freedombunker--2019-02-06--Alabama Cop Justified in Killing Innocent Man Says State Attorney General

Alabama Cop ‘Justified’ in Killing Innocent Man, Says State Attorney General

The Hoover, Alabama, police officer who killed the wrong man in a mall on Thanksgiving Day won't face criminal charges for his actions. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall's office says the officer was "justified" in shooting 21-year-old Emantic "E.J." Bradford, Jr.  In the immediate aftermath of the incident, police had a difficult time getting their story straight. There had been a shooting at the mall that injured 18-year-old Brian Wilson and a 12-year-old bystander, Molly Davis. Bradford was not involved in that shooting, but at some point, he took his gun out. Other shoppers may have done the same, Al.com reported in late November. Bejmanin Crump, an attorney for Bradford's family, has suggested Bradford was trying to help people in the midst of the chaos following the shooting.  Bradford ended up being shot and killed by a Hoover Police officer who was on duty at the mall. Police initially claimed Bradford was the suspected shooter, and then said less than two days later that he probably wasn't. Police eventually arrested a different suspect, Erron Martez Dequan Brown, who claims he shot Brian Wilson in self-defense, according to a report Marshall's office released yesterday.  That 24-page report explains why the unidentified cop who killed Bradford, referred to as "Officer 1," won't face charges. "Officer 1 reasonably exercised his official duties, powers, or functions when he shot," the report reads. "Accordingly, Alabama law declares his action 'justified and not criminal.'"  The report includes testimony from multiple witnesses and police. Marshall's office also released partial surveillance footage of both shootings taken from two nearby stores. In describing the footage, the report reads:  It's difficult to see the first shooting. However, the footage does show the scene turning chaotic in its aftermath. Brown appears to move away from the scene before starting to go the other way. Bradford only makes it a few steps before he drops to the ground, and a small black object appears to fall from his grasp. The footage can be seen below:  "I observed two males who were not running away, but, instead, were standing near the railing in front of FootAction," Officer 1 said in a written statement. "Next, I observed an armed suspect quickly moving towards the two males standing near the railing. The suspect was advancing on the two males and had a black handgun in his right hand. I fired my duty weapon at the armed suspect to stop him." After shooting Bradford, Officer 1 said he "asked the uninjured male…if the suspect was the only shooter. I understood an affirmative response to my last question."  In spoken testimony, Officer 1 said he thought Bradford "was going to murder Brian Wilson and AC," according to the report. His body camera was in standby mode until after he shot Bradford.  Officer 1's partner at the time, identified as "Officer 2," backed up Officer 1's testimony. "Officer 2 stated that, at the time, he believed E.J. Bradford had shot Brian Wilson," the report reads.  The report also cited three civilian witnesses. Two of those witnesses said they believed Bradford to be the shooter, though neither witnessed the original shooting. (They simply heard gunshots.) Both of those witnesses said they heard Officer 1 tell Bradford to drop his weapon three times before shooting him. But according to the report, "Officer 1 stated that he did not give any commands due to the imminent nature of the threat." The report said it's "unclear" whether he actually warned Bradford to put his gun on the ground or not. A third witness, meanwhile, simply "stated that she saw a police officer shoot E.J. Bradford three times."  An official autopsy from the Jefferson County Coroner Medical Examiner's Office did indeed say Bradford was hit three times, seemingly confirming much of what an independent autopsy had previously concluded. Bradford was shot once in the back of the head, once in the neck, and once above his right buttock, the official autopsy found.  The report said Officer 1 was ultimately justified in shooting Bradford because he "acted as a reasonable officer would have under the circumstances" and because he "acted in accordance with nationally-accepted standards for 'active shooter' scenarios."  But Bradford's family isn't buying it. "I'm outraged," Bradford's mother, April Pipkins, told The New York Times. "In no way was justice served," she added. Another witness, Ashlyn McMillan, told the Times that Bradford was helping get shoppers to safety in the first shooting's aftermath.  "It is outrageous and beyond comprehension that the Alabama Attorney General has concluded that it was reasonable for a trained law enforcement officer to fatally shoot an innocent civilian, one whose only action was an attempt to help protect the public and whose only 'crime' was being black," Crump said in a statement emailed to media outlets. Crump claims the footage released by Marshall's office does not tell the whole story, and he's calling for the "full, unedited video" to be "released immediately."  At a preliminary court hearing earlier this month, Special Agent Pete Acosta of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, which investigated the case, testified that Wilson had hit Brown, prompting Brown to shoot him. It's not clear if Bradford knew Brown, but they appear to have been connected by a mutual friend, Robert Poole, who also testified at the hearing, according to Al.com. Poole said he was with Brown and another friend at the mall when Bradford asked about his whereabouts over Facebook. Bradford and Wilson, who attended the same high school as Poole, then showed up at the mall prior to the shooting.  Clearly, there are still may questions left unanswered about what led to that first shooting. Bradford, however, does not appear to have done anything wrong. And clearly, he was not responsible for the original shooting. According to Marshall's report, "there is no evidence that" Bradford's gun "was fired at the incident scene," though he did chamber a round prior to being shot.  It's also worth noting that the attorney general's report suggests Officer 1 was partly justified because of the supposed threat Bradford posed, even though there's no evidence he had or was about to engage in any wrongdoing. The report reads:  In other words, Officer 1 was justified in killing Bradford for exercising his Second Amendment right to carry a firearm. (Alabama is an open-carry state, and Bradford's father has claimed Bradford has a permit for his gun.) The report suggests that even if Officer 1 did not think Bradford was the shooter, he was right to take him down because he was carrying a weapon. The attorney general's office is operating under the assumption that citizens should not take action to protect themselves and/or others in situations like these.  We saw this type of thinking play out in Chicago last November. An armed security guard returned fire on an active shooter and eventually pinned him to the ground. But the guard was shot and killed when police arrived on the scene and thought he was the bad guy.  As I've previously written, neither man deserved to die, and both actually appear to have been the proverbial "good guy with a gun." The fact that police shot first and asked questions later just makes their deaths all the more tragic.


freedombunker--2019-04-11--He Was Tased Arrested and Totally Innocent Now Hes Suing

He Was Tased, Arrested and Totally Innocent. Now He’s Suing.

Nate Carter is bringing a $3 million lawsuit against the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, its police department, and the officer responsible for his tasing and wrongful arrest.  According to the complaint, the April 2018 incident began when police responded to a 911 call about a man threatening the caller with a gun. The caller described the suspect as a black man with short hair, who was heavy-set and wearing green and black pants.  The suspect had fled by the time police arrived. Instead, they saw Carter, who was wearing a purple t-shirt and black shorts. Officer Cody Thomas asked Carter to identify himself. Carter, who said he was checking his mail outside, responded that Thomas was not welcome to come to his house. The situation escalated with Thomas telling Carter, "How about you watch your mouth before your ass gets thrown in the back of my car."  Thomas pulled out a Taser and threatened to shoot Carter's "fucking dog," which was barking in the front yard. Carter attempted to go into his house, at which point Thomas shot Carter in the back with his taser, causing him to fall on his front porch. Carter managed to make his way inside, and Thomas called for backup. Carter then re-emerged from his home with his family while several officers, including Thomas, pointed guns and tasers toward Carter, his family, and his dog. After the family was out of the way, the officers moved to arrest Carter.  Thomas later claimed that Carter was standing in the street and "bolted" prior to the incident. He charged Carter with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Those charges were thrown out by a judge in November and Carter is now suing.  This is not the first incident involving Officer Thomas. In February 2018, Thomas and other officers entered the home of Dale Edmonds after a neighbor told emergency services that someone was sitting in a black vehicle in Edmonds' driveway. The person in the vehicle was a Department of Child Services agent who was waiting while a second agent was meeting with Edmonds inside of the house. Though the agent explained to officers the purpose of their trip, Thomas and others entered the house through the backdoor without a warrant. The officers led Edmonds, his housemate, and the agent outside of the house at gunpoint, but not before Thomas "manhandled" Edmonds, who was recovering from a gunshot wound.  Robin Flores, an attorney and former police officer who works on police brutality cases, is representing Carter. Their suit argues that the city "has long-established patterns of overlooking or providing excuses and reasons to justify the misconduct of its officers." Flores told Reason that the complaint highlights how the city fails to "discipline and supervise" officers. The complaint lists other reports of bad policing by Chattanooga police dating back to 2003, including excessive force, lingering investigations, domestic abuse, and sexual harassment.  Flores told Reason that the Supreme Court has ruled that the language Carter used during his arrest is a form of protected speech. In 1974, the court ruled against a Louisiana statute that criminalized the use of obscene language while an officer is performing their duties. Justices argued that the law was too broad to fit within the legal definition of "fighting words" and had the potential to be abused in instances lacking a valid reason for an arrest.  Though Thomas' body camera was rolling during the incident, he turned his cruiser's dash camera off in violation of the department's policy. At one point, Thomas' hand covers his body camera. The complaint argues that this was done either in an attempt to turn it off or conceal his interaction with Carter.  Flores says that the footage available in both Carter's case and in the Edmonds case is "critical enough to bring a claim" against Thomas, the department, and the city. In other instances, footage has been enough to drop charges and reopen the cases of offending officers. He also mentions another case where he dismissed a suit after his client's version of events did not match the camera footage. This, he says, also protects police officers.


freedombunker--2019-04-30--Chicago Impounds Innocent Peoples Cars and Soaks Them in Fines Now Its Getting Sued

Chicago Impounds Innocent People’s Cars and Soaks Them in Fines. Now It’s Getting Sued

