As Manhattan grew too expensive for ordinary humans, the lesser ones were forced over bridges and through tunnels toward places where they wouldn’t take up space to which their betters were entitled.  The worst of these unsavory characters went to New Jersey, and would up in a place called “Hoboken.”  Hoboken is a native American word, created by the Lenni Lenape tribe, meaning “place for outcasts from Manhattan.”

Vesselin Dittrich may not have realized that he stood on a rung so low on the ladder of Importance as to open himself to question.  He likely thought himself entitled to the privileges and immunities of which Americans are so proud.  In Hoboken.

Every once in a while, a seed of an idea appears at Brian Tannebaum’s  My Law License blog. I know, I’m shocked too, but it happens.  His Battle de Jour is over a comment, said to “a friend of his” (itself a jarring notion):

So the lawyer tells me that some lawyer asked whether my friend really believed that I helped them out of unselfish motives. There of course had to be some motive, it couldn’t be just…that…I like this lawyer and was there for the advice.

And that motive is?

To become a judge.

Of course.

“I had no choice, I just couldn’t get out of bed.”

“I had no choice, it was the best program I could get into.”

“I had no choice, he told me to do it…”

Really?

It’s probably more accurate to say, “the short-term benefit/satisfaction/risk avoidance was a lot higher than anything else, so I chose to do what I did.”

Remarkable work often comes from making choices when everyone else feels as though there is no choice. Difficult choices involve painful sacrifices, advance planning or just plain guts.

I make a choice, every single morning, when I wake up, make a pot of coffee, then sit down in front of a computer and start to read, then type.  My choice isn’t going to win me any robes.  It’s not going to get me a chair at Harvard. It isn’t going to earn me a friggin’ dime.  My choice is to exist.

I’m going to die one of these days. Maybe sooner rather than later, and likely sooner than most of my readers. I’ll be damned if I die without having anything to show I was here.  I lack the skills to build the Taj Mahal, or write a symphony, or create a tourbillon.  But I can type words onto a computer screen fast enough to put some ideas on virtual paper that serve to demonstrate, at least for a day, that I was here.

Most of my enemies don’t exist.  They can complain about me all they want, disagree with me and be angry with me until spittle flies out of their mouths.  They can impute evil motives to me and this blawg to anybody who will listen.  I don’t care.

No, this isn’t about Jerry Sandusky, but Utah lawprof cum former federal judge Paul Cassell.  It started with a post by  Doug Berman to a  new article on SSRN.  While the link was as neutral as could be, lacking even the most underwhelming adjective of “interesting,” the name of the article began with “Avenging Amy,” an  inflammatory beginning if ever there was one.

The article was written by Steven Joffee, an unfamiliar name. Even more curious, there was nothing on SSRN to suggest the writer’s scholarly affiliation, though this article was to be published in the Whittier Journal of Child and Family Advocacy, whatever that is.  The abstract of the article included verbiage that couldn’t be ignored:

Although Congress intended for Section 2259 to apply in any case in which a victim has “suffered harm” as a result of a defendant’s conduct, its inclusion of the term “proximate result” in the Act’s catchall loss provision has created much confusion amongst federal courts. As a result of this confusion, several courts have simply ignored the mandatory language of Section 2259 and have flatly refused to award victims of child pornography with restitution, ultimately rendering the Act mere rhetoric.

To resolve this debate, and to end the further victimization of child pornography victims by courts refusing to grant restitution, the United States Supreme Court should grant certiorari to resolve this issue, or alternatively, Congress should amend the Act to make the requisite level of causation more clear. Only by resolving this issue will Congress’ intent to provide all victims harmed by child pornography with full compensation be achieved, ensuring that those who harm the “Amys” of this world will be held fully responsible for their abhorrent conduct. (Emphasis added.)

Former criminal defense lawyer cum television star turned prosecutor, Ken Lammers, presents an homage to truckers in a video showing how a few semis can really screw up a decent low speed escape from the clutches of The Man. 

The only good news for the driver of the fleeing vehicle is that the trucker’s deliberate and reckless use of his tractor trailer to block his escape route seems likely to give rise to a pretty decent lawsuit, which he can spend at his leisure when his sentence is over.

In the meantime, it seems to me only fair to counter Lammers’ Ode to Truckers who have forsaken their “watch out for smokey” heritage for their junior airmen wings with a video of a different sort.



