Caylee's Law?

Get ready for the cable-news-personality-driven push to enact "Caylee's Law" all over the country. They're entertaining one in the State of Georgia, and the usually diverse commentary at Peach Pundit presented a nearly united front against.

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Legit Verdict

To be clear, I'm of a rationally firm opinion that if someone attacks you with deadly force, you are well within your rights to defend yourself with a firearm.

However, if an attacker has already been shot, and they are unconcious and bleeding on the floor, coming back to stand over them and shoot them 5 more times is little better than cold-blooded execution. It passes the realm of "self-defense" and into the realm of "murder" when the attacker is no longer a threat due to lying prone and bleeding on the floor.

I don't know all the evidence presented in this case, but that's a verdict that appears to have a basis in reality.

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Criminal Justice 101

Essential reading from Radley Balko at Huffington Post:

Criminal Justice Myths 1
Criminal Justice Myths 2
Criminal Justice Myths 3

I would say that these items need to be read by every individual in the American criminal justice system, but I know they won't be. Further, I understand that many individuals in the criminal justice system will find ways to rationalize each and every one of these examples.

So, instead of that, these items need to be read by every American likely voter. And every American likely to spend any time on a jury, anywhere.

Though the traditional criminal justice system response to juries behaving such ways would likely lead to the end of the American trial-by-jury system, and authoritarian advocates would define such behavior as "turning criminals loose" as opposed to seeing the widespread lack of confidence in the system we have.

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," - Thomas Jefferson, and he was talking about more than just paying attention to possible terrorists and criminals in the area around you. It is time civil libertarians started going to Police Academy en masse instead of law school.

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Culture as a Weapon

Sectarian violence in Northern Ireland just a week after sports violence in Vancouver is making me wonder what progress resistant traits exist in culturally Christian nations that encourage this type of behavior.

Because, if our overblown national narrative of the last decade is to be believed, the only reason individuals in Muslim countries participate in violence is because of their religion. If that is true, we should employ the same lens to examine this widespread violent behavior in Christian and culturally Christian populations. If we did, I'm sure the Congressional hearings on Irish radicalization will be very uncomfortable for some.

Or maybe, propensity to violence is a human trait we see in some measure in all cultures. The only antidote isn't to change religion or national boundary or whatever issue is on the demagogue's list of rationalizations, but to seek justice as an antidote to reprisal.

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Professionalism

Or not. I'll leave this here without further comment.

Because, really, what can I say?

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Heckuva Job Moment

This massive Federal blunder belongs to the higher-ups at the ATF and the Department of Justice. Folks have stuck the Obama administration with a lot of BS over the years, but they're going to have to own this one, hard.

I know they were trying to do something bigger, but you have to pull the plug before it gets out of control on this level. This is stunning in scope and breadth of failure, on a scale with Michael Brown's leadership of FEMA in August and September of 2005.

And now that Weiner is out of the news, I expect we'll hear about this in a big way.

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Losing the Drug War

I don't agree with a lot of what Bob Barr says, but the man is an honest civil libertarian and has not wavered much from that stance. I'm glad one of the things he talks about negative impact of the Drug War on America, and America's need to lead the world out of this mess.

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The Police State

Another reason people have trouble trusting the police.

More than anything else going on in our society right now, unaccounted police misbehavior and the associated lack of public trust in the justice system is what I find the most ominous.

(HT: Andrew Sullivan and Balko.)

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Body Counts in the Drug War

DADvocate makes note of the police killing of Jose Guerena in Pima County, Arizona.

The war on drugs has become a war on the freedom in America. Too many police departments have taken on the cowboy/Dirty Harry mentality and are terrorizing the populace.

At least in Arizona, the police are still using the drug war as an excuse to terrorize the population. Some police departments have a bar far, far lower. Once you accept that the police can violate your rights for one reason or another, you'll have to defend everywhere else.

For those keeping score at home, Guerena was a United States Marine, a veteran of the Iraq War, and members of his family had recently been killed in a home invasion. So the SWAT team comes pouring into his yard in military garb, as part of a marijuana investigation. In the confusion, he takes up a weapon - who wouldn't, with armed men invading your home - and is killed in a hail of 77 bullets.

The police initially claimed that he had shot at them, and that illegal drugs were found on the property. This would justify their actions. Of course they feared for their life, as Guerena feared for his. Why do we put our police and citizens in such situations?

Of course, it is now coming to light that this might be a CYA story, that Guerena never got the safety off the weapon, and nothing illegal was found in the house. Nothing really connected him to the marijuana investigation at all other than the word of a secret, confidential informant. An informant that provided information into a home where nothing illegal was found. Why am I not surprised?

When I grew up, I remember hearing stories about despotic governments, where the thought police would keep track of people, and report on them to the government. In such places (thought to be the Third World, the Asian Tyrannies, and the Eastern Bloc) secret informants could destroy your life with a few words. The informed-upon would be "disappeared" to a camp or a mass grave, leaving the family only wondering.

The drug war has already been like that for a long, long time.

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Religion of Peace

I guess it is good that a few news outlets are reporting on this.

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Not Justice

This is not justice, or anything that appears to be justice. Multiple murders, multiple rapes, completely random victims in the neighborhood, evading police for weeks.

Of course this individual appears incapable of helping in his own defense. From a moral standpoint, however, mental incapacity only goes so far.

This seems to me more a decision on the part of the criminal justice system in New Orleans to not bring this case before a jury, because they are afraid such a system that we have will not be considered credible enough to land a conviction for these crimes. Better the accused receive treatment now with a chance of conviction later.