Chicago impounds thousands of people's cars a year, including cars owned by people who have committed no crime, and forces them through an expensive, bureaucratic maze to get their car back. This process that violates residents' constitutional rights, according to a new lawsuit filed against the city Monday evening.  The Institute for Justice filed a class-action lawsuit in Illinois state court alleging that Chicago's impound program violates residents' guarantee of due process, as well as protections against excessive fines and unreasonable seizures, under both the Illinois and U.S. constitutions.  "Owners find themselves in a labyrinthine impound system that is plagued by serious procedural flaws," the suit says. "Even innocent owners get caught up in this system, facing hefty fines and fees when someone else used their car to commit a crime without the car owner's knowledge."  A Reason investigation published last year described how Chicago's punitive impound program soaks people in fines and fees and deprives them indefinitely of their transportation, whether or not they actually committed an offense, in an effort to reduce its massive annual budget deficits. It also operates independently from the state's courts, meaning that even in cases where a defendant beats a criminal charge and/or a civil asset forfeiture case, they can still be found liable for thousands of dollars in fines and storage fees, and have their cars held until they pay or relinquish them to the city, by Chicago.  That's exactly what happened to Spencer Byrd, a 51-year-old resident of Harvey, Illinois whose impound case was featured by Reason and is now a named plaintiff in the Institute for Justice lawsuit.  Byrd, a part-time auto mechanic says he was giving a client a lift in his 1996 Cadillac DeVille one evening in June, 2016, when he was pulled over by Chicago police and searched. Byrd was clean, but his passenger, a man he says he'd never met before, had heroin in his pocket.  The police released Byrd without charging him with a crime, but his car was seized and dually claimed by both the Cook County State Attorney's Office and the city of Chicago. He's been fighting for nearly three years to get it back.  A state judge ordered Byrd's car released after he filed a financial hardship motion, but the city refused to return it, claiming he owed money under the city's municipal code.  Even after a state judge declared Byrd innocent in the civil forfeiture case against his Cadillac in Illinois state court, he was still found liable for violating Chicago's municipal code in the city's administrative hearings court, which has a low standard of evidence and almost no procedural protections for defendants.  In the meantime, Byrd's livelihood has suffered. His primary trade is carpentry, but his tools have been locked in his car since it was impounded. The city has refused to let him retrieve them, or his car, until he pays his accumulated fines and fees, which according to the lawsuit now stand at more than $17,000.  "If you do wrong, fine, but I didn't do nothing wrong," Byrd tells Reason. "I should have had my car released to me with no fines or anything—thank you, sorry for the inconvenience, and I'm on my merry way—instead of trying to get some type of revenue from me. I was proven innocent, and they still didn't want to act right."  Byrd is far from alone. A WBEZ analysis of Chicago's massive impound program found that in 2017 alone, the city impounded more than 22,000 cars for violations of its municipal code, which includes dozens of impoundable offenses ranging from drug possession to drag racing to having illegal fireworks.  The fines for those violations are steep, ranging from $500 to $3,000, and that doesn't include towing and storage fees, which accumulate at $20 a day for the first five days, and $35 a a day after that. Given that these cases can take weeks, if not months, to wind through the system, the fees can often exceed the fines themselves.  A Reason analysis of data from the Chicago Administrative Hearings Department showed Chicago fined motorists $17 million over a 12-month period between 2017 and 2018. About $10 million of those fines were for driving on a suspended license, and more than $3 million were for drug offenses like the one that resulted in the impoundment of Byrd's car.  Chicago can hold seized cars indefinitely. There is also no statute of limitations on impound fines and fees in Chicago. The debt can follow someone for life.  Chicago's impound racket is both easy to be ensnared in and hard to escape. There are only three narrow defenses for those whose cars are impounded for municipal violations in Chicago, and being an innocent owner isn't one of them.  "You're talking about a lot of money for something that you may not have been responsible for," says Institute for Justice attorney Diana Simpson. "The lack of an innocent owner protection really violates two different kinds of constitutional protections: both the excessive fines and fees protection, as well as due process."  The case of two of the other named plaintiffs in the Institute for Justice lawsuit, Jerome Davis and Veronica Walker-Davis, exemplify what critics say is the procedural nightmare people face when their cars are impounded in Chicago.  In May of last year, the couple dropped their 2006 Lexus off at a Chicago body shop following an accident. When the repairs dragged on for longer than expected, the shop first said it was waiting for parts, but eventually the couple learned the truth: An employee of the shop had driven their car on a suspended license and was pulled over. Their Lexus was now sitting at one of Chicago's six impound lots.  The city had never informed the couple that their car had been impounded, according to the lawsuit, and Veronica Walker-Davis had to travel in person to the city's administrative hearings building to request a hearing to fight the impoundment.  "I'm thinking that I'm just going to go and give a statement, show proof that my car wasn't in my possession, and everything will be okay, but in fact it turned into a nightmare," she says. "I felt like I was pretty much in The Twilight Zone."  The Twilight Zone is Room 110 in Chicago's administrative hearings building, a small courtroom where the city churns through its impound cases at a rate of roughly one every 10-15 minutes, five days a week.  Because the hearings are civil matters, not criminal, there is no right to a lawyer, and Walker-Davis found herself standing across from a lawyer for the city of Chicago. She tried to explain to the administrative hearing judge what had happened, but it made no difference. She was found liable for violating the city code and would have to pay nearly $2,500 to get their car out of impound.  "I felt like crap," she says. "I felt like a criminal."  In late March of this year, The couple managed to find a pro bono lawyer and negotiate their fine down to $1,170, but when they arrived with cash in hand, they were told the registration on their car had lapsed in the more than six months it had been sitting in an impound lot, and the city would not release it without a current registration.  Walker-Davis rushed the next day to get their registration renewed, which cost another $101, and got the city to agree to extend the deadline for the couple to pay their impound fines. In an email provided to Reason, a lawyer for Chicago's law department wrote to the couple: "The City will agree to extend the time for you to pay the settlement agreement to 4/12/19."  But when the couple showed up to retrieve their car on April 10, it was gone. The city had already sold it off. According to WBEZ, Chicago sells many of the cars it impounds for paltry amounts under $200, and almost all of them are sold to a single towing contractor.  The Institute for Justice is hoping that a recent Supreme Court case will bolster their claim that Chicago's rapacious impound program fines people so much and affords them so few avenues of escape that it violates the Constitution.  The Supreme Court ruled earlier this year in Timbs v. Indiana—the case of an Indiana man whose $42,000 Land Rover was seized for a drug felony—that states are bound by the Eighth Amendment's protections against excessive fines and fees. Although the Court did not define exactly what constitutes "excessive," it opened the door for civil liberties groups to press the issue.  In 2017, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Los Angeles' automatic 30-day impound law, ruling that it amounted to an unconstitutional seizure under the Fourth Amendment. While state and federal courts have repeatedly upheld Chicago's impound program in the past, the Institute for Justice hopes that it can build on the recent Supreme Court decision, as well as other cases that have addressed the government's use of fines and fees to generate revenue.  "We think we've got a really great chance, and we think the courts will agree with us that the system is just too much," Simpson says. "It's bringing in an entirely huge amount of money for the city of Chicago—there's about 22,000 cars that go in through this system each year—and that's not the role of the government."


freedombunker--2019-11-01--Federal Court Rules there is no Taking if the Police Destroy an Innocent Person’s House During a Law

Federal Court Rules there is no Taking if the Police Destroy an Innocent Person’s House During a Law Enforcement Operation

