. . . and now, motor oil.

In April, Janet Goodin of Warroad, Minn., was crossing into Canada for an evening of bingo with her daughters when an officer with the Canadian Border Service conducted a routine search of her van. The officer found an old bottle of motor oil, did a field test and told her that it contained heroin.

“I can’t even describe the feeling of amazement,” Goodin, 66, said in an interview. “I said, ‘That’s not possible, it’s leftover oil.’”

The bottle was re-tested, and agents said it again revealed the presence of heroin. Goodin was arrested, handcuffed and taken to jail, where she was strip-searched. The motor oil was sent to a Canadian federal laboratory, which eventually determined there was no heroin in it. After 12 days behind bars, Goodin was released.

Goodin’s case has been seized upon by critics who question the reliability of field drug-test kits, which are used widely by law enforcement.

“She is what you call collateral damage in the drug war,” said former FBI special agent Frederic Whitehurst, a North Carolina attorney and forensic consultant with a Ph.D. in analytic chemistry, who has publicly raised concerns about field drug-test kits. “When you run the tests, you run into all sorts of problems from overzealous cops.” . . .

The Border Service won’t explain how they made the mistake. But Sgt. Line Karpish of the RCMP said her agency used “reasonable grounds” based on information it got from the Canadian Border Service. She noted that drugs are smuggled into Canada by all types of people. “We find it in diapers, we find it on old ladies, young ladies, beautiful ladies,” Karpish says. “You can’t let ‘grandma’ cloud your judgment about the police force. That’s why terrorists use kids.”

No, but you might start to question the veracity of field test kits that continue to produce absurd false positives. Links to the prior field test horror stories in the headline here.

This is pretty incredible:

Drivers have no recourse if police say the tape from a dashboard-mounted video camera is not available, according to a ruling Wednesday from the Texas Court of Appeals. Mark Lee Martin wanted to defend himself against drug possession charges filed in the wake of an August 29, 2008 traffic stop, but he was told no video was available.

Travis County Sheriff’s Deputy Darren Jennings claimed that he pulled over Martin that evening because he failed to signal a left-hand turn. Within less than two weeks after the incident, Martin’s attorney formally requested that the department preserve video evidence from the stop. Subpoenas were issued to ensure “all videos and dispatch calls” would be saved. At trial, Jennings was asked why the camera evidence had not been kept.

“Since I didn’t put it in my report it wasn’t preserved because I didn’t believe it had any type of evidential value,” Jennings told the court.

The dashcam is automatically activated when an officer turns on his emergency lights. Department policy states that all video must automatically be saved for thirty days. Jennings could not say whether his machine was operating that night, but he would have noted either at the beginning or end of the shift if the device had not been functional. Jennings stated that the only way to know for sure if the video had been taken would have been if he had preserved the video. Martin argued the police were obviously hiding evidence.

“The officers intentionally destroyed the video and thereby put exculpatory evidence as far as the search is concerned or evidence favorable to the accused out of the reach of the accused,” Martin’s attorney claimed. “We feel that for no other reason the search is invalid and any evidence found as a result of that search should be suppressed.”

The appellate court found no merit in this argument.

“We agree with the state that the record supports a finding by the district court that the police did not act in bad faith,” Justice Bob Pemberton wrote. “The United States Supreme Court has held that ‘unless a criminal defendant can show bad faith on the part of the police, failure to preserve potentially useful evidence does not constitute a denial of due process of law.’”

The court found no evidence of bad faith because the officer testified that he had “no clue” whether there even was a recording made.

Relevant excerpt from my Reason piece “The War on Cameras”:

Last March, Justice Lee Ann Dauphinot of the Second Court of Appeals in Texas complained in a dissent that when defendants accused of driving while intoxicated in Fort Worth challenge the charges in court, dash-camera video of their arrests is often missing or damaged. “At some point,” Dauphinot wrote, “courts must address the repeated failure of officers to use the recording equipment and their repeated inability to remember whether the car they were driving on patrol or to a DWI stop contained the video equipment the City of Fort Worth has been paying for.”

Well I guess they are addressing it, now. They’re giving cops a how-to guide when it comes to destroying dash cam footage that makes them look bad, or that could exonerate a motorist: Just make it look like you’re incompetent, not malicious.

Art studio in Budapest.

•  Jose Guerena family to file $20 million lawsuit.
• “Kids for Cash” judge gets 28 years in prison.
• The philosophy of Louis C.K.
• Writer watches every Coen brothers movie.
• Crappy Crime Lab of the Week Award: Houston! Houston is a repeat winner of this award.
• Bad idea of the week: Anti-discrimination laws for the unemployed.
• Wait, shouldn’t all those cold medicine laws have us winning the war on meth?
• Soldier kills himself while facing ninth deployment to a war zone.

Unbelievable:

Police Chief Jim McDonnell has confirmed that detaining photographers for taking pictures “with no apparent esthetic value” is within Long Beach Police Department  policy.

McDonnell spoke for a follow-up story on a June 30 incidentin which Sander Roscoe Wolff, a Long Beach resident and regular contributor to Long Beach Post, was detained by Officer Asif Kahn for taking pictures of North Long Beach refinery.

“If an officer sees someone taking pictures of something like a refinery,” says McDonnell, “it is incumbent upon the officer to make contact with the individual.” McDonnell went on to say that whether said contact becomes detainment depends on the circumstances the officer encounters.

McDonnell says that while there is no police training specific to determining whether a photographer’s subject has “apparent esthetic value,” officers make such judgments “based on their overall training and experience” and will generally approach photographers not engaging in “regular tourist behavior.”

