Via Atrios, another example of horrendous police conduct--you have to read this one to believe it: As family shrieks, police kill dog

We think this news, which came out just before Christmas got buried. We wrote about it on December 26, having found out about it on one of our legal discussion list-servs, when lawyers started hearing from their clients they had received a notice they were going to be moved from a halfway house to prison. Since the Washington Post has revived it with this informative article in today's paper, we are reprinting our prior post:

The business section of today's New York Times has an article on Ashcroft's directive to the Bureau of Prisons that white collar offenders with short sentences must serve their time in federal prison, not half-way houses. For the past decade, the BOP has been allowing such offenders to go directly to a halfway house.

"In a memorandum last week to Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, the director of the Bureau of Prisons, Mr. Ashcroft said that the practice violated federal sentencing laws that require imprisonment and that it offered favorable treatment to white-collar criminals. The directive from the attorney general was first reported by Newsweek."

Because of Ashcroft's new policy, about 125 white collar offenders now in halfway houses will return to federal prisons.

The New York Times article also addresses in detail the proposed sentencing guideline changes for white collar offenders under the newly enacted Sarbanes-Oxley Act --changes with which the Justice Department is not happy.

When a law is enacted that increases penalties, the U.S. Sentencing Commission is directed to draw up new sentencing guidelines. They send them out for public comment. Then they vote on them. After that, unless Congress affirmatively takes action, the new guidelines automatically become law.

The Commission promulgated new guidelines on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and sent them out for comment. In two weeks, the Commission will vote on them. The Justice Department strongly objects to the proposed guidelines because they are not tough enough for low level fraud offenders. The two agencies have been feuding for months over this issue.

"Justice Department officials said in recent interviews that they plan to broaden their corporate investigations to focus more intensely on the professional "gatekeepers" - lawyers, accountants and others - who may have facilitated frauds."

Maybe now that Aschroft's actions are going to affect some prospersous people, some of whom undoubtedly must have "connections", we'll hear louder protests of Ashcroft and his brand of non-compassionate conservatism.

We've talked a lot about the dangers of using what we call "purchased testimony," by which we mean the testimony of informants or cooperating individuals that is obtained by the Government through promises of leniency in their own criminal cases. After all, given a chance at a reduced sentence or no sentence at all through immunity, who among that group do you think would not lie or stretch the truth, or at least provide the prosecutor's or FBI's version of the truth, to save their own hide?

As we've often said, freedom is a far more precious commodity than money, and the snitch system makes it too easy for untrustworthy, unreliable wrong-doers to fabricate or embellish a story to get someone else in trouble and thereby cut themselves some slack.

And now we have a great example. ABC News is reporting that the FBI alert for five men thought to have entered the U.S. from Canada on Christmas Eve was based on a hoax by an informant who was trying to get leniency in his own criminal case in exchange for the information.

"The FBI has concluded the information that led to a hunt for five men thought to have entered the United States illegally on Christmas Eve was fabricated by an informant, ABC News reported on Monday."

"Citing unnamed sources, the report said the informant identified as Michael John Hamdani, who was arrested in Canada, made up the story about 19 men who sought false passports in an attempt to get himself off the hook on criminal charges he was facing in the United States."

Case closed.

Via Eve Tushnet, we found this interview by Michael Lynch in the January issue of Reason. Lynch questions three ex-warriors who now fight against the War on Drugs.

One is a former cop named Joe McNamara.

Reason: From the perspective of the working police officer, how has the War on Drugs changed over the years? McNamara: It has become the priority of police agencies. It’s bizarre. We make 700,000 arrests for marijuana a year. The public is not terrified of marijuana. People are terrified of molesters, school shootings, and people stalking women and children. The police are not putting the resources into those crimes where they could be effective if they gave them top priority.

Another is former DEA Agent, now radio host and author Michael Levine:

What’s the mindset of agents in this war?

Levine: Before you become an agent, you’re bombarded with stories of drug war victories. It’s painted as heroic -- guys in guerrilla outfits and jungle gear fighting the drugs everywhere. You want to do something for your country. Then when you get in, the first thing you discover is that you can’t touch some of the biggest drug dealers in the world because they’re protected by the CIA or they’re protected by the State Department. Everyone from Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico to Manuel Noriega to the contras in Nicaragua to the Mujahedin in Afghanistan. Those of us who work overseas realize that this whole thing is a three-card monte game, that it’s a lie....

Reason: What is the relationship between informants, drug agents, and arrests?

Levine: Informants run the drug war. Ninety-nine percent of all drug cases start off with a criminal informant. These informants are criminals and liars and they will create crimes to make money and, at the same time, get the protection of the people they are working for.

The third is Orange County, California Superior Court Judge James P. Gray:

Reason: You write about a drug exception to the Bill of Rights.