Earlier this week, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled that the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment does not require the government to compensate an innocent man for the destruction of his house during a police operation:  The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment requires the government to pay "just compensation" to property owners any time their land or other property is "taken" by the state. That includes many situations where the government destroys or damages the property in question, rather than appropriates it for its own use. For example, in 2013, the Supreme Court unanimously held that a taking can occur as a result of the government deliberately flooding land. As far back as 1872, the Court ruled that "where real estate is actually invaded by superinduced additions of water, earth, sand, or other material . . . so as to effectually destroy or impair its usefulness, it is a taking, within the meaning of the Constitution." It seems pretty obvious that the Lech home was "effectually destroy[ed]" by the grenades and other "material" that the Greenwood Village police fired at it.  Why then, did the court rule that no taking had occurred, thereby denying the Lech family any right to compensation? Because the destruction of the house occurred in the course of a law enforcement operation intended to promote "the safety of the public":  [A]s the [Supreme] Court explained in Mugler, when the state acts to preserve the "safety of the public," the state "is not, and, consistent[] with the existence and safety of organized society, cannot be, burdened with the condition that the state must compensate [affected property owners] for pecuniary losses they may sustain" in the process…. [W]hen the state acts pursuant to its police power, rather than the power of eminent domain, its actions do not constitute a taking for purposes of the Takings Clause. And we further hold that this distinction remains dispositive in cases that, like this one, involve the direct physical appropriation or invasion of private property….  The court is right to point out that this distinction between the "police power" and eminent domain has been adopted in many of previous takings decisions immunizing law enforcement agents from liability. The main relatively new aspect of this case is applying the distinction to the physical invasion or destruction of property, as well as to "regulatory takings" where the government merely restricts the owner's ability to use his or her land. But the rule still makes no sense, and should be done away with.  The distinction between "police power" and "eminent domain"—with only the latter leading to a taking—is a false dichotomy. In many situations, courts have ruled that a taking has occurred even if the government did not try to use eminent domain—its authority to formally condemn private property for public use. That includes numerous cases involving both regulatory takings and physical invasions.  The fact that the "police power" may have been involved does not normally immunize the government from takings liability. As the Lech decision notes, the police power extends to government actions "for the protection of public health, safety, and welfare." Modern jurisprudence defines these concepts very broadly. Yet, in many contexts, courts nonetheless routinely rule that takings have occurred even though the purpose of the law at issue was to protect health or safety. For example, in the classic 1922 case of Pennsylvania Coal v. Mahon, the Supreme Court ruled that a prohibition on mining can qualify as a taking, even though its purpose was to protect the safety of people and property on the surface. Similarly, environmental regulations can sometimes qualify as takings if they destroy enough of the value of a property, even though their purpose is often to promote health or safety.  Cases where the government does go through the formal process of eminent domain often also involve the protection of health or safety. For example, the condemnation of property to build a road can increase health and safety if the new road is safer than the old, and thereby reduces the rate of traffic accidents. Yet, the government could not use that fact to seize the property and build on it without paying compensation.  Even if the government has a good reason to seize or destroy private property, the Takings Clause requires payment of compensation. As the Supreme Court famously stated in Armstrong v. United States (1960), "[t]he Fifth Amendment's guarantee that private property shall not be taken for a public use without just compensation was designed to bar Government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole." The history and original meaning of the Takings Clause also supports the notion that exercises of the "police power" can be takings.  Outside the context of law-enforcement operations, the fact that the government was trying to promote public safety does not create blanket immunity from having to compensate innocent owners whose property is taken or destroyed in the process. There is no good reason to exempt law-enforcement operations from takings liability of the same kind that applies to other government actions that might enhance public safety.  Indeed, as the Supreme Court recognized in the 2015 Horne case, the Takings Clause was inspired in the first place in part by revulsion at both British and American forces' seizure of property during the colonial era and the Revolutionary War. Many of these British actions were, of course, undertaken for the purpose of enforcing British law against recalcitrant colonists.  One possible distinction between police operations and other government actions is that the former may require quick decisions in order to ensure the capture of suspects. Thus, it might be unnecessarily burdensome to require police officers to consider potential takings liability at such moment. But the need for rapid decision-making is by no means a universal trait of police actions that damage or destroy private property. As Radley Balko shows in his important book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, law enforcement operations using destructive military-style tactics are actually often planned in advance. Even when quick decision-making is needed, line officers do not have to weigh takings issues on the spot. Such matters could be considered in advance by their superiors in formulating general tactical guidelines for their subordinates.  If the use of various destructive tactics pays large dividends for public safety, then the government can continue using them, secure in the knowledge that the compensation paid was well worth the price. And it is only proper that the costs be borne by the general public whose safety these operations protect, not by innocent owners who had the misfortune of having their property destroyed because it was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  If, on the other hand, authorities find that they routinely end up paying compensation that far exceeds any plausible benefit arising from the use of such aggressive tactics, then they would be well-advised to issue stricter guidelines for the use of force by their officers. Perhaps they shouldn't seize and destroy as much property as they currently do.  In this way, Takings Clause liability not only promotes fairness for innocent property owners, but also can help increase the efficiency of law enforcement. The government will have an incentive to prevent them from undertaking destructive operations that harm the public more than they protect it.  The Supreme Court would do well to overrule this case and make clear that the Takings Clause protects innocent owners whose property is destroyed during the course of law enforcement operations. Unfortunately, I am far from optimistic that will actually happen.  In commenting on this case, Clark Neily of the Cato Institute points out that "With an honorable and ethical gov[ernment], the constitutional question never comes up because they [would] just compensate the owner as a matter of common decency." But, as Clark also notes, when it comes to government policy, honor, ethics, and common decency are often in short supply. Thomas Jefferson put it well: "in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution." Though Jefferson didn't always live up to this principle himself, it is valid all the same. The chains of the Takings Clause should bind law enforcement no less than other agents of the state.


hitandrun--2019-07-24--How Confirmation Bias Sends Innocent People to Prison

Last week an Oklahoma judge freed Corey Atchison, who had spent 28 years in prison for a murder he has always said he did not commit, after concluding that he had been convicted based on the false testimony of "purported eyewitnesses" who had been "coerced" by prosecutors. The next day, an Idaho judge exonerated Christopher Tapp, who had served more than two decades for rape and murder, after DNA evidence implicated another man, who confessed to the crimes.  While cases like these often feature wrongdoing by individual prosecutors and police officers, a new study suggests the problem is deeper. After analyzing 50 wrongful convictions and other investigative failures, Texas State criminologists Kim Rossmo and Joycelyn Pollock found that confirmation bias, reinforced by groupthink and strong incentives to quickly identify the perpetrators of highly publicized crimes, figures prominently in the mistakes that send innocent people to prison.  Once police decide they have the right suspect, Rossmo and Pollock report in the Northeastern University Law Review, they tend to develop "tunnel vision" that obscures other possibilities. They become focused on building a case against the person they've decided is guilty, ignore or minimize countervailing evidence, and interpret ambiguous evidence in a way that supports their initial conclusions.  After Angela Correa, a 15-year-old high school student in Peekskill, New York, was raped and strangled to death in 1989, for example, police quickly settled on one of her classmates, Jeffrey Deskovic, as their sole suspect. "Suffering from tunnel vision, detectives pursued a single-minded course of action designed to get Deskovic to confess," Rossmo and Pollock write. "Police did not look for other suspects despite the presence of exculpatory physical evidence. In a classic confirmation bias pattern, detectives changed their theory of the case when the DNA test results came back excluding Deskovic."  Deskovic was convicted in 1990 based on a false confession he later retracted. For years the Westchester County district attorney, Jeanine Pirro, now a Fox News host who opines on justice, rejected Deskovic's requests to compare the DNA evidence against a criminal database. Deskovic was not exonerated until 2006, after he had served 16 years in prison, when a new D.A. approved testing that identified the actual perpetrator.  Christopher Tapp's conviction also was based on a false confession that was contradicted by DNA evidence, the pattern in about a third of the 367 cases in which the Innocence Project has used such evidence to clear people who were wrongly convicted. "Interrogations are not a quest for information," observes the Innocence Project's Vanessa Potkin. "The purpose is to get an admission."  In another case that Rossmo and Pollock examined, Bruce Lisker was wrongly convicted in 1985 of stabbing his mother to death at their home in Sherman Oaks, California. He was not released until 2009, at which point he had served 26 years, after a judge determined that he had been convicted based on false evidence, including the testimony of a jailhouse snitch police knew was unreliable.  "Investigators coerced a confession (quickly recanted) from the 17-year-old teenager through the offer of a plea bargain," Rossmo and Pollock write. "A rush to judgment followed by tunnel vision led to confirmation bias. Exculpatory evidence was ignored, while the alibi of an alternative and viable suspect was never checked despite inconsistencies in his story."  Confirmation bias is common and hard to root out. Rossmo and Pollock recommend training in "cognitive de-biasing," better evidence procedures, closer supervision, and a general awareness of cognitive biases and the factors that let them run riot.  Rossmo and Pollock also note that the "probable cause" standard for arresting someone, which creates momentum toward a conviction, is a low bar that does not require showing the suspect is more likely than not to be guilty. "A probable cause that is not probable is inconsistent with both language and mathematics," they write. "The most certain way to prevent a wrongful conviction is to minimize wrongful arrests of innocent people."


hitandrun--2019-07-30--Police Faked Evidence and the Real Killers Confessed But Missouri Still Imprisoned an Innocent Man

Police Faked Evidence and the Real Killers Confessed. But Missouri Still Imprisoned an Innocent Man for 24 Years.

The St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office will give a new trial to Lamar Johnson, who was convicted of capital murder in 1995 after the lead detective falsified witness statements and bribed a man to identify Johnson as the killer.  For Johnson to have been guilty, he would have had to leave an apartment party, travel three miles, kill the victim, and return on foot to the same party within a matter of five minutes. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner has now filed a 67-page motion to vacate the conviction. It and an accompanying investigative report say that Johnson was only convicted after police and prosecutors relied on "perjured testimony, suppression of exculpatory and material impeachment evidence of secret payments to the sole eyewitness, and undisclosed Brady material related to a jailhouse informant with a history of incentivized cooperation with the State."  Joseph Nickerson, the lead detective at the time, was found to have fabricated parts of his investigation, including falsifying four witness statements and bribing a man $4,000 to identify Johnson as the shooter at trial. Johnson continued to sit in prison even after the actual killers confessed to their crime, and absolved Johnson of any involvement, in 1996 and 2002.  The Midwest Innocence Project (MIP), which has long represented Johnson, praised Gardner in a press release for filing a motion for a new trial. "We don't expect prosecutors or law enforcement officers to be perfect—but we should expect that once overwhelming evidence of innocence and government misconduct come to light, that prosecutors fulfill their duty to administer justice by correcting those injustices," said MIP attorney Lindsay Runnels.


hitandrun--2019-10-06--States Are Depriving Innocent People of Their Second Amendment Rights

