Law

Sen. Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) home was raided today by the FBI. All of Alaska’s federal legislators are now under investigation for corruption, as are some Alaskan state legislators, such as Ted Stevens’ son Ben Stevens, president of the Alaska State Senate. UPDATE (August 1, 2007): George W. Bush continued his habit of supporting legislators with criminal investigation and ethics problems by hosting a White House dinner in Ted Stevens’ honor back on May 23 of this year. UPDATE (October 28, 2008): Ted Stevens was convicted yesterday on seven charges, making him the fifth sitting Senator to be convicted of a felony.

A federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to pay $101 million to four men who were wrongly imprisoned for more than thirty years on murder convictions when the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence. Two of the four men died in prison. The Department of Justice argued that the federal government had no obligation to share information with state prosecutors even though they knew that the testimony identifying the men as the killers was false. The judge declared that the DoJ’s position was “absurd” and “The FBI’s misconduct was clearly the sole cause of this conviction." The FBI gave bonuses and commendations to its agents who were responsible for these erroneous convictions for the murder of Edward “Teddy” Deegan. (Via The Agitator, who rightly asks why the FBI agents responsible for this travesty of justice are not themselves in jail.) UPDATE (July 31, 2007): The Agitator reports on FBI Assistant Director Wayne Murphy’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on the use and abuse of confidential drug informants, in which Murphy argues that the FBI should not be required to disclose evidence about wrongdoing by confidential informants to state prosecutors in order to prevent murders or to prevent people from being wrongly imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. Apparently the FBI considers the war on drugs so important that it is better to allow people to be murdered or people to be wrongly imprisoned than to jeopardize a drug investigation. ...

Orac at Respectful Insolence points out that a recent Arizona death after liposuction was a case of “minor surgery” being performed by a homeopath. And Arizona law permits these quacks to perform “minor surgery." UPDATE (July 28, 2007): Orac has more on what Arizona allows via its regulation of “homeopathy."

One out of every twenty police officers on the Chicago Police Department has received at least ten official written complaints filed against them in the last five years, but the only reason we know is because of a lawsuit. The Chicago PD is still fighting to prevent the release of these bad cops’ names–yet average citizens accused of crimes are identified in newspapers. Shouldn’t police be held to a higher standard? More at the Agitator, including links to some specific serious abuses that have come out of the Chicago PD.

In France, the penalties for speeding are now so widely seen as unfair that there is now a market for selling and purchasing the deduction of points from your license for traffic offenses. Each driver starts with 12 points on their license, and loses points for violations. Exceeding the speed limit by 20 kph or less has a two-point penalty, for example. Once you get to zero, your license is automatically suspended for six months. But if you get a traffic citation, you can pay 300-1500 euros per point to someone who is willing to take the rap for you (either because they don’t drive or are sufficiently far from zero that the penalty won’t bother them), and they’ll incur the points by sending in their information on your ticket. The French Interior Ministry is attempting to investigate means to crack down on this, but the volume of tickets is apparently making it difficult. More at the Reason blog. I think this mechanism could work well for photo radar speeding tickets in the U.S.

The Arizona legislature and the governor have passed legislation banning the sale of t-shirts that say “Bush Lied/They Died.” The Arizona legislature voted unanimously in favor of the ban, which allows for the punishment of a year in jail for using the names of deceased soldiers to sell goods, and gives the families of such soldiers the right to collect civil damages. This is an outrageous violation of the First Amendment to prohibit perfectly legitimate political speech using factual information in the public domain. Similar bans have also been passed in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, and are in the works in Florida. In Arizona, this law also violates the state constitution (Article 2, Sections 1, 2, and 6, in my non-lawyerly opinion). Several Democrats who voted for the bill have now agreed that they should not have, and made excuses for why they did: “I shouldn’t have voted the way I did,” House Minority Leader Phil Lopes said. The Tucson Democrat blamed his vote in favor of Senate Bill 1014 on a “senior moment." Rep. Tom Prezelski, D-Tucson, said he thought problems he originally had with the measure had been fixed. He acknowledged not reading the final version. And Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Phoenix, conceded that she wasn’t paying attention and was totally unaware of the contents of the bill on which she voted at least twice—once after a proponent of the measure gave a short floor speech explaining the essence of the bill and why he believed it was necessary. Our governor, also a Democrat, has given an equally lame response when asked why she signed such a clearly unconstitutional bill: …gubernatorial press aide Jeanine L’Ecuyer said a divided vote would not have resulted in a veto. “Her concern is for the families who lost someone,” L’Ecuyer said. Asked if Napolitano, a lawyer, believes the measure is unconstitutional, L’Ecuyer’s only response was, “The governor signed the bill."Napolitano cannot be re-elected, and after this, she clearly should not be. Any legislator who voted for this bill should be given the boot, which means cleaning out the entire Arizona legislature. Toss the bums out! The shirts are being sold by Dan Frazier of Flagstaff, who also offers some different messages on top of the list of names of the fallen soldiers. The Arizona Civil Liberties Union has already filed a lawsuit to overturn the law (PDF). If anyone in Phoenix is interested in purchasing some of these shirts as part of a group purchase (or as my resale at cost to you, so I can work some civil disobedience of an unconstitutional law into it), please let me know. UPDATE (August 24, 2007): Dan Frazier has gone to court to get an injunction against the law, but it looks like the legislators wrote the law not only in ignorance of the Constitution, but in ignorance of what Frazier is doing–the law doesn’t ban the sale of items using the names of fallen soldiers, it bans advertising using the names of fallen soldiers. The names are not legible on Frazier’s website, so he may not fall afoul of the law. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a bad, unconstitutional law, however. ...