There may not always be two sides to every story, but there’s always a song to bring comfort to those on the wrong side of a crash with a semi.

Every wonder what makes the fad of “drug courts” really special? Via the New York Law Journal, the Westchester County Town of Greenburgh offers a glimpse, prompting the state Office of Court Administration to remove all cases before the court.

The shift in cases occurred after Peter H. Tilem of Tilem & Campbell in White Plains complained of the town drug court’s practices in which the judges apparently presided over the same matters simultaneously and in which a “team” was allowed to vote on such issues as whether an attorney admitted in New York State could practice in the Greenburgh drug court, and whether a defendant should be released on bail.

Bet you didn’t know about the “team” approach to criminal law.  Bet you didn’t know that the “team” had to give you the old “okey-dokey” before you could represent a defendant before the team. And bet there’s more you didn’t know. 

Brooke Ahern pleaded to a petit larceny and was diverted to drug court. She warranted, but returned on her own, only to be remanded without a hearing. So she got a lawyer.  Smart move in most courts. In Greenburgh, however, representation by counsel isn’t necessarily appreciated.

Several days later, Ms. Ahern appeared with Mr. Tilem in Greenburgh drug court, where Justices Forster and Friedman were presiding simultaneously, with one on the bench and the other in the jury box, according to court records.

Mr. Tilem said in an affirmation, supported by a verified petition from his client, that he was told by Justice Forster that he was not admitted to practice in the Greenburgh drug court and the matter was adjourned for nearly a month while Ms. Ahern was in jail. Ultimately, a “team” that included the judges and two attorneys, Bernard Bacharach, the primary drug court attorney, and Alan J. Tomaselli, the alternate drug court attorney, voted to permit Mr. Tilem to represent his client, according to court records.

The records show that without a hearing, the team, along with Mr. Tilem, deadlocked 3-3 on whether Ms. Ahern should be immediately sentenced to a year in jail. Mr. Tilem said he voted against putting his client in jail, resulting in a 3-3 tie.

However, he said he was then asked to leave the room, and when he returned learned that his client was to be sentenced immediately.

“Presumably, with me out of the courtroom the vote was 3-2,” Mr. Tilem said in his affirmation.

My apologies to John Caher for such a lengthy quote, but the background (combined with his good writing) calls for the details.  Does any of this strike any lawyer as even remotely familiar?  Isn’t this how courts typically function, send the lawyer out of the room (assuming the team has deigned to allow him in at all) and then vote to send the defendant to jail?

On what planet does this happen?  Is everybody in this court on drugs?

The only conceivable rationale comes from the nature of drug courts, an invention intended to help criminal defendants overcome drug dependency and deal with their criminal conduct as more (not entirely, but more) as a medical problem than a criminal one.  Standing alone, this sounds just hunky-dory.

But it doesn’t stand alone.  It takes a village, or in this case a team, to really screw things up and undermine every constitutional mandate there is.  And this team did exactly that. 

The rationale for the Greenburgh drug court, which isn’t a recognized drug court under the state system but operating under a federal grant, which apparently meant to the judges of the court that they were free to do whatever popped into their mind.

“We as a group vote on everything and we have our procedures and we follow them,” she said. “Our drug court is not part of OCA and we have our own grant and our own rules and there is no court above who supervises us. Nothing happened in this case that was different, other than private counsel came in and made a lot of noise.”

Damn those noisy lawyers, making a big stink about the fact that the court was run like a private fiefdom, where fealty was due a couple of judges in kangaroo suits.  After all, if the court gets federal money, doesn’t that mean they get to create their own rules?  It’s not like the feds, passing out grants, expects anything of them.

That the Office of Court Administration, upon learning that the Greenburgh drug court defied essentially every precept of constitutional procedure familiar to a first year law student, is to their credit.  It’s not so great that it they had no clue that a court functioning in the State of New York utterly ignored law and procedure until “noisy” Peter Tilem spilled the beans.  After all, they were sending recalcitrant defendants to jail, likely prison as well, and yet nobody had the slightest idea how they managed to arrive at these sentences?

Advocates of drug courts will note that not all courts function like this, that most are both highly professional and deeply caring about the welfare of diverted defendants, cleaning them up and returning them to society as law-abiding citizens who have overcome a drug habit. 