Shortly after 5 a.m. on November 5, 2018, two police officers arrived at Gary Willis' house in Glen Burnie, Maryland. They were there to take away his guns. They ended up killing him instead.  According to the Anne Arundel County Police Department, the 61-year-old man, who at that hour presumably had just been awakened by the officers' knocking, answered the door with a gun in his hand. He put it down when he saw who was there. Upon learning that the two officers had come to serve him with an "extreme risk protective order" (ERPO) that barred him from possessing firearms, police said, Willis became "irate" and picked up the weapon again. As one officer tried to wrestle the gun away from Willis, it went off, whereupon the other officer shot him.  Police Chief Timothy Altomare subsequently argued that the incident illustrated the need for Maryland's ERPO law, which had taken effect barely a month before. "If you look at this morning's outcome," he told the Annapolis Capital, a newspaper whose headquarters had been the site of a mass shooting the previous June, "it's tough for us to say 'Well, what did we prevent?' Because we don't know what we prevented or could've prevented. What would've happened if we didn't go there at 5 a.m.?"  Well, for one thing, Gary Willis probably would still be alive.  Altomare invites us to speculate that Willis might have used a gun to kill someone. Yet at the time of his death, the only evidence to support that concern seems to have been a complaint from his sister, who reportedly obtained the temporary ERPO against her brother after a family argument during which he said something that alarmed her. Willis had no opportunity to challenge that claim, and he had no idea he had been stripped of his Second Amendment rights until police arrived at his door early in the morning with the court order in hand.  Anne Arundel County police did not respond to my inquiries, and the Maryland courts have declined to provide records of the case, which are confidential under state law unless a judge rules otherwise. Based on interviews with relatives, local news outlets reported that the ERPO stemmed from an argument the day before about the care of Willis' elderly mother. According to WBFF, the local Fox station, "Gary Willis struggle[d] with alcoholism" but "family say he wasn't dangerous, just strongly opinionated."  Michele Willis, Gary's niece, gave a similar account in an interview with The Baltimore Sun, saying her uncle "likes to speak his mind" but "wouldn't hurt anybody." She added that his fatal encounter with the police seemed senseless. "I'm just dumbfounded now," she said. "They didn't need to do what they did."  Maryland is one of 17 states with so-called red flag laws, most of which were enacted following the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton in August, President Donald Trump endorsed red flag laws as a way of preventing such crimes by disarming would-be mass murderers. But judging from the available data, the court orders authorized by such laws are usually aimed at preventing suicide rather than homicide. The evidence on whether they succeed in doing that is mixed. So far there is no solid evidence that they prevent homicides, even though the oldest red flag law was enacted two decades ago.  One thing is certain: Taking away people's guns based on predictions of what they might do with them raises thorny due process concerns. That's especially true with laws like Maryland's, which authorize broad categories of people to seek ERPOs based on scant evidence and effectively put the burden on gun owners to demonstrate that they don't pose a threat to themselves or others. While the benefits of these laws are mostly speculative, they inevitably deprive law-abiding people of the constitutional right to armed self-defense, even when it is quite unlikely that they would use guns to hurt themselves or anyone else.  Maryland's law, which was enacted two months after the Parkland attack and took effect in October 2018, authorizes law enforcement officers, physicians, mental health specialists, and various relatives, intimates, and cohabitants to seek ERPOs. That list includes housemates, spouses, dating partners, people who have "a child in common with the respondent," and anyone "related to the respondent by blood, marriage, or adoption." A temporary ERPO, lasting up to a week, can be issued if there are "reasonable grounds" to believe the respondent poses "an immediate and present danger" to himself or others.  At that stage, as Gary Willis discovered, respondent is a misnomer: The initial ERPO is an ex parte order, meaning its target does not have a chance to respond. A judge can extend the ex parte order for up to six months if there is "good cause." A final ERPO, which lasts up to a year and can be extended for another six months, can be issued after a hearing based on "clear and convincing evidence" that the respondent "poses a danger" to himself or others. In light of that language, extreme risk protective order is also a misnomer, since any level of danger—slight, great, or middling—suffices to obtain one. But at least at this point, the respondent is allowed to rebut the claims against him, although he has no right to legal representation if he can't afford it.  During the first five months after the ERPO law took effect, according to statewide data published by the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, judges or commissioners (low-level judicial officers) approved 422 temporary or interim orders. Requests for those initial orders are almost never rejected in Maryland, and the same is true in Florida, which enacted a red flag law in March 2018.  It is not surprising that judges are disinclined to be skeptical of an applicant who claims a gun owner poses an imminent threat, since they do not want to take the blame if something terrible happens before they can hold an adversarial hearing. But what happens at the next stage, when the threat need not be imminent but the burden of proof is heavier? In Maryland, when a hearing was actually held (in some cases the petitioners did not show up), judges granted final ERPOs 62 percent of the time. In Florida, according to data from the Office of the State Courts Administrator, 1,482 hearings had been held as of March 31 and 1,409 orders had been granted, which translates into an approval rate of 95 percent.  Although the standard of proof in Florida is the same as in Maryland (clear and convincing evidence), Florida's law allows petitions only by law enforcement officers or agencies, which judges apparently find more credible than the reports of possibly aggrieved (or sincerely mistaken) spouses, dating partners, cohabitants, in-laws, or blood relatives, who accounted for most of the applications in Maryland. But that trust can be misplaced.  Consider Chris Velasquez, a University of Central Florida (UCF) student who owned no firearms, had no history of violence, and had never threatened anyone, but who nevertheless was an early target of his state's red flag law because he said some stupid things on Reddit. In a thread titled "You guys are too weak to be a school shooter," Velasquez replied, "Maybe for now but not forever." Later, he posted "RIP Paddock my hero" in a thread about the autopsy of Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock and wrote "Cruz is a hero!" in reference to Nikolas Cruz, perpetrator of the Parkland massacre.  Those three comments resulted in a March 2018 interview with a UCF police officer, Jeffrey Panter, during which Velasquez explained that he was just "trolling" and trying to look tough but regretted his tasteless comments. "I'm not a violent person," Velasquez told Panter. "I would never, ever act out in violence against anybody in a mass shooting or anything of the sort." He called the Parkland massacre "a senseless tragedy" and noted that a mass shooter may get his "15 minutes of fame" but will "eventually be remembered as a piece of crap." Listening to the interview, you do not get the impression that Velasquez had ever seriously contemplated committing a crime of this sort, let alone made any plans or taken any steps in that direction.  Panter refused to accept Velasquez's explanation or his assurances. During the interview he pressured, cajoled, and manipulated Velasquez into agreeing with statements that, taken out of context, made it seem like he genuinely admired Paddock and Cruz, that he identified with Cruz because both of them had been bullied as kids, and that he had repeatedly fantasized about returning to his former middle school or high school in Orlando and shooting it up.  A mandatory psychiatric assessment after the interview found that Velasquez did not meet Florida's criteria for involuntary treatment, which would have required clear and convincing evidence that, because of mental illness, there was a "substantial likelihood" that he would "inflict serious bodily harm" on himself or others "in the near future." Panter nevertheless referred the case to the Orlando Police Department, where Sgt. Matthew Ochiuzzo twisted Velasquez's online comments and his interview with Panter into a portrait of a deeply troubled man who was just one disappointment away from committing mass murder.  On a list of 15 possible grounds for issuing a risk protection order (as it's known in Florida), Ochiuzzo checked five, including "there is evidence that the respondent is seriously mentally ill," "respondent has committed a recent act or threat of violence," and "respondent has used or threatened to use any weapons against him or herself or others." None of that was true.  Ochiuzzo claimed Velasquez "disclosed that he has had thoughts and urges to commit a mass shooting since his sophomore year of high school." But Velasquez never said that. To the contrary, when Panter asked about his state of mind in high school, he said, "I didn't have any thoughts of a school shooting."  Ochiuzzo also claimed "the respondent indicated that he wanted to commit the mass shootings so that he could feel the 'adrenaline rush' from the shooting." In reality, Velasquez repeatedly said he would never commit such a crime.  Based on an affidavit that was highly misleading and in some respects blatantly inaccurate, Circuit Judge Bob LeBlanc issued a temporary risk protection order against Velasquez. But at a hearing about two weeks later, when Velasquez finally had a chance to defend himself, LeBlanc found the city had failed to provide clear and convincing evidence that Velasquez posed "a significant danger."  Velasquez's lawyer, Kendra Parris, says LeBlanc realized the threat described by Ochiuzzo was never more than theoretical. "The judge asked, 'Did he actually make any threats, or was this all in response to hypothetical questions?'" she says. "And of course, it was all in response to hypothetical questions. Fortunately, the judge noted that this essentially amounted to thought policing and declined to issue the order."  Although that decision may look like a victory for due process, Parris notes that LeBlanc could have reached a different conclusion, since Florida's law says judges "may consider any relevant evidence." The statute gives 15 examples but says the list is not exhaustive.  The law also leaves crucial terms undefined. Ochiuzzo claimed Velasquez was "seriously mentally ill," for example, even though he had no diagnosis and a psychiatrist found he did not meet the criteria for commitment. Nor is it clear what "a significant danger" means in this context. Even assuming that judges apply such standards with precision, should they consider a 5 percent risk "significant"? One percent? Ten percent?  "Because we can't figure out what 'significant' means, you have this high burden of proof," Parris says—but it relates to a probability that may be "extraordinarily low," based on any evidence a judge considers relevant. "The 'clear and convincing evidence' standard is meaningless, because the criteria are open-ended. The court literally can look at anything."  One of Parris' clients, who lives in Broward County, Florida, posted a photo of an AR-15 rifle he had built, accompanied by the comment, "It's done. Hooray." On another occasion, he posted a comment criticizing teenaged gun control activists, who he said were trying to take away people's Second Amendment rights. Those two posts were enough to obtain a temporary gun confiscation order, although Parris ultimately persuaded the city to drop its petition for a final order.  Another client, former professional football player Oliver Hoyte, did not have the benefit of a lawyer at his hearing, but he really could have used one. After an argument with his aunt and her boyfriend, he says, they told police he had threatened them with a gun. In addition to that claim, Tampa police presented several other unverified allegations against Hoyte—including some they had never questioned him about, he says. They even cited a 2013 case in which he was acquitted of aggravated assault. He says video evidence contradicted the testimony of a man who claimed Hoyte had pulled a gun on him.  Parris notes that an Orange County judge last year rejected an application for a final risk protection order because it was based on events that predated the red flag law. Since the law does not say it applies retroactively, the judge said, the presumption is that it does not. That is one of the points Parris planned to raise if she managed to get a rehearing for Hoyte. She hoped to get that hearing by arguing that the government should have provided him with a public defender, although at press time she also was trying to negotiate dismissal of the case with the city.  "I feel like I should have the right to representation," Hoyte says. "The judge said, 'You do have the right to representation, but the court is not going to appoint it for you.'"  Police confiscated Hoyte's Taurus 9 mm pistol, and he was forbidden to buy any other firearms for a year (possibly longer, if the order is extended). As a result, Hoyte says, he does not feel safe visiting certain neighborhoods, including the one where his family lives. "I'm not on an equal footing with everyone else," he says. "I don't have the right to bear arms, and I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't been convicted of any crime. I haven't been hospitalized. I haven't harmed anyone. This law is wrong because it eliminates due process. They're treating me as if I'm a criminal."  The high approval rate by judges in Florida suggests the deck is stacked against respondents like Hoyte. "All the pressure is on the other side," Parris says. "There's absolutely no downside to just going ahead and issuing the order."  Parris argues that the "significant danger" standard is unconstitutionally vague and that Florida's law impermissibly delegates legislative and prosecutorial authority to the police. But while such arguments can be raised on appeal, the process typically takes longer than the risk protection order lasts. "By the time your appeal works its way through the District Court of Appeal, it's already going to be 12 months," Parris says. "There's no real recourse."  Connecticut enacted the country's first red flag law in 1999, following a mass shooting at the Connecticut Lottery Corporation's headquarters the previous year. The statute allows police officers or prosecutors to seek a gun confiscation order when they have "probable cause" to believe someone poses "a risk of imminent personal injury" to himself or others. A hearing is required within 14 days of the seizure, at which point the standard becomes "clear and convincing evidence" of an imminent risk. If police meet that burden, they can keep confiscated guns for up to a year.  Indiana came next, enacting a red flag law in 2005, after a man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia used a rifle to kill one Indianapolis police officer and injure another four. That law allows a police officer to seek a gun confiscation order against someone he believes poses an imminent threat to himself or others. It also applies to someone who poses a threat that is not immediate but who "has a propensity for violent or emotionally unstable conduct" or who "has a mental illness that may be controlled by medication" but has not been diligent about taking it.  Under Indiana's law, a police officer can seize guns without a court order, in which case he is supposed to file an affidavit explaining his reasons after the fact. If a judge agrees that the officer had probable cause, police can keep the confiscated weapons. A hearing is required within 14 days, at which point the state has to prove by clear and convincing evidence that the gun owner meets the law's criteria. After at least six months have passed, the gun owner can seek the return of his property. He has to prove by "a preponderance of the evidence" that he "is not dangerous."  Notwithstanding the requirement that a hearing be held within two weeks, a 2015 study reported in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law found that gun owners waited an average of more than nine months before a court decided whether police could keep their firearms. When a hearing finally was scheduled, most of the gun owners did not show. But when they did, they usually prevailed, meaning judges decided the state had not met its burden of proving them dangerous. During the last 71 months covered by the eight-year study, gun owners won every contested case.  In Connecticut, by comparison, judges ruled that guns should be kept by the government in 68 percent of cases where the outcome was known, according to a 2014 Connecticut Law Review article. But outcomes were reported in less than 30 percent of cases.  Although Indiana and Connecticut both enacted red flag legislation in response to mass shootings, the laws are used mainly to protect people from their own suicidal impulses, a justification cited in 68 percent of Indiana cases from 2006 through 2013 and in 61 percent of Connecticut cases from 1999 to 2013. A study reported last year in the journal Psychiatric Services found that Indiana's law was associated with a 5 percent reduction in the overall suicide rate, while Connecticut's law was associated with a net increase in suicides. Using a different (and contested) method, a 2017 study published in Law and Contemporary Problems estimated that one suicide was prevented in Connecticut by every 10 to 20 gun seizures. A 2019 study of Indiana's law by the same researchers, reported in The Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, reached a similar conclusion.  Duke University medical sociologist Jeffrey Swanson, the lead author of those last two suicide studies, thinks due process needs improvement in Indiana. "The state's apparent failure to comply with the statutory guideline of holding a hearing within 14 days puts a damper on the success story of suicide prevention," he writes in an email. "This should be the focus of efforts to improve implementation of the law."  Even taking the results of Swanson's studies at face value, the implication is that the vast majority of people whose guns were seized—90 to 95 percent—would not have committed suicide had they retained their firearms. Meanwhile, none of these studies reported any effect on homicides.  David Kopel, a gun policy expert at the Independence Institute in Denver, says red flag laws may have an impact, even if it is too small to be detected by looking at suicide and homicide rates. "I think it would disarm some people who are suicidal," he says. "And I think you have some people who are acting dangerously enough that a person with common sense would say, 'Wow, that guy should not have a gun.' It would address folks like that."  But Kopel emphasizes the importance of procedural safeguards to protect the constitutional rights of gun owners, such as requiring that petitions be submitted only by law enforcement agencies after an independent investigation, allowing ex parte orders only for good cause, limiting them to one week, limiting subsequent orders to six months, requiring clear and convincing evidence, providing counsel to respondents, giving them a right to cross-examine witnesses, and letting them sue people who file false and malicious petitions. He also recommends giving gun owners advance notice of confiscation orders unless there are special reasons not to do so, a policy that might have made a crucial difference in Gary Willis' case.  Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, an expert on mass shootings, shares Kopel's concern that suddenly seizing guns can make violence more likely. "If you have an individual who's angry, bitter, threatening other people, [and] owns a gun," Fox told Reason's Nick Gillespie in August, "the attempt to take that gun away can actually precipitate the very violent act that you're trying to prevent."  No existing law meets all of Kopel's criteria. Washington state allows an even longer list of people to file petitions than Maryland does, including former spouses, former girlfriends and boyfriends, and former roommates. California's list is almost as long, and a pending bill would expand it further, adding employers, co-workers, and school personnel. Colorado is the only state that guarantees a lawyer for respondents, and no state provides a civil remedy when petitioners lie.  In Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, and the District of Columbia, a final order can be obtained based on a mere preponderance of the evidence: anything more than a 50 percent probability that the respondent poses a "significant" danger. Depending on what counts as significant, this formula implies that people can lose their gun rights even if it is nearly certain that they would not have hurt themselves or others.  After the El Paso and Dayton massacres, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) introduced a bipartisan bill that would provide federal grants to encourage the passage and enforcement of red flag laws. "The Second Amendment is not a suicide pact," Graham told Fox News, while dismissing critics of red flag laws as "libertarians." He likened gun confiscation orders to involuntary psychiatric treatment, saying "that process would apply to gun ownership," when in fact the criteria for civil commitment are substantially stricter. Graham also promised that "nobody's going to lose their gun unless they have their day in court," which is clearly not true in light of ex parte orders that can last as long as six months.  "It's a great idea on paper," says Dave Workman, senior editor at the Second Amendment Foundation in Bellevue, Washington. "The problem is the execution." In practice, he says, red flag laws mean "you're guilty until you prove yourself innocent."


