From Reason: Supreme Court Will Hear This Texas Woman's Challenge to a Politically Motivated Arrest

The problem with unrestrained police.

- Click here for the article. 

Four years ago, Sylvia Gonzalez, a newly elected member of the Castle Hills, Texas, city council, was charged with concealing a government record, a misdemeanor that would have resulted in her removal from office if she had been convicted. Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales declined to pursue the case, and it is not hard to see why. The charge, which was orchestrated by Gonzalez's political opponents, was based on what she describes as an honest mistake: After a city council meeting, she says, she accidentally picked up a bundle of petitions against City Manager Ryan Rapelye—petitions that she herself had organized—and placed it in her binder along with other papers.

As a result, Gonzales was arrested two months later and spent a day in jail, after which her mug shot appeared in local news reports. According to a Supreme Court petition that the Institute for Justice filed on Gonzalez's behalf in April, "Gonzalez was so hurt by the experience and so embarrassed by the media coverage of her arrest" that "she gave up her council seat and swore off organizing petitions or criticizing her government." On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear her case, Gonzalez v. Trevino, which poses the question of what counts as "objective evidence" that someone was arrested in retaliation for constitutionally protected activity.

- ScotusBlog: Gonzalez v. Trevino.

- Oyez: Gonzalez v. Trevino.

ScotusBlog: Court hears Texas city council member’s retaliatory arrest claim.

U.S. Supreme Court: Audio Recording.

From Vox: These states let police take and keep your stuff even if you haven't committed a crime

A bit more for out look at criminal justice.

- Click here for the article.

Most states in America let police take and keep your stuff without convicting you of a crime.

These states fully allow what's known as "civil forfeiture": Police officers can seize someone's property without proving the person was guilty of a crime; they just need probable cause to believe the assets are being used as part of criminal activity, typically drug trafficking.

Police can then absorb the value of this property — be it cash, cars, guns, or something else — as profit, either through state programs or under a federal program known as Equitable Sharing, which lets local and state police get up to 80 percent of the value of what they seize as money for their departments.

But the restrictions in some states, such as California and New Mexico, make it so they can't keep that property without a criminal conviction under many circumstances, under state law. And, therefore, they won't be able to take people's property as easily for personal profit.So police not only can seize people's property without proving involvement in a crime, but they have a financial incentive to do so. It's the latter that state restrictions on civil forfeiture attempt to limit: Police should still be able to seize property as evidence.

And in case you are curious - and as you would suspect - Texas is one of the states thatcan take your stuff without a conviction.

From the Washington Post: New report: In tough times, police start seizing a lot more stuff from people

It's not that new - last year - but it helps explains what drives law enforcement policy.

- Click here for the article.

Recent years have brought public scrutiny on a controversial law enforcement practice known as civil asset forfeiture, which lets police seize and keep cash and property from people who are never convicted — and in many cases, even charged — with wrongdoing. But despite a growing public outcry spurred in part by news investigations and congressional hearings, a new report Tuesday from the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit civil-liberties law firm, finds that the past decade has seen a "meteoric, exponential increase" in the use of the practice.

The government does not measure the number of times per year that assets are seized. But one common measure of the practice is the amount of money in the asset forfeiture funds of the Department of Justice and the U.S. Treasury, the two agencies that typically perform forfeitures at the federal level. In 2008, there were less than $1.5 billion in the combined asset forfeiture funds of the Justice Department and the U.S. Treasury, according to the report. But by 2014, that number had tripled, to roughly $4.5 billion.

From ABC News: Paper: Federal Civil Rights Cases Against Officers Are Rare

For our look at due process and civil rights - where 2305 and 2306 overlap. It's tough to prosecute police officers for violating civil so often it doesn't even happen.

- Click here for the article.

The study it refers to can be found here:

- Trib investigation: Cops often let off hook for civil rights complaints.

Federal prosecutors declined to pursue civil rights allegations against law enforcement officers 96 percent of the time since 1995, a newspaper found, with most experts blaming the low prosecution rate on the difficulty of winning such cases.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review said the 12,703 potential civil rights violations turned down nationwide out of 13,233 total complaints from 1995-2015 include high-profile incidents in Chicago, New York and Ferguson, Missouri, but also thousands of incidents the public knows little about.

It said the most frequent reasons cited for declining civil rights complaints involving officers were weak or insufficient evidence, high standards of proof established by Supreme Court rulings, and policies set by the Justice Department.

Many legal and civil rights experts told the newspaper ( http://bit.ly/252UQoo ) that convicting a police officer of a civil rights violation is one of the toughest challenges a prosecutor can face. But some criminal justice experts also said the Justice Department needs to put more resources into the cases, and suggested that the typical partnering of police and prosecutors affects decision-making.

"The standard is high and challenging," said Alan Vinegrad, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, New York, who oversaw criminal civil rights cases.

"It's got to be a willful deprivation of rights, meaning the police officer intended and wanted to either kill or injure the person," said Vinegrad, now a partner at the law firm of Covington & Burling LLP in New York. "Not just 'it was reckless or negligent' or anything like that."

The U.S. attorney's office in Pittsburgh will open files for even minor accusations that the FBI investigates against a police officer, said Steve Kaufman, chief of the office's criminal division. But, he said, "it's one of the most difficult cases to gather sufficient evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt at trial."

