It’s overwhelming. One story after another, interesting and informative. Well, interesting.  But the stream of stories under the generic heading of criminal justice has been a raging torrent of late, making the head of a poor blawger like me spin.  

My staff of crack journalists and investigators is somewhat smaller than the Times’, as is my advertising and subscription revenues. Still, I’ve received a steady flow of emails telling me of great articles about which I should write. Hey, I get the Times.  This nice little boy Timmy leaves it for me at the end of the driveway every morning.  Okay, his name isn’t really Timmy, and he’s not a little boy. And he misses at least one day a week, but still, I subscribe.

The problem is that I can’t keep up.  She may be gray, but she’s clearly more spritely than me.  And even if I could, would anybody really want me posting ten times a day? I used to do that on occasion, and I remember the hate mail.  But this isn’t to say I don’t appreciate your heads up, or that the Times’ stuff isn’t fascinating and worth some thought. 

So instead of trying to keep up with the old gal, here’s a quick stroll through some of the leading stories from last week’s paper, after which I can use it to wrap fish.

Dog Stink

Megan Winfrey smelled good to a dog, as did her father and brother.  Unfortunately, her father and brother also smelled good to judges, who tossed out their convictions for murder,  Megan, not so much.

Ms. Winfrey; her brother, Richard Winfrey Jr.; and their father were charged with conspiring to murder and rob Murray Burr, a longtime custodial worker at the high school the Winfreys attended.

Both the father and the son are free after courts decided the state’s key evidence —  obtained in scent lineups —  was not enough to establish their guilt. Ms. Winfrey remains in a Gatesville prison despite the fact that her conviction hinged largely on the same dog-sniffing evidence.

Despite the fact that people who think have long ridiculed dog scent evidence as being shockingly unreliable, and subject to handler influence, it remains a viable part of our criminal justice mythology.  Whether it’s because dogs are cute and friendly, or judges are dumber than dirt when it comes to assessing the scientific value of things used to convict people, doesn’t matter to Megan as she still sits in her cell.

“We conclude that scent-discrimination lineups, when used alone or as primary evidence, are legally insufficient to support a conviction,” Justice Barbara Hervey wrote in the court’s opinion granting the acquittal. Mr. Winfrey Sr. left prison in October 2010.

And yet Megan sits, in the third year of her life sentence, awaiting for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to make a photocopy of her Dad’s opinion.

The War on Crime Needs an Army

On the one hand, it could be that the American public really likes the style of cargo pants and Hummers.  Maybe, deep in our hearts, we all want to be G.I Joe. Or maybe the  police like it even more than the rest of us.

Police forces undeniably share a soldier’s ethos, no matter the size of the city, town or jurisdiction: officers carry deadly weapons and wear uniforms with patches denoting rank. They salute one another and pay homage to a “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” hierarchical culture.

But beyond such symbolic and formal similarities, American law and tradition have tried to draw a clear line between police and military forces. To cast the roles of the two too closely, those in and out of law enforcement say, is to mistake the mission of each. Soldiers, after all, go to war to destroy, and kill the enemy. The police, who are supposed to maintain the peace, “are the citizens, and the citizens are the police,” according to Chief Walter A. McNeil of Quincy, Fla., the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, citing the words of Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern-day policing.

Does this mean they can’t ride around in tanks with “special weapons?”  Come on, how cool is that, especially when you can let your friends drive the tank for kicks.  Or maybe they do it for our sakes, to protect us from the terrorists?

What seems clear is that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and the federal Homeland Security dollars that flowed to police forces in response to them, have further encouraged police forces to embrace paramilitary tactics like those that first emerged in the decades-long “war on drugs.”

Both wars — first on drugs, then terror — have lent police forces across the country justification to acquire the latest technology, equipment and tactical training for newly created specialized units.

Somehow, none of this seemed to register on the public’s radar. Not that it wasn’t happening, but that it didn’t matter. As Matt Brown noted, jurors don’t seem to distinguish the difference between cops and soldiers, lumping both in the same boat.  Since everybody loves soldiers, who are nice farm boys from the midwest, do us no harm and risk their lives to protect us, their innocence and bravery washes over cops who use their tanks to run down chickens.

Why does this all suddenly matter to the Gray Lady, not to mention the rest of us?  Dan Filler offers an answer :

But here’s the rub.

As police culture has shifted, the police seem to have forgotten — or perhaps never realized — that these aggressive policies are really only politically sustainable when they’re employed against disempowered communities.

