal searches by the exclusion of evidence), civil rights suits from people who have been wrongly searched, and internal disciplinary procedures against offending officers.
Scalia’s first reason is debatable at best. And as we’ve seen, his other two remedies rarely happen, in part thanks to rulings from judges like Scalia, who have made it increasingly difficult to sue an agent of the government.
Here’s the latest piece of evidence against Scalia’s argument that police are usually disciplined by their own departments for conducting illegal searches:
But a closer look at those prosecutions reveals something that has not been trumpeted: more than 20 cases in which judges found police officers’ testimony to be unreliable, inconsistent, twisting the truth, or just plain false. The judges’ language was often withering: “patently incredible,” “riddled with exaggerations,” “unworthy of belief.”
The outrage usually stopped there. With few exceptions, judges did not ask prosecutors to determine whether the officers had broken the law, and prosecutors did not notify police authorities about the judges’ findings. The Police Department said it did not monitor the rulings and was aware of only one of them; after it learned about the cases recently from a reporter, a spokesman said the department would decide whether further review was needed.
Though the number of cases is small, the lack of consequences for officers may seem surprising, given that a city commission on police corruption in the 1990s pinpointed tainted testimony as a problem so pervasive that the police even had a word for it: “testilying.”
And these cases may fuel another longtime concern that flared up again in recent days: suspicions that the police routinely subject people to unjustified searches, frisks or stops.
[...]
Federal judges rarely suppress evidence, Judge Martin said, and the unusual number of suppressions in New York City gun cases raises questions about whether such tactics may be common. “We don’t have the statistics for all the people who are hassled, no gun is found, and they never get into the system,” he said.
The point here is not that a small number of police officers were caught conducting illegal searches. The point is that they weren’t in any way held accountable for conducting them, even after called out in court by a judge. Those internal disciplinary procedures aren’t merely not working very well, they’re practically nonexistent.
Last week, the city of Cleveland was pursuing criminal charges against a bar manager for operating pool tables without a permit. This week, Washington Post columnist Mark Fisher reports on the heroic Frank Winstead, whose moral crusade has purged Washington D.C. of the threat of an un-permitted ping pong table.
Hat tip: Jacob Grier.
I doubt this was an honest mistake. My guess is that someone in the Clinton campaign is unhappy with the boss.
The Get Out Clause, an unsigned Manchester band who could not afford a camera crew for their video, ‘performed’ in front of a load of CCTV cameras, requested the footage from the camera operators under the Data Protection Act and then stitched the results together for their music video.
Here’s the result:
Gene Healy has the cover story for the June issue of reason. It’s now available online.
It’s a modified excerpt from his new book. Which you should buy. Here.
The NY Daily News reports that Rep. Vito Fossella, the family-values GOP congressman from New York City who recently admitting to having a second family in D.C. in addition to his wife and two kids in New York, has a gay sister, and has basically disowned her.
Clearly her advocacy for gay rights tore at the fabric of Fossella’s own marriage, causing him to cheat on his wife and have a baby with another woman.
USA Today asked the three remaining major-party candidates how they feel about Title IX and about performance enhancing drugs.
Refreshingly, all three said neither steroids nor gender participation are any of the government’s business, and that, being private entities, sports organizations should be free to set their own rules free of meddling from the federal government or grandstanding congressmen.
Just kidding. All three favor using the federal government to bend pro and amateur sports to their liking.
Still, I laughed.
I like the Reddit headline for this story:
BREAKING: Republican congressman has an affair with a lady.
Police investigating a child sex abuse case break into the home of a man recovering from intestinal surgery, rip out his catheter, then leave him alone without medical care. Even if this was the right guy, that seems more than a little unnecessary to make an arrest.
Turns out, it was the wrong guy.
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