Nice as this sounds, and even if its true, it remains a significant problem that defendants whose conduct is guided by drug dependency are almost invariably required to forego basic rights in exchange for the concession of rehabilitation rather than incarceration.  Why?  Why must a defendant give up his constitutional rights in the process before being offered rehab in the end.  If the concern, as it;s claimed to be, of drug courts is to stop the cycle of crime and dependency by treating addicted defendants, to what good end is there in putting them in jail rather than rehab because they asserted their constitutional rights in the process?

But it’s got to be a bargain if you want to get the benefit. To be given rehabilitation rather than incarceration, even if the former is obviously more appropriate than the latter, defendants have to pay with their constitutional rights.  In Greenburgh, the price was way too high.  In other drug courts, the bargain may not be as bad, but it’s still a trade-off of constitutional rights for drug treatment. 

Engage authentically.  And apparently, they did, even though they wear a gun and shield on duty.  No, they aren’t looking to manufacture the appearance of expertise to get your business, but merely to share the deep thoughts and feelings that cops have when civilians aren’t around.  Except when you post it on Facebook, civilians are around, even if only virtually.  It’s like being best friends with a cop, provided your best friend is outrageous racist, hates your guts and thinks you’re garbage who ought to die.

From the New York Times :

They called people “animals” and “savages.” One comment said, “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.”

Hearing New York police officers speak publicly but candidly about one another and the people they police is rare indeed, especially with their names attached. But for a few days in September, a raw and rude conversation among officers was on Facebook for the world to see — until it vanished for unknown reasons.

For unknown reasons? Fair enough, Let’s take a wild guess then.  They were talking about the West Indian American Day Parade in Brooklyn.  Some parade details, like St. Patrick’s Day, cops like. Others, like the West Indian Day Parade, not so much.  And they authentically engaged about it. A lot.

The comments in the online group, which grew over a few days to some 1,200 members, were at times so offensive in referring to West Indian and African-American neighborhoods that some participants warned others to beware how their words might be taken in a public setting open to Internal Affairs “rats.”  

But some of the people who posted comments seemed emboldened by Facebook’s freewheeling atmosphere. “Let them kill each other,” wrote one of the Facebook members who posted comments under a name that matched that of a police officer.

And these are the comments that are printable in a family paper. They merely express hatred and the desire to see them all die. 

“Welcome to the Liberal NYC Gale,” said another, “where if the cops sneeze too loud they get investigated for excessive force but the ‘civilians’ can run around like savages and there are no repercussions.”

“They can keep the forced overtime,” said one writer, adding that the safety of officers comes “before the animals.”  

Wrote another: “Bloodbath!!! The worst detail to work.”

How bad must it be for cops to be willing to turn away overtime, their very lifeblood?  That it turns out the cops think blacks are subhuman would be viewed with outrage and disgust by most of us, outsiders though we are, but there’s a far more insidious (yes, it can get more insidious) than mere racial hatred.

“Filth,” wrote a commenter who identified himself as Nick Virgilio, another participant whose name matched that of a police officer. “It’s not racist if it’s true,” yet another wrote.

It’s that last quote that is most revealing.  There isn’t going to be any ebony and ivory moment here. The writer knows that the expressions of hatred toward a race fall under the rubric of “racism,” and that the words are not supposed to be spoken, but deep down, deep in their heart of hearts, they know something that the rest of us don’t, and perhaps never will. They know it’s true.

 
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

This isn’t to say that every cop in New York City, or your city, or any other city, is outrageously racist.  There are a lot of cops and they hold diverse views, just like everyone else.  But cops see everyone who doesn’t have a shield differently. We, the shieldless, are the “them” to their “us.”  Their eyes see suspicion everywhere. Their eyes see all the bad, whether real or imagined.  And oftentimes it’s real.

That every cop isn’t racist, however, doesn’t alter the pervasive groupthink, a cultural view of people where they believe they know better than we do. A cultural view that relies on our deluding ourselves with some Utopian vision of equality and racial love, when their truth is they’re animals, savages.  It’s far easier to beat an animal. It’s harder to tell lies that put someone in prison for life when you see them as human beings.

Even those police officers who don’t hate people because of the color of their skin or their national origin struggle to see “them” as real people.  Some win the struggle. Most don’t.

Social Media pundits talk about the great wonders of the new medium, how it enables so many wondrous connections that could never before be made.  If we ignore the self-serving adjectives, we can appreciate the point when something like this shows up on Facebook.  Unless you have the opportunity to sit in on a group of cops sipping some brewskis after they’ve completed an overtime shift, you will never hear such frank talk about the job.