At least, I can only hope that is the case; that the reevaluation to come will allow a trial to proceed. What I fear is that this system wants to wait until the crimes aren't so fresh; that the victims have moved away to safer places; that the outcry is not so loud. That way, they can just turn him lose back on a neighborhood, and hope someone there takes care of the problem for them.

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High Cost of the War on Drugs

Someday, I hope someone can explain to me why, in a legitimate and compelling way, this is a worthwhile expenditure of tax dollars. I hope someone will explain why that is a priority.

Because I drove over crumbling roads to work in a city filled with blighted houses and at-risk schools in a state where people's homes are being intentionally flooded by the government so other people's homes don't flood accidentally.

And I hope my brother will recognize that this is what I'm talking about when I say that drug policy in this country is an absolute but expensive failure.

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Fighting Back

I'm just going to leave this right here next to this.

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Torture Worked!

Well, at least in the delusional fantasy land of make believe that affects most American right-wingers these days. Folks, here's where credibility is important.

The people who brought you "Not One Drop of Oil [Spilled Due to Gulf Hurricanes in 2005]" proudly present:

"Torture Years Ago Killed Osama Earlier This Week."

(This of course creates the offspring narrative: "George W. Bush Had Much More To Do With OBL's Apprehension than Barack Obama.")

And you know what? They're going to repeat this as much and as often as is necessary to convince the American media consumer that this nonsense is true. Just like they did with the "Not One Drop" narrative. This is how they work, after all: create a talking point and repeat it until enough people have heard it so often they assume it is true. And they do it very well.

It doesn't even matter how easily their arguments can be deconstructed (NSFW Image).

[A]lthough neither torture victim gave up the correct information, and one gave an entirely false lead, it was their refusal to tell the truth that proves torture worked! Seriously. It was the failure of torture to get accurate information that proves the validity of the torture!

Update: The only thing that has been proven right in this episode of American history are the folks who warned us that, once our popular culture embraces torture in such ways, it was only a matter of time before the uses of torture were officially expanded.

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Security Theatre's New Season

So, the new Department of Homeland Security wants to scrap the old, color-coded terror alert levels. Napolitano brought up a great point:

"We've been at 'orange' since 2006."

I always found that color-coordinated stuff nonsense, and I remember it changing every once in a while to remind Americans to fear, fear, fear. I believe it was counterproductive, the equivalent of crying "wolf" constantly for years.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect to be a fan of the new system, either. All this is, in my opinion, more theatre. Maybe it comes from those American people who allow themselves to believe that they can outsource vigilance to a government agency so they don't have to worry about it personally. Maybe it is the government, who wants to advertise that they're doing something of value to the taxpayer without people looking too closely. Maybe it is a combination of both.

I only know this: you are never perfectly safe. Never. You never have been, you never will be, and no amount of complaining too or about the government is going to change that. They have limited resources to act proactively and reactively to those things that go bump in the night. While you are right to expect those actions to work effectively and continuously to help minimize risks to society as a whole and to work towards justice after the fact, you cannot abdicate your responsibility to participate in your own personal safety.

Now, you can let your fear of non-safety rule your life, or you can deal with it and pay attention to your surroundings, mitigating your risk as much as you can within reason, and understanding that sometimes no amount of preparation will ever be enough.

The answer isn't an overactive, color-coded government. The answer isn't to live your life in fear and never enjoy things because you're worried about events beyond your control. The answer is a society where everyone is, on average, a little bit vigilant; a society where people are more educated and less fearful, more involved in their communities and less alienated from each other, and use more common sense to pay more attention to their surroundings.

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The Problem with DNA Evidence

Is that examining the cases of the wrongly convicted are demonstrating the many innocuous investigation procedures that lead to false convictions.

Not that DNA evidence is a problem for the exonerated. Not that DNA evidence is a problem in that it requires investigators and prosecutors actually do their jobs. But it does present a tremendous problem with credibility.

For a justice system to work, the people must trust its authority. Just one overturned conviction is enough to shake the foundations of credibility. With so many convictions overturned, and the by-the-books tactics exposed as vulnerable, and now even confessions called into question of validity, how can we trust a justice system?

That's the problem.

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The KSM Civilian Federal Trial Unicorn

Promised. Not delivered.

But let's not kid ourselves who is at fault for this broken promise. While the President and the Attorney General bear tremendous responsibility for it, you cannot excuse the cowardice of the political factions in this country who would use such a trial as an excuse to fan the flames of cultural panic, nationalist fear, and sectarian hatred all over America.

They are the same people who manufactured a controversey about a "Ground Zero Mosque," which was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, which an issue last summer (several of whom are running for President) to help them win elections through demagoguery. They are the people who, fearing the political fallout from that manufacture, choose to bow or cower before the altar of cultural panic instead of leading the nation away from it.

It is a shame that, when it comes to big decisions, the political calculus must include expectations of issue demagoguery by the opposition and allies. What is even more of a shame is that those calculations show the manufacture of fear to be more powerful than doing things the way they ought to be done.

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Impunity

Justice Clarence Thomas and the Right-Wing of the Supreme Court of the United States of America have recently ruled that a prosecutor can knowingly rob 14 years off your life and nearly get you murdered under state sanction, and they can do it with near absolute impunity from prosecution or punitive damages.

I'll let Jeffrey show you the round-up.

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Some Measure of Justice

An edtorial. Includes a striking quote:

Turmoil and chaos cannot be used as excuses for breaking the law, especially not by those sworn to uphold it.

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The Glynn County Life

Finally, someone exposes the bullshit stinking from behind the bench from the Glynn County Drug Court. (HT: patsbrother)

Luckily, like in the Middle East, when cracks first appear in the despot's reign, things start to happen. Hopefully, people will start taking notice and start realizing how much power local authorities have over your life.

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