hitandrun--2019-11-21--With This Forfeiture Trick, Innocent Owners Lose Even When They Win

Critics of civil forfeiture, the system of legalized theft that allows law enforcement agencies to seize people's property by alleging it is connected to criminal activity, often focus on the burden of proof the government faces when owners try to recover their assets. While those standards are obviously important, nearly nine out of 10 federal forfeiture cases never make it to court, largely because mounting a challenge often costs more than the property is worth. And while the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA) allows owners who win in court to recover "reasonable attorney fees and other litigation costs," prosecutors can defeat that safeguard by dragging out cases and then dropping them before a judge decides whether forfeiture is legally justified.  In the meantime, desperate owners may decide to let the government keep some of their property, even when they are completely innocent. From the government's perspective, there is no downside. "By gaming the system and denying property owners a 'win' in court," says Institute for Justice (I.J.) senior attorney Dan Alban, "federal prosecutors have found a way to short-circuit judicial oversight of their activities, while at the same time preserving their ability to continue to abuse Americans' property rights."  I.J. is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider a case that takes aim at such sneaky tactics, arguing that an owner can "substantially prevail" in a forfeiture battle, as required by the CAFRA provision dealing with attorney fees, even if the government returns the property before it officially loses in court. "The threat of paying attorneys' fees is a critical check on government abuse," observes Justin Pearson, another I.J. senior attorney. "Otherwise, there is no disincentive to stop prosecutors from filing frivolous civil forfeitures against property belonging to innocent owners."  The I.J. case involves Miladis Salgado, a Florida woman whose home was searched in 2015 based on a tip that her estranged husband was a drug dealer. Although that tip proved to be unfounded, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents found $15,000 in cash that belonged to Salgado, which they seized. Salgado hired a lawyer to challenge the forfeiture on a contingency fee basis, agreeing to pay a third of any money she recovered.  The case dragged on for two years, and the government dropped it just as a federal judge was about to rule on Salgado's motion for summary judgment. Since the DEA admitted it had no evidence implicating Salgado in criminal activity, it seems likely that she would have prevailed, which explains why the government suddenly agreed to return her money. But now instead of her original $15,000, she had only $10,000, since she had to pay her lawyer.  When Salgado asked the court to make the government cover that cost, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles ruled that she was not entitled to attorney fees under CAFRA, since the case had been dismissed without prejudice, meaning it theoretically could be refiled. "A dismissal without prejudice cannot trigger the statutory entitlement," he concluded, "because such a dismissal lacks the necessary 'material alteration of the legal relationship of the parties' with a corresponding 'judicial imprimatur on the change.'" Last July the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld that decision.  The Institute for Justice is now asking the Supreme Court to resolve two questions: When does an owner "substantially prevail" in a forfeiture challenge, triggering an award of attorney fees, and does a judge have the discretion to dismiss forfeiture claims without prejudice when "the court has ordered the United States to return the seized money and the lawsuit will never be refiled"?  The institute's petition argues that the 11th Circuit erred by reading the word substantially out of CAFRA, limiting its analysis to the question of whether Salgado was the "prevailing party." I.J. notes that the district court not only ordered the government to return Salgado's money but said the government would be on the hook for her legal fees if it decided to refile the case. "Ms. Salgado substantially prevailed," I.J. says. "She obtained the full return of her money, and she even obtained a court order inhibiting the United States from refiling the civil forfeiture lawsuit."  To conclude otherwise, the petition says, would deprive innocent owners of the protection CAFRA was supposed to provide. According to the House report on the bill, Congress wanted to "give owners innocent of any wrongdoing the means to recover their property and make themselves whole after wrongful government seizures." An innocent owner who loses a third of her property to legal fees imposed on her by a wrongful forfeiture action plainly has not been "made whole."  The House report on CAFRA also noted that "many civil seizures are not challenged" because of the costs owners must pay on "the arduous path one must journey" to contest them, "often without the benefit of counsel, and perhaps without any money left after the seizure with which to fight the battle." If owners are forced to pay those costs even when the government effectively concedes their innocence, the remedy provided by CAFRA has been nullified.  I.J. also wants the Supreme Court to resolve a circuit split on the question of whether judges may dismiss forfeiture claims without prejudice in cases like this. Disagreement on that point among federal appeals courts, it says, has "resulted in widely divergent outcomes in district courts across the country." The position endorsed by the 11th Circuit in Salgado's case "presents a catch-22" for victims of forfeiture abuse, the petition says: "In order for an innocent owner to be awarded attorneys' fees under CAFRA, the government's case against the money or property cannot be dismissed without prejudice. But the innocent owner cannot prevent the case from being dismissed without prejudice because, in these circuits, their right to be awarded attorneys' fees has not yet vested."  In this case, as in its many other challenges to forfeiture abuse, I.J. is calling attention to the way the system works in practice, showing that even well-intended safeguards can be defeated by coercive tactics that deprive innocent people of their property. "Seizing someone's property and forcing them to hire an attorney for two years to get it back has real costs," Pearson says. "The government can't take your property, keep it for years, and then suddenly give it back and pretend like nothing happened."  So far, of course, the government can do exactly that. The Supreme Court can put a stop to it by taking up this case.