Gray: When I graduated from law school in 1971, it was illegal for a police officer, even after arresting you, to search anything that was outside of your grasp. If you can reach over to something, then you could search it. But if a suitcase you were carrying was locked, the police could not go in there unless they got a search warrant first. They couldn’t go into the trunk of your car, they couldn’t go into the glove compartment, and they couldn’t go into the backseat.

That has totally been reversed. The police not only can search you and everything in your car, but they can also search your passengers. They can search your mobile home, which is in effect a home on wheels. They can go through and search everything....

When I was running for Congress a few years ago, I met individually with two sitting congressmen from Orange County to try to get their support. They both said that the War on Drugs isn’t working, but the problem is even worse than I thought because most federal agencies get extra money to fight the War on Drugs. It’s not just the obvious ones like the U.S. Customs Service and the DEA. It’s the little guys too, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They are addicted to drug war funding.

The above are just our selected snippets, all are worth reading in their entirety.

"A review of traffic ticket data shows Massachusetts police were more likely to search cars of black and Hispanic drivers during routine traffic stops than those of white drivers, the Boston Globe reported Monday."

"Two years ago, the state began collecting information on traffic citations to measure possible racial profiling by police, following the example of 20 other states. The Globe analyzed more than 750,000 tickets from every police department in the state and found a wide racial disparity in the tickets and vehicle searches."

"Statewide, black and Hispanic drivers received traffic tickets at a rate twice their share of the population. Once ticketed, they were 50 percent more likely than whites to have their cars searched. But a higher percentage of the white drivers whose cars were searched were arrested, the study found."

A more comprehensive article appears in the Boston Globe here.

If you live in Nevada or one of 16 other states, be aware the state is snooping into your medicine cabinet--every prescribed controlled substance you receive from a pharmacy is reported to a state board and to law enforcement. They say the information is not being used for law enforcement purposes, but to encourage those who take more than "experts" think they should to seek treatment.

"Nevada is one of 17 states in which police are able to collect the information under the auspices of a federal program that has pharmacists file regular reports that include patients' names, the names of their prescriptions, the amount of the medication they receive and the names of their doctors. The states' programs fall under the national umbrella of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program."

Nevada's Prescription Controlled Substance Abuse Prevention Task Force "tracks everything from hard-core narcotics to prescribed painkillers and anti-anxiety medication like the frequently prescribed Xanax and Valium pills. It is composed of representatives from boards that license doctors, veterinarians, dentists and pharmacists as well as physicians who specialize in the treatment of addiction. One member is from the Nevada Division of Investigations."

An update on the case of the two U.S. pilots who released the bomb over Afganistan in April that killed four Canadian soldiers: A lawyer for one of them says the Air Force pressured the pilots to take amphetamines (called "go pills") that "may have impaired their judgment during the mission."

We commented at length on the case here.

Update Jan. 4 from the LA Times is here.

Night courts, a key part of Tony Blair’s attempt to tackle “yob culture” are to be abandoned after proving a costly failure.

"The courts were supposed to operate around the clock, to bring instant justice to criminals who terrorised city centres. But the huge cost of the scheme, opposition from workers in the criminal justice system and a failure to provide enough cell space for offenders, means the policy will now be abandoned."

"Instead of delivering swift justice to young offenders and drunken thugs, the courts dealt only with a few minor offences, such as begging, shoplifting and prostitution. Night courts were first suggested by Sir John Stevens, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who was impressed by the swift justice delivered by them in New York. The idea was seized on by the Prime Minister as part of new Labour’s tough law and order rhetoric in the last general election campaign. Mr Blair indicated his support in a speech decrying “yob culture”.

"Officials at 10 Downing Street pressed for pilot schemes to start as soon as possible, despite misgivings among many in the criminal justice system that the idea was a gimmick. Two schemes were launched in London and Manchester in May at a cost of £5.4 million."

“The US justice system places great reliance on plea bargaining and therefore quick justice, the British system does not. This expensive experiment must not be rolled out nationally as it would waste money that could be put elsewhere in the hard-pressed criminal justice system.”

"On some weekends when the courts were expected to be at their busiest, only ten people appeared. Many cases were adjourned because paperwork or evidence was not ready. Mr Fletcher said that during the pilot scheme it cost an average of £4,000 to process a defendant compared with £1,610 in an ordinary court."

Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle justly takes Bush to task for the puny mercy he exhibited in the limited pardons he granted last week.

"Those sentences are peanuts compared to the sentences being served by many first-time nonviolent drug offenders in the federal system this Christmas. Laws that were supposed to put away drug kingpins have been subverted so that drug dealers can turn in the help and get soft time, while their gofers may serve decades-long sentences."