HPD officers kill double amputee

A great example of the coercive power of government. A wheelchair bound man is killed by officers who mistook his pen for a weapon (which they are in a sense).

The Chronicle reports that the HPD chief has asked the FBI to investigate the shooting, which some are using to call for reforms in the department.

How to hold police departments accountable?

Atlantic Cities has a disturbing piece on keeping police departments accountable. It stats that had Trayvon Martin been shot by police officers under the same conditions we would not be having this discussion about whether his shooting was warranted. We would just have assumed that it was.

Holding police departments accountable, especially when it comes to activities affecting minority communities, is difficult to do. Community review boards are largely ineffective: 

. . . there is no such justice for police abusers in Philly. According to a recent Daily News report, the city's Police Advisory Commission “is often described as a toothless, civilian-run police oversight board without the authority to do anything.” The Commission has no power to punish offending police officers and can only make recommendations to the police department. It has done so just 21 times since 1994. In January, the Commission published its first recommendation since 2007. The barely funded agency currently has a backlog of 129 cases dating back to 2008. A proposal to strengthen the commission has so far been stymied by the city's powerful Fraternal Order of Police.

In New York, advocates likewise have little faith in the Civilian Complaint Review Board ( CCRB).

“The CCRB has unfortunately proven itself to be highly ineffective at reigning in police abuse,” says Donna Lieberman, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “While the CCRB receives increasing numbers of complaints every year, many people don't go there because they fail to substantiate all but a small percentage of complaints. And the police department fails to discipline officers in cases that are substantiated.”

Should Forensics be Separated from Law Enforcement?

Radley Balko:

After countless scandals in recent years, the problems with America's forensics system are finally getting some national attention. In December, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) introduced a bill to reform the country's crime labs. In January, ProPublica and Frontline teamed up for a year-long investigation into the ways criminal autopsies are conducted across the country. In North Carolina, the state legislature is considering reforms to that state's crime lab, which was rocked by a damning 2010 investigation commissioned by the state attorney general and a follow-up report by the Raleigh News and Observer that uncovered widespread corruption, hiding of exculpatory findings, and a pro-prosecution bias among crime lab workers. All of this comes on the heels of a congressionally commissioned 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences that found expert witnesses in many areas of forensics routinely give testimony that is not backed by good science.

So the good news is that we are starting to see some skepticism, even some outrage, about the way forensic science is used in criminal cases. The bad news is that the solutions politicians and policy makers are proposing, while better than nothing, do not really address the primary problem. That problem is perverse incentives.

To be sure, there are other problems with the forensics system. For starters, many forensic disciplines, such as hair and carpet-fiber analysis, blood spatter analysis, and especially bite mark analysis, have not been subject to rigorous scientific testing. Even fingerprint analysis is not the sure thing it was once thought to be. Many of these fields were either invented by law enforcement agencies or honed and refined by them. The fields have not been subjected to peer review, and the methods by which, for example, a carpet-fiber or ballistics analyst produces a "match" are not blind. On the contrary, the analyst often knows the details of the crime and which sample implicates the suspect. When done this way, these analyses are not science, but they are often presented in court as if they were.

Ministers' report sees race bias in bond policies

From the Chron, a story that combines civil rights and civil liberties (procedural rights):

More than 15,000 people were collared in Harris County for misdemeanors in the final months of 2010, but 70 percent of white inmates were released on bond before trial, compared to 50 percent or less of Hispanics and African-Americans, a new report critical of detention practices shows.

White criminal defendants also generally had to pay lower bonds for their freedom, according to a report released by the Houston Ministers Against Crime. The group of politically connected pastors claims aggressively locking up those who have been accused - but not yet convicted - for crimes like fighting and trespassing costs taxpayers big bucks and harms poor communities "struggling under the ongoing financial crisis."
I can't find a website for Houston Ministers Against Crime, but they're a local interest group actively involved in policing issues. Here's a 2006 story about their support for a public defender's office.

Is Philly’s ‘Stop and Frisk’ Racial Profiling?

From Findlaw:

Stop and frisk sounds more like a trendy dance move or a board game than a form of racial profiling. But that is exactly what some critics are claiming the real purpose behind Philly’s stop and frisk approach to law enforcement is. The Philadelphia stop and frisk policy has now become the center of a civil rights lawsuit, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The suit claims that in 2009, 72% of pedestrians that were stopped under the policy were African American. “Implicitly, the message is to make as many stops as you can and hopefully you will find something,” said one attorney working on the case. The purpose behind the Philly stop and frisk policy was to decrease the rising crime rate on the streets. Although officers were trained, the suit alleges that the behavior of the force seems to ignore the training.

- Stop and Frisk: Legal Definition.
- Wikipedia: Frisking.
- Wikipedia: Racial Profiling.

Do Cameras Affect Police Behavior?

Speaking of the media . . . though this story is about reality shows, not newspaper journalism. Do we act differently when the camera is on us? Do police? Considering that some want the Supreme Court to be televised, does this story suggest this would be a bad idea?

More Falsified Evidence

Considering the Stevens case below, are the floodgates now open?

More checks and balances, and guarantees of due process.