Political, police, abuse of authority roundup - " Everything Hitler did was legal. Everything our Founding Fathers did was illegal." - Wayne Dyer

Or, the things I read to just piss myself off. Authority is not to be respected. Respect is earned, not given. And it must be earned again and again.

3 weeks worth of bile inspiring stupidity and rage inducingness...

Judge sentences man to 6 months for yawning in court - Boing Boing

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Taser Nation:

"Alabama police tase three times, pepper-spray, arrest, and jail deaf, retarded man because he took too long in a Dollar General store bathroom, and didn’t come out when called. Here’s the “you’ve got to be kidding me” part: “A spokesman for the Mobile Police Department said the officers’ actions were justified because the man was armed with a potential weapon — an umbrella.” They went ahead and jailed him even after learning about his deafness and severe mental disability.

Police tase a grandfather and a pregnant woman after responding to a noise complaint. Bonus points: The grandfather is a “church family counselor and a bible study teacher.” Double bonus points: They were responding to a child’s baptism party.

Boise police effectively sodomize a man with a taser, then threaten to tase his genitals, too. He was handcuffed at the time. He was tased apparently for protesting while the officers were on top of him that he could breathe. Link includes audio."

Disorderly Conduct: Conversation About Gates Arrest Precedes Arrest:

"A lawyer who moments earlier had been complaining to friends about police overreaction in the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., got a taste of the Gates treatment himself after loudly chanting 'I hate the police' near a traffic stop in Northwest Washington, D.C.

...One officer reacted strongly to Tuma's song. "Hey! Hey! Who do you think you're talking to?" Tuma recalled the officer shouting as he strode across an intersection to where Tuma was standing. "Who do you think you are to think you can talk to a police officer like that?" the police officer said, according to Luke Platzer, 30, one of Tuma's companions.

Tuma said he responded, "It is not illegal to say I hate the police. It's not illegal to express my opinion walking down the street."

According to Tuma and Platzer, the officer pushed Tuma against an electric utility box, continuing to ask who he thought he was and to say he couldn't talk to police like that.

...D.C.'s disorderly conduct statute bars citizens from breaching the peace by doing anything "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others" or by shouting or making noise "either outside or inside a building during the nighttime to the annoyance or disturbance of any considerable number of persons."

The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has said that the city's disorderly conduct law is "confusing, overbroad, frequently used by police to harass disfavored individuals" and that it "violates constitutional rights of free speech, assembly and petition."

...While the Gates incident has largely been treated as a story about race, many have noted, from the Los Angeles Times to Christopher Hitchens to Maureen Dowd, that the incident said as much about police use of disorderly conduct laws. Tuma agrees. "People talk about the Gates thing in terms of race, but it's an ongoing problem of police using disorderly conduct to shut people up," Tuma said."

The whole Crowley/Gates thing blew up when I was on vacation... it struck me less about race [probably in part cause I'm a white dude] than it did about authority and its misuse. Basically, it boils down to the fact if you make a cop look bad by yelling at him in front of others, puncture his ego a little bit, you go to jail. Stuff and nonsense. This was probably my favorite summation of the whole thing.

Hit & Run ; "When he's not arresting you, Sergeant Crowley is a really likable guy." - Reason Magazine:

"...But after you put down the peace pipe, a legitimate and important difference remains. It's structural, and cultural, and (over the past four decades of relentless Drug Warring and Constitution-eroding), judicial as well. There is a strain in law enforcement, backed by various vague statutes, thousands of politicians, and everyone who tends to side with authority against an obnoxious popoff, in which it's considered perfectly acceptable form to arrest, detain, or otherwise punish a non-threatening person for being an asshole. This includes the perceived assholery of yelling about one's real (and sometimes imagined) trampled rights. If a person is considered undesirable by a police officer, for whatever reason, it's far too easy to ruin his day, even if no law has remotely been broken. And as Balko has led the world in documenting, the literal militarization of domestic police forces, combined with awful Drug War-related enforcement, has caused grave injustice and the death of innocents..."