"If, in 1986, Congress had told the public that it was passing a sentencing law that looked to be tough on kingpins but in fact would enable the biggest drug players to avoid long sentences, Americans would have been appalled. If the public had understood that the only true check on prosecutors who are harsher on petty criminals than high-level drug dealers would be the presidential pardon, Congress (one would hope) would have been too ashamed to pass the legislation."

"If Congress didn't know what it was doing then, federal law enforcement knows all too well now what the law has wrought: Get-out-of-jail-free cards for kingpins; and despair for their dupes."

"Only one man in America has the power to end these injustices and insure that the punishment fits the crime. How it breaks my heart that George W. Bush, who is such a giant, has limited himself to meting out pardons to bootleggers and a man who rolled back an odometer. It is beneath him."

The Telegraph of London reports on LA Police Chief Bill Bratton's attempts to rid LA of street gangs and crime. They call him the blunt super-cop, because he has promised to:

"...flood the districts where gangs operate with foot patrols, ending a policy that advised officers not to get out of their vehicles for their own safety in what were essentially unofficial "no go" zones.

To try to disrupt the gangs' territorial nature he has also ordered daily cleaning of the coded graffiti by which they mark their sphere of influence, and in a series of high-profile raids his officers have already seized several caches of assault rifles.

Mr Bratton, 54, described the gangs' activities as "homeland terrorism", and added: "It is time to fight the internal war on terrorism as well." It is an approach that has resulted in the Los Angeles Times nicknaming him "supercop" and gained him the full backing of the local police officers' union."

Bratton has his detractors, but many, particularly mothers and relatives of the many murdered young men,"have embraced the possibility of a new dawn."

"This news is sweet," said Alice Brown, who recently led a demonstration of dozens of women in support of the crackdown. "We are watching our children die like dogs. We have to stop this."

The article has several links to other articles about Bratton, including this one by TalkLeft.

We thought Rave Raids were bad. How scary is this? It's happening in England, not here...yet. So be aware.

Pub and club revellers face a drugs test as soon as they enter the premises. Anyone going into a bar, whether they arouse suspicion or not, will be asked to take a swab test, which highlights any drug use.

The scheme is being run by police in south Staffordshire and will initially cover the towns of Cannock and Stafford.

Police have warned that anyone refusing will automatically arouse suspicion and have told establishments that do not co-operate that it will be held against them when their licences come up for renewal.

Liberty, the civil rights pressure group, said it was "deeply worried" and accused the police of operating "by coercion rather than by consent".

Chief Supt Nick Lowe, division commander, said: "The beauty of it is that it is so quick. It will allow us to test hundreds of people in a very, very short amount of time. A swab will be placed on the hand and will show up green, amber or red, depending on if there are drugs in the person's system.

"If it shows red, which means definite contact with drugs, the police can intimate their powers under the Misuse of Drugs Act to stop and search the person, and then arrest them if necessary.

"If it is green or amber no action will be taken. If someone refuses, then it is a tick in the first box of suspicion. Police officers are present and it may be that further questions will be asked."

The equipment used is a £40,000 computer the size of a briefcase, funded by the Communities against Drugs Fund. A swab on the back of the hand, which is then fed into the computer, will test for ecstasy, cannabis, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines and also rohipnol, the so-called date rape drug.

The test with results takes about eight seconds and does not provide officers with a DNA sample. The swabs are thrown away immediately.

Mr Lowe said: "We have clear evidence that a large volume of crime is drugs-related, whether it be for violence, vehicle crime or anti-social behaviour.

"The tests appeal to the general majority of the public who want to use drug-free premises. Most people are happy to do it."

Because there is only one computer, the police will also be operating with dummy ones in other premises.

Gareth Crossman, a Liberty spokesman, said: "This is an extremely questionable use of police powers. The police cannot force someone who is not under arrest to take a drug test but they are implying they can.

"To then use a perfectly legitimate refusal to comply as part of the justification for suspicion is an abuse of policing powers."

The San Francisco Chronicle points out the problems with the move of the INS from the Justice Department into the Department of Homeland Security in its Thursday editorial , Immigrants as 'Enemies'

"The White House says that the new department would "make certain that America continues to welcome visitors and those seeking opportunity within our shores." It will create an ombudsman to "assist individuals and employers" in resolving problems" getting visas or citizenship papers."

The new chief of the INS is former Congressman Asa Hutchinson, who worked so hard to impeach President Clinton that he ended up with the job of Chief of the DEA.

"But these warm and fuzzy elements do little to disguise the radical shift that has taken place: Immigration control has now become indistinguishable from the fight against terrorism. New immigrants will almost certainly face delays and confusion in getting their visa applications approved. The more insidious danger is that xenophobic forces trying to restrict immigration will exploit the new linkage to promote their own short-sighted agendas."