Fingerprint matching has been used as an investigative tool by law enforcement and as a key piece of evidence to convict criminals in courts for over a century, but its accuracy has not actually been scientifically tested until recently. It turns out that claims of its accuracy have been exaggerated, and fingerprint matching is often more art than science. In 2004, the FBI claimed that a fingerprint found on a bag at the sign of a terrorist bombing in Madrid, Spain on March 11 was a match to the left index finger of Brandon Mayfield, an attorney in Beaverton, Oregon who converted to Islam and married to a Muslim woman from Egypt. Despite the fact that Spanish police disagreed, claiming that there was no match to Mayfield, the FBI insisted they had a “one hundred percent identification” with fifteen separate points of agreement between the latent print from Spain and Mayfield’s fingerprint, validated by at least three FBI fingerprint examiners. Mayfield was arrested and detained on May 6, 2004. On May 20, Spanish police announced that they had matched the fingerprint to Ouhnane Daoud of Algeria, who–unlike Mayfield–had actually been in Spain. Mayfield was released and the FBI ended up apologizing. This case has resulted in scientific scrutiny of fingerprint evidence that has been long overdue. A decade ago, Tucson printer and publisher of the anarchist periodical The Match!, Fred Woodworth, published “A Printer Looks at Fingerprints," in which he pointed out pseudoscientific reasoning in fingerprint matching methodology as described in fingerprint textbooks. Subsequently, Simon Cole authored the book Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (2002, Harvard University Press), and has just authored an article on the subject in the July/August 2007 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, titled “The Fingerprint Controversy." In Cole’s Skeptical Inquirer article, he states that “The very first study containing accuracy data was finally published just recently, finding very high accuracy rates in a class of trainees on latent prints of unknown difficulty; but the study contains some methodological flaws (Haber and Haver 2006). Moreover, the authors again argue strongly against inferring accuracy rates from their own data (Wertheim, Langenburg, and Moenssens 2006)." No doubt scientific investigation will demonstrate that proper use of fingerprint analysis is a reliable method of identification, but more importantly, it will find its limits and weaknesses so that it does not continue to be pressed beyond its capabilities and result in false judgments of guilt in criminal cases. Unfortunately, law enforcement and prosecutors have a vested interest in the flexibility of techniques that can be used to produce the judgment they want, as demonstrated by the difficulty in getting police departments to modify their procedures of eyewitness identification of suspects to correct for well-known cognitive biases.

Hillsborough County, Florida Sheriff’s Deputy Daniel Brock was honored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving for his drunk driver arrest record, but now it turns out that many of the people he arrested and testified against were innocent and arrested on the basis of falsified reporting by Brock. From October 2005-October 2006, Brock arrested 313 people for driving under the influence. In one year (not clear from the report if it’s during that same period), he arrested 58 people whose blood-alcohol content was below .08. 43 of those 58, according to an internal affairs investigation, displayed no discernable impairment. In 41 cases, urine samples did not show alcohol over the legal limit. In many cases, videos of sobriety tests showed that Brock made false accusations of losing balance, being unable to correctly recite the alphabet, and slurred speech. Brock also failed to turn on his car’s audio and video recorder 40% of the time, instead choosing to fill out his reports on the basis of memory, sometimes days and even weeks after the arrest. Brock was fired on May 24. (Via The Agitator.) ...

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported on the FBI’s “Operation Bot Roast,” which busted several criminal users of botnets: _James C. Brewer, of Arlington, Texas. He was indicted Tuesday on charges of infecting more than 10,000 computers globally, including two Chicago-area hospitals operated by the Bureau of Health Services in Cook County, Ill. The computers at the two hospitals were linked to the health care bureau’s mainframe system. They repeatedly froze or rebooted from October to December last year, resulting in delayed medical services, according to the indictment. Brewer was released on a $4,500 bond, court records show. ...