Hit & Run ; Response to LAPD Officer "Jack Dunphy" and Blogger Patterico - Reason Magazine:

"...Dunphy's point. He's arguing that you can't possibly know what's going on in a police officer's head when he stops you or confronts you. You can't know what circumstances led him to stop you. So you'd best just shut up and submit, even he asks you to do something that you aren't obligated to do under the Constitution. Dunphy's using his unlikely hypothetical to plant the threat that any noncompliance with an officer's demands may end with him shooting you. Put another way, because you can't possibly know the reasons why the officer has stopped you, giving lip about your rights may well endanger your life."

Daily Brickbats ; Father's Day - Reason Magazine:

"Agnes Lawless had a bad day. First, she was rear-ended by a hit-and-run driver. Shortly afterward, she was in a convenience store when a man approached her from behind and grabbed her neck. As she pulled away, he jammed a gun in her neck so hard it left a bruise. The man was Alberto Lopez Sr., an on-duty police officer and the father of the driver who had hit her car. Lopez arrested Lawless for assaulting him and later testified that when he ordered Lawless and friends to the floor, she 'freaked out' and begin hitting him. Fortunately, for Lawless, the store's security cameras showed exactly what happened and charges against her were dismissed."

Hit & Run ; Transportation Safety: So Easy, It's Like Taking Toys from an Orphan - Reason Magazine:

"NBC Miami reports that Jeremiah Ramirez, "an eight-year-old boy who lost his dad to cancer," was relieved of souveniers from his trip to Disney World by a few Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport...

Lest you now begin to feel bad (not likely) for TSA officials hamstrung by absurd regulations prohibiting toy weaponry on aircraft:

Edge said she became even angrier when she claims that not long after the TSA officers had confiscated the items, she saw the officers playing with the toy sword and gun..."

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Tough Call:

"A Virginia woman has been arrested for blogging about the members of a local drug task force. The charge is harassment of a police officer. She apparently posted on the blog one officer’s home address, as well as photos of all members of the task force, and a photo of one officer getting into his unmarked car in front of his home...

It doesn’t look like the woman was accusing these officers of any misconduct. She appears to have been merely goading them. That of course makes her less sympathetic, though I don’t think it would or should have much effect on whether or not her arrest was constitutional. The charge for which she was arrested seems like it could just as easily be applied to someone who publicly criticizes or alleges misconduct against an undercover officer by name. That can’t be illegal. And I don’t know that you can really make a distinction under the law.

[From the comments]

I don’t think it’s a tough call. I despise the thought of undercover policework for ANY crime. We aren’t meant to have a secret police force. The bulk of undercover work is done because the “crimes” being investigated are consensual or victimless. How much undercover work do you see for assault, rape, burglary, robbert, etc? It’s always for gambling, drugs, prostitution, internet (adult) child enticement. If the state can’t investigate it openly, the state should have no interest in prosecuting it..."

Hit & Run ; Why Does This Banana-Eating Jungle Monkey Have to Make Everything About Race? - Reason Magazine:

"A Boston cop who was suspended for calling Henry Louis Gates a "banana-eating jungle monkey" in a mass email insists, "I didn't mean it in a racist way."

Disturbing the Peace: On the inalienable right to "excessively noisy sex" - Reason Magazine:

"At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the northeast of England, was remanded in custody for having “excessively noisy sex.”

...So how did Cartwright’s expressions of noisy joy become a police case, scheduled to be ruled on at Newcastle Crown Court, one of the biggest courts in the north of England? Because, unbelievably, Cartwright had previously been served with an anti-social behavior order (ASBO)—a civil order used to control the minutiae of British people’s behavior—that forbade her from making “excessive noise during sex” anywhere in England.

That’s right. Going even further than Orwell’s imagined authoritarian hellhole, where at least there was a wood or two where people could indulge their sexual impulses, the local authorities in Wearside made all of England a no-go zone for Cartwright’s noisy shenanigans... "

Hit & Run ; "None of our freedoms are absolute, and the freedom of expression is not absolute" - Reason Magazine:

"That's from Florida Republican state Rep. William D. Snyder, defending the arrest of two Florida men for displaying alleged gang hand signals on their Myspace pages. Not that those men have been charged with any gang-related crimes, mind you, just with posting pictures of themselves making hand signals."