“I say have the parade one more year,” wrote a commenter who identified himself as Dan Rodney, “and when they all gather drop a bomb and wipe them all out.”

Now that they know that social media isn’t private enough to keep the animals (or animal lovers) out, they may never have another Facebook discussion like this one again.  Or at least not with names attached. So seize this opportunity to get a better feeling for who the real person is behind the badge.  And maybe it will provide a better understanding of why the officer would be inclined to do what he did to your client, friend, son or daughter. 

We may never get a chance to watch New York’s Finest authentically engage like this well again.  

 

When Gillian Hadfield raised the possibility of lawyers working out of Walmart, she expected the negative backlash to be quick and severe.   She was surprised when I thought she was on to something.  A small firm in Boynton Beach, Florida, took it to the next level.

Just south of the food court and past the $15 “designer style” jewelry stand is an unusual mall kiosk staffed not with vendors hawking holiday ware but attorneys offering legal advice.

The Law Booth at the Boynton Beach Mall was opened Nov. 1 by three Palm Beach County attorneys who said they saw a need for legal counseling outside normal business hours and the traditional office setting.

Founded by Melva Rozier, Richard Carey and Paul Burkhart, the stand, which sits outside American Eagle Outfitters, is typically open from about 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. with “Walmart”-priced advice on legal matters including foreclosure, bankruptcy, estate planning and family law.

Why not?  If the mall is where the people are, then there is no good reason why lawyers shouldn’t be there as well. We serve people.  Ease of use has never been a strong suit of the profession, and the Law Booth changes that. While the fees charged may seem low to most of us, if they satisfy the needs of Rozier, Carey and Burkhart, then that’s all that matters.  That they also happen to be remarkably affordable is wonderful.

My pal, Elie Mystal at  Above the Law found this story impossible to pass, though he includes the sober views of  South Florida Lawyers Blog praising the idea, which entitles him to have some fun.

It’s the notion of “immediate” help that I think bothers me most of all. Legal actions should only be undertaken after careful reflection — you shouldn’t be buying legal services on impulse. “Ooh, we need some potholders, a new step ladder for Uncle Jim, and we should buy a lawyer to sue your bitch of an ex-wife!”

The ABA Journal, tipping its bowler to 800 pound gorilla ATL while completely ignoring the always thoughtful South Florida Lawyers, jumped on the story with this lede:

Shoppers at the Boynton Beach Mall in Florida can get some legal counseling during their quest for the perfect holiday gift.

I can’t help but wonder why they omitted the obvious, that the perfect holiday gift for a lawyer, according to the ABA Journal, is an iPad? It’s such a natural, given their unapologetic adoration of anything electronic.  Their support for Mall Law, however, isn’t nearly so clear.

There may well be some nuts and bolts issues to work out when law is practiced in a kiosk, such as how to keep the loose 8-year-old from sticking his head into a private consultation to see if there some cool spinny-type chair inside to play with.  There’s the question of whether the lawyers involved are sufficiently versed to address every question a mall-dweller might ask.  And then there’s the emergency, when mall cop’s Segway runs down Pandora purchaser.

Kidding aside, this may fall a tad short of brilliant, but it’s most definitely real, and satisfies a very real need, conveniently, inexpensively and promptly.  So you say it’s not sufficiently dignified? Hardly.  While other strut down the boulevard in hotpants to persuade potential clients to give them a whirl, these lawyers are doing three things that others are not.

• They’re providing real legal services to people who need them.
• They’re providing real legal services at a cost that ordinary people can afford.
• They’re providing real legal services.

These are great things, and I applaud them.

Would Lenore Zimmerman lie?

Probably not. When she says that she was strip searched at JFK airport by two TSA agents, who required her to remove her pants and bloomers, it’s unimaginable that she was making it up.  But there’s a problem.  There’s no video of it happening.  She was taken to a private room, where no one else could see what happened.  If there is a video of what happened inside the room, it hasn’t been made public.

Therefore, it never happened.  That’s the TSA’s position, and they’re sticking to it.

That’s not to say that TSA Bob is a heartless fellow.

You may have heard in the news about an elderly woman who is stating she was strip searched at New York’s JFK airport by TSA officers. TSA contacted the passenger to apologize that she feels she had an unpleasant screening experience; however, TSA does not include strip searches in its protocols and a strip search did not occur in this case.