hitandrun--2019-12-12--An Unreliable Jailhouse Informant May Have Sent an Innocent Florida Man to Death Row

James Dailey has long maintained that he didn't murder Shelly Boggio in 1985. No physical evidence ties him to the case, and there's good reason to think the man who originally pointed the finger at Dailey is the actual killer. A story by Pamela Colloff, published by ProPublica and The New York Times, shows how an unreliable jailhouse informant may have doomed an innocent man to the execution chamber in Florida.  On May 6, 1985, Boggio's nude body was found floating in a Pinellas County waterway; she had been stabbed several times. Dailey and his roommate, Jack Pearcy, became subjects of interest in the case. Pearcy has a history of violence against women. On the last day of her life, Pearcy took Boggio to a bar near the Intracoastal Waterway after spending an afternoon drinking and smoking weed at his apartment.  Though he admitted to stabbing Boggio at least once and provided intimate details of the crime, Pearcy insisted that Dailey was the actual murderer. Pearcy claimed that Dailey joined the pair before they reached the water that night.  Pearcy, who is serving life in prison, has since confessed four times that he was solely responsible for Boggio's death. He also told two other inmates that Dailey was innocent. Pearcy owned a knife consistent with the stab wounds, knew where investigators could find its sheath, and was the only person who eyewitnesses saw with Boggio the night she was murdered.  Yet Dailey's fate was sealed by three jailhouse informants, including one Paul Skalnik. Skalnik was one of the county's most prolific jailhouse informants, testifying in at least 37 cases. Many of those trials ended in convictions or plea deals; four ended with death sentences. Though he spent his days in protective custody, he told investigators that he managed to obtain a confession from Dailey while passing by his cell.  Pearcy refused to testify against Dailey in court, so Skalnik took the stand, testifying that Dailey had confessed to the murder while asking for legal advice. Detective John Halliday vouched for Skalnik because they had worked together before.  Jailhouse informants have an incentive to tell prosecutors what they want to hear, since their cooperation could help with their own cases. After the two other inmates claimed that they heard Dailey admit to the murder, a third later said that they concocted their stories in an effort to get their own sentences reduced. (They succeeded.) The third inmate also said police showed him news clippings of the crime in hopes that he would testify against Dailey. He refused.  Though Skalnik assured the jury that he was receiving nothing for his testimony, he was released five days after Dailey was sentenced to death.  After serving a sentence for grand theft, Skalnik was paroled in March 1985. He quickly violated his parole with various financial cons and returned to jail. Though he was identified as a flight risk, a parole violator, and was called a "danger to society" by his parole officer, a Florida Parole and Probation Commission memo said he was released due to his "cooperation with the State Attorney's Office in the first-degree murder trial." Public records show several other instances where Skalnik received benefits for his help in other trials despite assessments that he was a "con artist of the highest degree." Prosecutors once dismissed a 1982 charge for lewd and lascivious conduct involving a 12-year-old girl. Neither those charges nor their dismissals were mentioned to the jury in Dailey's case.  There are other reasons to question Skalnik's honesty. When Colloff interviewed him, he claimed that he'd been shot down in Laos during the Vietnam War. After obtaining his military records, Colloff found that Skalnik was not on combat duty during Vietnam, and did not serve overseas at all.  Dailey was set to die on November 7, but U.S. District Judge William Jung temporarily stayed his execution in October to give lawyers more time to present their case. Yesterday Jung rejected the new appeals.  Dailey's attorney, Josh Dubin, tells Reason he is asking Gov. Ron DeSantis to grant a clemency hearing to argue the prisoner's innocence. A coalition of local supporters—including the Innocence Project of Florida, the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine, a former prosecutor, and a collection of Florida death row exonerees—is also asking the state to exonerate Dailey before it's too late.


mediamattersforamerica--2019-03-31--Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress expresses support for the death penalty Innocent people are ex

Fox News contributor Robert Jeffress expresses support for the death penalty: Innocent people are executed but so "was Jesus Christ himself"

ROBERT JEFFRESS (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Let's admit, the death penalty is sometimes inequitably and even mistakenly applied. We know that. And we ought to do everything we can to prevent that. But I remind people, the greatest example of an innocent person being executed was Jesus Christ himself. He was totally innocent, and yet in spite of that, the New Testament never calls for an end to the death penalty. Instead, Paul said in Romans 13, God has given government the power of the sword, the ability to execute in order to bring punishment against those who do evil.


mercurynews--2019-03-17--Letter Innocent man was executed then the murder victim surfaced alive and well

Letter: Innocent man was executed, then the ‘murder victim’ surfaced alive and well

In reference to an article on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News this morning, I would like to offer my opinion on the subject of the death penalty in regard to a statement made by the resident of the Association of Deputy (Los Angeles County) District Attorneys Michele Hanisee:  “Those in support of abolishing the death penalty point to the possibility of an innocent person being executed… The innocent can take solace in knowing that a unanimous jury of 12 citizens must render the death verdict after an exhaustive trial where the accused murderer is represented by two highly competent attorneys and overseen by an independent judge who ensures a fair trial.”  If I had a son who was executed for a murder he didn’t commit and posthumously proven innocent, I would be tempted to avenge his wrongful death (actually murder) through vigilante justice.  The excuse “I’m doing my job” that people in government have been using is only legitimate when used by meter maids.  Letter: Here is how the president can get $8.6 billion for his wall: Letter: Why vote if Newsom’s is the only vote that counts? Letter: How many times must police officers hide behind their guns and badges? Letter: If we remove the Lafayette crosses, we could replace them with this Right is right and wrong is wrong regardless of jury verdicts, code law, or anything else. William Jackson Marion was hanged in 1887 for “murdering” a man who later re-emerged alive and well.  Submit your letter to the editor via this form   Read more Letters to the Editor


nationalreview--2019-10-14--When Cops Create Their Own Risk, Innocent People Die for Their Mistakes