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Morning Links:

"Elderly Columbia, Maryland couple who were subjected to a mistaken police raid file a lawsuit. This was the raid where, according to the couple, the husband asked if he could go out to restrain his dog. The police said no, then went out and killed it."

NY police use trick to arrest people for pot possession - Boing Boing:

"An article in Cannabis News by Harry G. Levine, a professor of sociology at Queens College, City University of New York, explains why New York City is the 'marijuana arrest capital of the world.' The law states that possessing a small amount of pot results in $100 civil citation for the first offense. Yet 40,300 people were arrested and jailed in NYC last year for possessing small amounts of pot. How so? By trickery on the part of the NYPD. Police officers convince people to pull their stash out of their pocket, promising to go easy on them if they do, then bust them on charges of having marijuana 'open to public view,' which means they can be handcuffed, fingerprinted, and jailed on a misdemeanor charge..."

The Agitator » Blog Archive » New Professionalism Roundup:

FBI investigating one D.C. and five Prince George’s County, Maryland police officers for involvement in a gambling ring. The ring itself may be responsible for as many as five homicides.

I mentioned the case of the Philadelphia cop caught on surveillance video assaulting a woman in my crime column last week, but it’s worth noting that the store clerk in the case claims officers other than the one who committed the assault also asked him erase the videotape. They were cleared by internal affairs. Seem to be quite a few problems with the level of professionalism in Philadelphia right now.

A Seattle police officer who shoved an innocent man head-first into a wall, putting the man into a coma, won’t be prosecuted. The man fled when police approached after a witness wrongly fingered him as the culprit in a bar fight.

Officer in Hollywood, Florida rear-ends a woman. Woman wasn’t at fault in the crash, but she was intoxicated. Dash cam then catches four officers planning a cover up and subsequent falsification of a police report to pin the accident on the woman, not the cop. They’re on paid leave. And check out this graph from a separate story on the incident: “The last major blow to the Hollywood department’s credibility came in February 2007, when four officers were charged and later convicted of delivering heroin in an FBI sting operation. Federal authorities said at the time that they could have snared more corrupt Hollywood cops had department higher-ups not alerted colleagues to the investigation.”

Fifteen people suing West Virginia police officer for lying, pulling motorists over at gunpoint, sexual humiliation, and a host of other fun activities. He’s on paid leave, too.

West Palm Beach, Florida officers fired after dash cam catches them beating a man. Fortunately, the video also caught them huddling to get their story straight after they discovered the beating had been caught on video. Not sure why they didn’t think the story-planning wouldn’t be preserved, too."

The Agitator » Blog Archive » Corrupt Prosecutor Gets Promoted To Become Corrupt Judge:

"Last week, Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Bobby DeLaughter pled guilty to lying to FBI agents investigating him for corruption.

Before he became a judge, DaLaughter was the prosecutor who hid exclupatory evidence from the jury in the murder and robbery case against Cedric Willis. Willis did 12 years at Parchman Penitentiary before he was exonerated and released in 2007."

Hit & Run ; This Week in Innocence - Reason Magazine:

"In 1985, then-19-year-old, openly gay Bernard Baran was convicted of molesting children at a day care center in Massachusetts...

After serving 21 years in prison, during which he was beaten and sexually assaulted by other inmates, Baran has finally been cleared of the charges. His defense team found videotapes in which children at the center tell investigators Baran never touched them. Other children who did say he abused them appear to have been coerced. The tapes were never turned over to Baran's attorneys."

Hit & Run ; "Any person who shall willfully blaspheme the holy name of God, by cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor." - Reason Magazine:

"The First Amendment Center's David Hudson has an entertaining and slightly unnerving story about the various blasphemy and profanity laws still on the books in various American states. Here's a sampler:

Michigan's blasphemy law says: "Any person who shall willfully blaspheme the holy name of God, by cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor."

Oklahoma law provides: "Blasphemy consists in wantonly uttering or punishing words, casting contumelious reproach or profane ridicule upon God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Scriptures, or the Christian or any other religion." Uttering such speech is classified as a misdemeanor...."