By using bold faced type, TSA Bob makes it absolutely clear that a strip search could not possibly have happened since the TSA doesn’t do such things.  Whew. Dodged a bullet there.

Brian Tannebaum questions the efficacy of even noticing Lenore Zimmerman’s complaint.

I write not to express outrage at the notion that airport security would ask some old lady to take her pants off, I write to ask what the point is in even talking about it?

What’s the point of pounding the keyboard to rant about the unbelievable power of TSA and the cowards in Congress who allow it to continue?

Very little will ever change.

Perhaps he would feel differently if there was a video of this nice old woman without her knickers.  While the existence of video, showing the many things that never, ever happened before the existence of video, informs us that sometimes the very people we think are there to protect us behave very badly, we’ve grown jaded.  We have plenty of video now to show that police lie, beat the crap out of people for no good reason, even kill people needlessly and then lie to cover it up.  We know this because we have video conclusively proving it.

There is no one in America with a computer who can credibly deny these things happen.  They can rationalize why it’s not consequential, whether because the person deserved it anyway, or it’s the price we have to pay for self-preservation, or cops and TSA agents have a very difficult job and it’s too much to expect them to be perfect.  These are very forgiving people.

But the need to rationalize wrong happens only when we’re forced to confront it.  Damn those videos.  Here, there is no video, and thus nothing to stop TSA Bob from doing what government has done successfully forever. Deny it ever happened.

But TSA Bob is a shrewd fellow, well-trained in the magic of marketing, and he seizes the opportunity to remind us that, even though this never happened, there are excellent reasons why it should.

The passenger opted out of advanced imaging technology screening, requested a pat-down and told the officers that she was wearing a back brace or support belt which required private screening.

Private screening was conducted by two female officers. The item was removed, rescreened, and the passenger was cleared for travel. Nothing unusual was depicted on the CCTV as the passenger and two female officers entered and exited the room. The wheelchair attendant assisted the passenger in departing the checkpoint area for the gate.

Terrorists remain focused on attacking transportation through tactics such as concealing explosives under clothing. Further, as evidenced by the Christmas Day 2009 attempted bombing, concealed anomalies under clothing must continue to be resolved and cleared as part of the screening process to ensure the item does not pose a threat to the safety of the traveling public. Terrorists and their targets may also range in age. Read here about a group of elderly men who were planning on using toxic ricin against U.S. citizens, U.S government and officials.

Anyone.  Anyone can be a threat, a terrorist, bent on destruction.  Old women. toddlers, anyone.  Whether it’s a bomb planted in a shoe, or in underwear, or even a bodily crevice.  Why would you question the will of a terrorist, a person who has already made the choice of giving up their life to destroy ours, from having a bomb implanted deep within their anus?  It could happen, and when the TSA finds it and stops it, you will be extremely thankful that it wasn’t you or your child on that plane that would have exploded but for the heroic vigilance of the TSA.

But the TSA doesn’t make airplane passengers remove their old lady undergarments.  It is not included in its protocols.  It didn’t happen, and there’s no video to show otherwise.

So Lenore Zimmerman, who seems to be a lovely woman from Long Island, a snowbird flying to Florida to escape the harsh northern winters that chills her very bones, must have been terribly confused.  Perhaps she had a senior moment. Maybe she’s antagonistic toward the government.  Even anarchists grow old, you know.  This could be her way of trying to embarrass the TSA, by fabricating a story of being strip searched at JFK Airport when protocols preclude it from being possible.  

Without a video, we can never be certain that Lenore Zimmerman isn’t one of them.  But if we had a video, unsavory as the image of Ms. Zimmerman’s knickerless lower torso might be, would it change anything?   It hasn’t thus far.

Chicken Little was wrong. It was just an acorn, and so we ridicule those who appear to strike an hysterical tone about the end of times.  The sky isn’t falling.  The sky could never fall. How ridiculous to run around yelling “the sky is falling.”  Yet every once in a while, very rarely but every once in a while, something happens that very well bring the sky down.  Now may be such a time.

Unlike the more curious marketing names attached to legislation designed to convince the public that a law does the opposite of what its text says, or a law honors some bizarrely unusual yet horrible death of a child by criminalizing quasi-related routine conduct, this bill carries a pedestrian title,  the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (S.1867).  Nothing scary at all. Just housekeeping stuff.

Yet buried within its body are words that have pushed Mark Bennett to the extreme :

Some senators think that indefinite detention without due process of Americans arrested in America was allowed before the passage of the NDAA (and that’s just their interpretation of the law that they allow us to know about).