And when the mistake is theirs, they cannot use the ‘split second’ defense.  The video is puzzling and shocking. After receiving a call to a non-emergency number requesting that police check on a neighbor’s house that had its doors open and its lights on, police approach silently. They look into an open door and into a brightly lit room, but they don’t say anything. They then creep around the house, moving from light to dark. They use a flashlight. They keep moving around the edges of the house.  Suddenly, in a mere moment, one of them spots movement in a window. The officer yells for the shadowy figure to put up her hands and then immediately fires a shot. Atatiana Jefferson was dead. She was 28 years old. According to her family’s lawyer, she was playing video games with her young nephew when they heard “rustling” outside and “saw flashlights.” There was a gun in the house, but there’s no indication (yet) that she was holding it in her hand.  But what if she was? Does a homeowner not have a right to investigate someone lurking on her property? Can she not arm herself at 2:30 a.m. when she hears a strange sound in the darkness?  I’ve been looking closely at the police-shooting issue for many years, and I’m noticing a trend in many of the worst and most controversial shootings. The police make mistakes that heighten their own sense of danger, and then they “resolve” their own error by opening fire.  The examples are easy to find. The worst and most recent is that of Dallas officer Amber Guyger, who made the dreadful mistake of entering the wrong house and then immediately dealt with the perceived “threat” by shooting the innocent man inside.  But Guyger is hardly the only offender. Who can forget the terrible shooting of Philando Castile, gunned down as he tried to comply with conflicting commands from an obviously panicked officer — the officer told Castile to hand over his license and proof of insurance, but also to not reach for his gun. He shot Castile to death even as Castile was calmly telling him that he wasn’t reaching for his gun.  Then there’s the extraordinarily gut-wrenching video of a cop killing Daniel Shaver as he sobbed and begged for his life. The officer’s instructions were utterly incomprehensible. He told Shaver to not put his hands down for any reason. He also told him to crawl down the hall..  No one should forget Andrew Scott. Police seeking a suspect showed up at the wrong house (without a warrant), did not turn on their lights, did not identify themselves as police, and pounded violently on the door late at night. When Scott answered his own door with a firearm in his hand, he was instantly shot dead.  It wasn’t until the tragic death of Willie McCoy that the trend truly became obvious. McCoy was sleeping in his car, blocking a drive-through window, with a gun in his lap. When he began to move, cops clustered around his car started screaming at him so loudly that the transcript of the video has to explain that the shouts weren’t gunshots. Then, within three seconds, the officers riddled him with bullets. They startled him awake, and then killed him.  Would Atatiana Jefferson still be alive if the cops had parked in front of her house and clearly identified themselves by shouting into the open door? Would they still be alive had they not lurked around a person’s home without permission — exactly like a person who was trespassing, perhaps with malign intent?  There is absolutely no question that police have a difficult job. There is no question that even routine encounters and wellness checks can — on rare occasions — escalate to deadly violence. But there is also no question that time and again police have enhanced the risk to the public through their own mistakes. Poor tactics can yield terrible results, and police should not be able to use the “split-second decision” defense when they created the crisis.  There is no greater violation of liberty than the loss of your own life in your own home at the hands of misguided, panicky, or poorly trained agents of the state. Absent compelling evidence not yet revealed to the public, it appears that the man who killed Atatiana Jefferson committed a criminal act. He deserves to face criminal justice.


newyorker--2019-01-14--Study Most Innocent People Need to Hire Thirty-Five Lawyers at Some Point

Study: Most Innocent People Need to Hire Thirty-Five Lawyers at Some Point

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Most people who are innocent of any crimes will still need to hire thirty-five lawyers at some point, a new study shows.  According to the study, commissioned by the University of Minnesota Law School, thirty-five is the “bare minimum” number of lawyers that an innocent person should have on retainer in the event that he or she becomes the subject of an entirely unjustified criminal investigation.  “We found that many innocent people are going through life without taking the basic precaution of hiring thirty-five lawyers,” Professor Davis Logsdon, who supervised the study, said. “They are flirting with disaster.”  “An innocent person who has absolutely nothing to hide should do everything in his or her power to avoid answering questions from investigators,” he said. “Thirty-five lawyers can really help you do that.”  Additionally, Logsdon noted, hiring nearly three dozen lawyers is invaluable because of the powerful statement it makes. “Nothing says ‘I’m innocent’ like hiring thirty-five lawyers,” he said.  Although some innocent people may balk at the unwieldy number of lawyers that the study recommends, Logsdon emphasized that thirty-five lawyers provide necessary protection against unforeseen legal complications. “If, for example, one of your lawyers goes to prison, you will still have thirty-four,” he said.  Logsdon acknowledged that, although every innocent person should definitely hire thirty-five lawyers, such legal help does not come cheap. “Legal bills for thirty-five lawyers can be very expensive, unless you’re a person who doesn’t pay his bills,” he said.


powerlineblog--2019-05-04--Kamala Harris feels awful about role in keeping apparently innocent man on death row

Kamala Harris feels “awful” about role in keeping apparently innocent man on death row

Advocates of abolishing the death penalty claim that innocent defendants have often been executed. I’m not sure whether these advocates have been able to show that this has ever happened in modern times, but a New York Times piece by Nicholas Kristof makes a pretty good case that Kevin Cooper, a death row inmate, is innocent of the murders he was convicted of committing.  Cooper, an African-American, was convicted of murdering four people in 1983. The victims, all White, were a couple, their daughter, and a boy who was sleeping over at the couple’s house.  The couple’s son, who survived the attack, told police that the assailants were White. Hairs found in the victims’ hands seemed to confirm this account. In addition, a woman told police that her White boyfriend, a convicted murderer, was probably involved in the attack. To support this statement, she gave deputies his bloody overalls.  The deputies, says Kristof, threw away the overalls and arrested Cooper. He awaits execution.  Kristof’s lengthy article is worth reading in full. I want to focus on the role of Sen. Kamala Harris, a candidate for her Party’s presidential nomination, in the long legal battle that followed Cooper’s conviction.  Readers will recall that Harris was California’s Attorney General before she became a Senator. By the time of her involvement in the Cooper saga, DNA testing had become available for use in cases like this one. The availability of such testing is part of what gives supporters of the death penalty a high degree of confidence that the innocent won’t be executed  Harris, though, refused to allow the use of DNA testing in Cooper’s case. Indeed, according to Kristof, she “showed no interest in the case.”  It’s almost as if Black lives don’t matter to Kamala Harris.  Harris did become interested in the case after the online version of Kristof’s article appeared. She emailed him to say “I feel awful about this.”  Harris also put out a statement saying:  My career as a prosecutor was marked by fierce opposition to the death penalty while still upholding the law and a commitment to fixing a broken criminal justice system. I’ve long been an advocate for measures to improve and make our system more fair and just. As a firm believer in DNA testing, I hope the governor and the state will allow for such testing in the case of Kevin Cooper.  Harris did not explain why, as a firm believer in DNA testing, she refused to allow it in Cooper’s case. Nor did she explain why, if she’s a “fierce opponent” of the death penalty, she couldn’t be bothered to look into whether a man who faced that penalty was innocent.  As for “fixing a broken criminal justice system,” a good start would be not electing grandstanding opportunists like Harris to positions as prosecutors.  Harris should feel awful. She is a hypocrite and a disgrace.


prisonplanet--2019-07-06--Report 81 of Suspects Flagged by UK Police Facial Recognition Are Innocent

Report: 81% of ‘Suspects’ Flagged by UK Police Facial Recognition Are Innocent

According to a recent report, approximately four out of five people identified by the London Metropolitan Police’s facial recognition system as possible suspects are totally innocent.  A recent report by Sky News has revealed that approximately four out of five people identified by the U.K.’s Metropolitan Police force’s as possible suspects are innocent. Researchers discovered that the system has an 81 percent inaccuracy rate which means that the vast majority of people flagged by the system are not on any wanted lists. The report states that this raises “significant concerns” about Scotland Yard’s use of the technology.  The report concludes that it is “highly possible” that the Met’s usage of the system would be found unlawful if challenged in court due to a number of technical, operational and legal issues. The Live Facial Recognition (LFR) system has been utilized since August 2016 by the Met to monitor crowds, testing the system first at Notting Hill Carnival.  Professor Pete Fussey and Dr. Daragh Murray studied the technologies accuracy rate at six of ten police trials, finding that of 42 individuals identified by the system only eight were verified to be correct. This gave the system an error rate of 81 percent. The Met has an alternative way of determining the error rate, measuring instead the number of successful and unsuccessful matches with the total number of faces processed by the system, given it an error rate of just 0.1 percent.  The Met’s deputy assistant commissioner, Duncan Ball, stated: “We are extremely disappointed with the negative and unbalanced tone of this report… We have a legal basis for this pilot period and have taken legal advice throughout.” He continued, “We believe the public would absolutely expect us to try innovative methods of crime fighting in order to make London safer.”  This article was posted: Saturday, July 6, 2019 at 2:09 am


realclearpolitics--2019-05-15--At Harvard Youre Guilty Until Proven Innocent

At Harvard, You're Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Lawyers need not defend their clients because the guilty, in this brave new worldview, do not deserve representation. That's the logic at Harvard


rferl--2019-01-01--Family Says Detained US Citizen Is Innocent Was In Moscow For Wedding