Airport profiling is OK for Muslims. Random street searches are OK for African-Americans. And seat-of-the-pants immigration detentions are fine for Mexicans. But you can’t engage in invasive stops, searches and unsubstantiated detentions of, and attacks on, white folks without other white people getting agitated. What’s good for the goose has never been good for the gander.

Dan argues that it took the  Occupy Davis images to make a dent in the consciousness of us fine, law-abiding folks,  watching our children getting pepper sprayed by paramilitary Lt. Pike.  In case you’re not getting the point, you can have your cool cop armor, from body to vehicle, as long as you don’t use it on white college kids. 

Just Switch the Heads

For those of us who remember the good old crack days, when stealing drug money from a dealer was considered an unwise business move, and there was no shortage of seriously drug-addled minds willing to do whatever it took for another fix,  this story will bring back memories.

The man’s head had been cut off.

It was just after 8 a.m. on Dec. 10, 1987, on a Bedford-Stuyvesant block of Madison Street that was a teeming drug market, with dealers selling heroin on the other side of the schoolyard fence. Addicts shuffled into so-called shooting galleries in nearby basements. The police arrived that morning and found a blood trail from the decapitated body to just that sort of basement across the street.

Back then, this wasn’t considered a high priority murder.  The cops saw it as street justice, one less bad guy to worry about.  Ah, good times.  You see, the headless body belonged to a  fellow who stole from a drug dealer, and that was considered poor drug etiquette.  Something had to be done.

On Madison Street, the story of what had happened was taking shape. Mr. Emmanuel was a drug dealer selling large amounts of cocaine for his supplier. He had sent a girlfriend to pick up a kilogram from the supplier, and she was robbed of the drugs before she could bring them to Mr. Emmanuel. The supplier then held the woman as ransom. You can have her back, the dealer told Mr. Emmanuel, if you pay for the missing drugs or bring the head of whoever stole them.

Mr. Emmanuel had no idea who stole the drugs. So he drove to the Bronx and found a homeless man and grabbed him or lured him into the car, then brought him to that basement.

It was money or a head, and since Emmanuel had neither to offer, any head would do. Now a cold case, the cops finally decided that Emmanuel, “now gray and 53,” should pay.  He copped a plea.

He was sentenced on Thursday in Brooklyn State Supreme Court. For sawing off a stranger’s head, he will serve two to six years behind bars.

While everybody is busy patting themselves on the back for a job well done, only the victim’s brother, Michael Ross, wonders why this is sufficient for his brother’s head being cut off with a chainsaw for having the misfortune of having a head when a drug dealer needed one, and any one would do.

Thinking Wrong Thoughts

It’s not just a job, but a duty.  A duty to adopt the mindless “esprit de corps” of hating who and what you’re told to hate, and that includes illegal immigrants and anybody who smokes some weed.  So Bryan Gonzalez learned, as did Joe Miller.

Stationed in Deming, N.M., Mr. Gonzalez was in his green-and-white Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet from the international boundary when he pulled up next to a fellow agent to chat about the frustrations of the job. If marijuana were legalized, Mr. Gonzalez acknowledges saying, the drug-related violence across the border in Mexico would cease. He then brought up an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition that favors ending the war on drugs.

Clearly he can’t be trusted, with his misguided views and divided loyalties.

In Arizona, Joe Miller, a probation officer in Mohave County, near the California border, filed suit last month in Federal District Court after he was dismissed for adding his name to a letter by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which is based in Medford, Mass., and known as LEAP, expressing support for the decriminalization of marijuana.

Supporting LEAP is tantamount to giving aid and comfort to the enemy. For their efforts, they got the ax.  Not, according to their respective agencies, because they expressed dissent. No, that would be wrong.

The Justice Department, which is defending the Border Patrol, has sought to have the case thrown out. Mr. Gonzalez lost a discrimination complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sided with his supervisors’ view that they had lost trust that he would uphold the law.

After all, how can we trust a guy with a gun and shield who doesn’t share the proper values?

After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”

On the other hand, who better to know that the War on Drugs is perhaps the worst law enforcement failure of the past century?  Maybe Bryan Gonzalez’s views reflect exactly those core characteristics of patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.  Just not the way the Department of Justice had in mind.

And yes, I know there were other articles in the New York Times that some of you think I should write about, but don’t you think this post is long enough already?