Do you trust the government with such power? You shouldn’t.

Under Subtitle D, which hardly sounds threatening, you will find:

Detainee Matters:

• Section 1031 – Affirmation of the authority of authority of the Armed Forces of the US to detain covered persons pursuant to the authorization for the use of military force,


• Section 1032 – Requirement for military custody.

The powers given by Congress to the Executive Branch are both shocking and completely understandable at the same time.  As terrorism replaced communism as our national nemesis, we’ve embraced our government’s measures of protection.  We are Americans, and it is fundamental to our belief system that our government was conceived so that it would serve the People in perpetuity.  From our earliest days in school, platitudes are drilled into our heads that make us secure in our belief that we are Exceptional.  We, alone amongst regimes, systems and economies, are Free, and nothing can ever change that.

You might think, it could never happen here. Why? Once the legislative branch has given the executive branch the power, what’s to stop the executive from using it?

We like to pretend that we’re better than that, that our form of government makes us free, but our elected representatives have, by and large, done fuck all to preserve the very freedoms that made America.

Over time, the word “terrorism” grew an appendage, the word “homegrown.”  In the past decade, a few men have been accused of being terrorists, of desiring to do what terrorists desire to do.  We’ve been told how fortunate we are that the government found them, infiltrated their world, provided them with the wherewithal to go from irrational oddball to manifest killer but for the lack of a bomb, and then sprung the trap. We are saved.

Senator Carl Levin, a liberal Democrat from Michigan, chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee.  He sponsored this bill.  There’s neither basis nor need to attribute any malevolent intent to Sen. Levin.  It’s acceptable to believe that he means well, intends only to protect us from the threat of terrorism.  It’s safe to assume that Sen. Levin wants to do whatever he can to make sure that no one is ever harmed by a terrorist attack.  He believes that our government would never use its power improperly.  He believes in America.

The bill authorizes the President to declare someone a terrorist.  It authorizes the military to take custody of the terrorist, even if he’s on American soil.  That’s because the terrorists have “brought the battlefield to us.” This is a fine rhetorical flourish of the sort that stirs American souls. How dare they bring the battlefield to our shores, to threaten our homes and families.  We are Americans, and we won’t let that happen without a fight.

The  Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibited the government from using the military to enforce law on our soil.  The military was to fight wars abroad. American law enforcement was to deal with wrongs committed at home.  But that was during Reconstruction, many enemies ago. You will no doubt remember that 9/11 changed everything, as we’ve been told with regularity.

Once seized, terrorists can be held indefinitely without trial.  They are not mere violators of our laws, but terrorists.  They are our enemy in a war.  Had 9/11 not occurred, we might have been hard-pressed to believe that the word “war” could be used to describe these actions, not be a sovereign or uniformed cadre of warriors, but fanatics prepared to blow themselves up, to blow their children up, in order to blow us up. They shattered our sense of invincibility by taking down the Twin Towers, making us feel less Exceptional. But we are Americans, and we could not let that happen.

In the ten years that followed, many taboos have been broken, with the grudging approval of those upon whose judgment we trust.  Step by step, we hear of their falling, but understand that it’s just a small step, made necessary by our enemy’s insidious genius and heartless tenacity. We bow our heads, but realize that we must give a little bit more to be safe.  Freedom isnt free, and we surrender a bit of our convenience to the greater good of winning the war and protecting our fellow Americans.

This step, giving our President the power to declare a person a terrorist, and thereby remove him from all the protections and freedoms that we hold sacred, is a small one.  It’s really just a variation on a theme that has been happening over the past ten years, as we’ve come to accept that a person who wants to blow up a plane is entirely different than a sad, sick person who takes a gun and shoots many students, or a workplace filled with people.  That’s because he’s a terrorist, and we know this because the government says so.

This law will enable the government to place the label of terrorist on any person of its choosing and, by doing so, authorize the person’s effective disappearance from our world.  As long as we trust the President, whether this one or another one who may someday take office, to never be wrong, to never act for a purpose other than our protection from terrorist threat, to never abuse the authority or be guided by an excess of caution or accept the bad advice of another, then no law can undermine our American freedoms.

We are exceptional.  Our government is the best ever created. It can never break through the wall created by the founding fathers to assure our freedoms in perpetuity.  Not unless we, the People, allow it.

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?