Family Says Detained U.S. Citizen Is Innocent, Was In Moscow For Wedding

The family of a U.S. citizen being held by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) over suspected spying says he is innocent and was in Moscow to attend a wedding.  Paul Whelan, a retired Marine, was last heard from on December 28, according to a statement from his family, obtained by RFE/RL on January 1.  His failure to contact his family “was very much out of character for him,” the statement said.  “We are deeply concerned for his safety and well-being. His innocence is undoubted and we trust that his rights will be respected,” it added.  Whelan, 48, could face between 10 to 20 years in prison if found guilty. Russian officials did not disclose any details of his alleged involvement in espionage.  David Whelan told RFE/RL in a direct message via Twitter that his brother "has a corporate security role" with BorgWarner, a U.S.-based supplier of automotive parts and components.  BorgWarner said in a statement sent to RFE/RL on January 1 that Paul Whelan was the company's global security director. It added that he is responsible for overseeing the company's facilities in Auburn Hills, Michigan, "and at other company locations around the world."  BorgWarner has 60 manufacturing sites in 18 countries, but none of them are listed as being in Russia.  A spokeswoman for BorgWarner told RFE/RL that the company "does not have any facilities in Russia."  Russia's state-owned conglomerate Rostec said in 2013 that its truckmaker, KamAz, had a long record of collaboration with a subsidiary of BorgWarner known as BorgWarnerTurboSystems.  David Whelan told AP in a January 1 interview that his brother had been to Russia "several times" before and was helping a former U.S. Marine friend of his plan a wedding with a Russian woman.  On the morning of the day he was detained, Paul Whelan had given a tour of the Kremlin museums to a group of wedding guests, his brother said. He failed to show up for the wedding on the evening of December 28.  David Whelan said his absence led the family to fear he had been in a car accident or perhaps mugged, and were searching the Internet for news about "dead Americans in Moscow."  The U.S. State Department has said it knows about "the detention of a U.S. citizen by Russian authorities" and had been formally notified by the Russian Foreign Ministry.  The State Department said on December 31 that it had requested consular access to Paul Whelan and expected "Russian authorities to provide it."  David Whelan said in the AP interview that his family was told by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that it has been unable to speak with Paul Whelan.  David Whelan said his brother had previously worked for Kelly Services, an international office-staffing company that does have offices in Moscow, and had been to Russia on business and to visit friends he had met on social-media networks.  Paul Whelan reportedly had a page on the Russian social-media site VKontakte on which he writes messages in basic Russian.  David Whelan said his brother was stationed in Iraq several times with the U.S. Marines and has been living in Novi, Michigan.  The announcement of Whelan’s detainment came a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow remains open to dialogue with Washington in a New Year’s greeting to U.S. President Donald Trump.  Relations between the United States and Russia remain strained over a raft of issues including Russia’s role in wars in Syria and eastern Ukraine, its alleged meddling in elections in the United States and elsewhere, and the poisoning of a Russian double agent in Britain.  At the end of November, Trump abruptly canceled a planned meeting with Putin on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Argentina, citing tensions after Russian forces opened fire on Ukrainian Navy boats before seizing them and capturing 24 Ukrainian sailors.  The detention of Whelan comes weeks after Russian Maria Butina pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to acting as an agent for the Kremlin.  The Kremlin has denied that Butina is a Russian agent and has organized a social-media campaign to secure her release.  In the past, Russia has arrested foreigners with the aim of trading prisoners with other countries.  In his annual year-end news conference on December 20, Putin said Russia would "not arrest innocent people simply to exchange them for someone else later on."


rferl--2019-02-12--Belarusian News-Site Editor Tells Court She Is Innocent

MINSK -- The editor of Belarus's largest independent news site, who is on trial on accusations that her publication has illegally obtained information from a state-run news agency, told the court she is innocent.  A court in the capital, Minsk, on February 12 began preliminary hearings in the case against Maryna Zolatava, editor in chief of the website Tut.by.  Dozens of people who came to the trial greeted Zolatava with applauds and supporting chants as she entered the courtroom. All of the courtroom's 170 seats were filled.  As the hearing started, Zolatava rejected all the charges.  "I have not committed any of the crimes I'm charged with," Zolatava said.      The case has raised concerns by right advocates, who have warned about growing press restrictions under President Alyaksandr Lukashenka's government.      In August, police officers searched Tut.by's Minsk offices, along with that of another outlet, BelaPan. Several reporters and employees, including Zolatava, were detained.      The Belarusian Investigative Committee later alleged that computers from within the Tut.by and BelaPan offices used an account and password other than their own to access the paid subscriber section of BelTA, the state-run news agency. A third outlet, Belarusskaya Nauka, was also targeted.      "The crime inflicted considerable damage" on BelTA, "leading to the illegal procurement and use of information protected from unauthorized access, as well as to the erosion of the enterprise’s business reputation," the committee charged.      In all, 15 people faced charges. However, all except for Zolatava had charges dropped after paying administrative fines and damages.      Zolatava, meanwhile, was hit with new charges of "official inaction," a charge comparable to negligence.      She has denied the allegations.      Independent Belarusian media have faced severe restrictions for years under Lukashenka's authoritarian government.      In June, lawmakers passed controversial amendments to the country's media laws, which media advocates warned would likely to lead to further censorship of the press.      A month later, a journalist was sentenced to four years of restricted movement and forced labor after being convicted of assaulting two police officers. The reporter, Dzmitry Halko, said the case against him was retribution for his critical stance against Lukashenka.      Other Belarusian journalists and bloggers have been harassed and detained, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.


shareblue--2019-05-17--GOP takes money from accused rapist because he says hes innocent

GOP takes money from accused rapist because he says he's innocent

The Republican Party is happily accepting money from an accused rapist who calls Trump his "great friend."  The Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee — two of the main groups that seek to get Republicans elected at the federal level — accepted $400,000 in campaign contributions from Steve Wynn, the disgraced casino magnate accused of sexual assault and rape by multiple women, Politico reported Friday.  The cash came from Steve Wynn, who was forced to resign from his role as finance chair at the RNC after the allegations about sexual assault and rape came out. Wynn was also forced to step down as chairman of his casino empire.  That's because the allegations against Wynn are disturbing and graphic. He's accused of forcing one employee at his Las Vegas casino to have sex — and ended up settling with the female accuser for $7.5 million, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.  Another employee at his Las Vegas casino, a female massage therapist, said Wynn would expose himself during massages and once forced her to masturbate him to climax — something she felt pressured to do because he was her boss and she feared being fired for not accepting his demands.  The RNC faced pressure at the time the allegations were first made public to return the donations Wynn had made to the committee, but refused.  Now, however, they are accepting hundreds of thousands more from Wynn.  And the reasoning from RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel is about as mealy mouthed as it gets.  "While we must take any allegations like these seriously, everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence and due process. Over the last year and a half, multiple investigations into the allegations against Steve Wynn have concluded. Throughout this entire process, Steve has repeatedly and unequivocally denied wrongdoing, and he has not been charged with or found guilty of any crimes," McDaniel said in a statement to Politico. "At this point, there is no reason for refusing his support."  Of course, this is the same McDaniel who went on a crusade against Democrats who accepted money from Harvey Weinstein, the film mogul who was also accused of sexual assault and rape. Like Wynn, Weinstein has also not been found guilty of the crimes he's accused of committing.  Republicans accepting men accused of sexual assault and rape shouldn't surprise anyone, however.  Trump is, after all, the leader of the GOP, and he's been accused of sexual assault by nearly two dozen women, as well as openly admitted to grabbing women's genitals without consent.  Last month, Wynn greeted Trump on the tarmac in Las Vegas when Trump flew there for a rally.  It's no wonder women have fled the GOP. This is not a party that values or supports women.  Published with permission of The American Independent.


sottnet--2019-01-17--Cop charged for stomping innocent man as K9 chewed off hunks of flesh

Cop charged for stomping innocent man as K9 chewed off 'hunks of flesh'

On the night of June 24, 2016, Frank Baker - an innocent man - 'fit the description' of a 'black man' in the area, so he was attacked by police and their K9.On Wednesday, officer Brett Palkowitsch, 31, was charged with one count of deprivation of rights for kicking the innocent man while a K9 tore him apart, literally.said a news release from the Minneapolis' FBI office, which investigated the case.At the time of the incident,Also at the scene that fateful night was officer Tony Spencer - whose dashcam recorded the violent assault on Baker - and who could not keep silent about what he saw.That night, Spencer and his partner responded to a call, which ended up being fake, about a man with dreadlocks wearing a white t-shirt and armed with a gun.When they arrived on the scene, Spencer and his partner saw Baker and realized he did not look like a suspect."There are about 50 people who would have matched that description that night," Spencer said of Baker. "He is not acting agitated. To me, he does not appear to be engaged in a fight. He did not appear to have run from a fight ... so we continue to roll through."However, just after they passed Baker, two less experienced and far more violent cops showed up, pulled out their guns, and unleashed a dog.Because police said Baker was slow to respond when showing his hands, officer Brian Ficcandenti let loose the K9, 'Falco.'"I'm thinking he (Ficcadenti) saw something we didn't see or missed and is now performing a felony-style stop," Spencer recalled. "As I turn the car and see the dog pulling out this man from the cars, I recognize it's (Baker). I can clearly see there's nothing in his hand as he comes between the cars."The dashcam then captured the following beat down - after Baker had been mauled.Baker's legs were so severely injured during the attack that he spent weeks in the hospital recovering. He also suffered several broken ribs and collapsed lungs as well.According to his attorney Robert Bennett, the dog tore "hunks of flesh" as its teeth bit "down to the bone" of Baker's legs.After watching his fellow officers do this to an innocent person, Spencer could no longer stand it and did what a good cop should do. He crossed the thin blue line and testified against the officers who nearly killed an innocent man. It is highly likely that without Spencer's testimony, Palkowitsch would not be facing any charges. After all, he was still hired back, even after Spencer blew the whistle."It was very difficult because it was something I had been programmed throughout my career to never do," Spencer, told Ruben Rosario from Twin Cities at the time."But I decided that the right thing to do was tell Mr. Baker's story," he added as he looked away momentarily, tears starting to form in his eyes, explained Rosario. "I owed it to him. How do you explain to that guy what happened to him was justified?"Spencer, who felt horrible after watching his fellow officers do this to an innocent man, visited Baker in the hospital."He had these big tears in his eyes," Spencer noticed. "He was still having trouble breathing. And then he tells me:"We are the department that brought (cop killer) Guy Harvey Baker to jail alive," Spencer said. "That's what the community expects of us. The younger cops don't understand the legacy of the department. In our darkest hour on our worst day, we brought in that guy alive. And he did not have seven broken ribs and two collapsed lungs, did he? And he killed two of our cops."Because of Spencer's testimony, which was described as the entire department against him and his partner, Baker received the largest settlement for police misconduct in the history of St. Paul, $2 million.Officer Spencer is the epitome of a good cop as he was unafraid of pointing out the crimes of his fellow cops against an innocent member of society - whom they ostensibly protect.However, that good cop is now gone, retiring shortly after this incident, and he has since been replaced, as he stated above, by "younger cops [who] don't understand the legacy of the department" who are more prone to destroy first and attempt to justify later.Below is a video showing the type of legacy the new cops intend to leave for the St. Paul police department - and it is terrifying.