This policy apparently falls under the rubric of compiling Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR) as outlined in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order No. 11, a March 2008 statement of the LAPD’s “policy …  to make every effort to accurately and appropriately gather, record and analyze information, of a criminal or non-criminal nature, that could indicate activity or intentions related to either foreign or domestic terrorism.”

Among the non-criminal behaviors “which shall be reported on a SAR” are the usage of binoculars and cameras (presumably when observing a building, although this is not specified), asking about an establishment’s hours of operation, taking pictures or video footage “with no apparent esthetic value,” and taking notes.

Of course, taking photos with no aesthetic value usually does fall under “regular tourist behavior.” Also, this policy land everyone who uses Hipstamatic on death row.

Jokes, folks. From a guy who regularly takes photos as a tourist. Just lightening the mood. Because this has gotten so goddamned ridiculous.

(Link via commenter “Jay.”)

• Leading by example.
• Photos from the Glass Beach.
• Videographer arrested in Miami, charged with terrorism.
• The Muppets theme song vs. “Stray Cat Strut.”
• Cops looking for fugitive raid, ransack the wrong house.
• “How to Make Henry’s Anytime Chili for One.”
• Hero worship at National Review. This is second cover in recent memory that looks like it could have been commissioned from the Leningrad Institute of Proletarian Visual Arts. Remember this one?
• Speaking of commies, it’s kinda depressing that this article could even be written.

Talking about Rick Perry with Alyona Minkovski.

As you near the suburbs of Budapest, there’s a nondescript little gravel-lined park surrounded by brick walls. Inside, there’s a stunning display of the creepy statues, monuments, and memorials the Soviet Union put up around the city during its half-century of occupation. Most East European cities destroyed the Soviet relics, or melted them down to make new monuments. In Budapest they preserved them, and gave them a home in the midst of some ugly suburban sprawl. It’s a remarkable little site.

(Click on the slideshow twice for full-screen.)

• The NY Times on how sentencing reform is catching on in the red states.
• The GOP continues its search for a viable presidential candidate.
• Not touching this one. 
• BART shuts down cell phone service at its stations during protest over a police shooting.
• Court documents allege U.S. allowed drug cartel to import “tons” of cocaine in exchange for information.
• Indiana legislator obviously voted against gay marriage so there would be more single gay men for him to prowl on Craigslist.
• Mississippi judge suspended for advocating vigilante justice.
• Rick Perry: Pastor, Prophet, and Presidential Candidate.

The insanity continues . . .

The aunt of a Monroe toddler who drowned last week has been charged in connection with the boy’s death.

Felicia Tucker, who was watching the child Aug. 1 when he wandered away and drowned in a nearby lake, was arrested and charged Tuesday with second-degree endangering the welfare of a child, the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office announced Wednesday.

Tucker, 26, faces up to 10 years in prison.

Tucker was watching her 2 1/2-year-old nephew, Joshua Moore, at the home she shared with the boy’s mother when he wandered from the home and drowned in nearby Victory Lake. In a release announcing her arrest, the prosecutor’s office said Tucker “endangered” the child “by allowing him to leave the residence and drown.”

Prosecutor’s spokesman Bernie Weisenfeld said a factor in the case was the finding of a “significant period of time when the child was not supervised.”

A devastated Tucker said she was feeling “extremely guilty” when she talked with a reporter last Friday. Neither Tucker — who was released after being charged — nor the child’s mother, Leanne Tucker, could be reached for comment Wednesday.

Last week, Tucker said she had been doing paperwork in her room the evening of Aug. 1 while Joshua and her 4-year-old daughter played around the house. The boy was discovered missing around 7 p.m. when his 15-year-old brother came home and found the front door ajar.

Tucker searched the area herself before calling police around 8:23 p.m. She found the child floating in the nearby lake about an hour later.

(Via Lenore Skenazy)

Salon’s Justin Elliott riffs on that appalling “It takes balls to execute an innocent man” comment from a Texas GOP focus group participant, and wonders if the Cameron Todd Willingham case may actually help Rick Perry in the GOP primary. As Elliott points out, it almost certainly isn’t going to hurt him. And that’s bad enough.

I’d like to hear some of the more thoughtful conservatives lining up behind Perry weigh in on this. Here’s how I see it: A state government has no more awesome, complete, or solemn power than the power to execute its own citizens. If you’re going to claim to loathe big government, this is one area where you ought to be more skeptical of government than any other. Hell, if for no other reason than that it can’t be undone.

The problem here isn’t necessarily that Perry presided over the execution of a man who was likely innocent. If Perry had shown some concern about what happened in the Willingham case, maybe set up an investigation into what went wrong, perhaps even attempted to suspend executions in Texas until he could be sure checks were in place to prevent the execution of an innocent, the way George Ryan did in Illinois—if he’d done any of that, he’d at least have shown some appropriate skepticism. He’d have shown that he’s at least cognizant of the fact that government employees in law enforcement and criminal justice are just as fallible and subject to the trappings of power, bureaucracy, and public choice theory as government employees in, say, tax collection or the regulation of business.

Instead, Perry couldn’t even acknowledge the possibility of doubt about Willingham’s guilt. He justified his stubbornness by pointing out that Willingham also allegedly beat and was verbally abuse toward his wife, as if that were at all relevant to Willingham murder trial. (Unfortunately, lots of men beat their wives. Most of them don’t also burn their children alive.) More importantly, Perry’s pivot to a “Willingham was a bad man” defense glosses over the most alarming aspect of Willingham’s case, which is much bigger than Willingham: The state of Texas used completely bogus forensic evidence to convict a man in a capital case. (The state also used testimony from a fraud psychologist in the death penalty portion of Willingham’s trial, as it had in dozens of other trials.)  If that was allowed to happen here, it has happened in other cases, and in other contexts. Worse, when the state’s forensics committee attempted to investigate Willingham’s execution, Perry replaced the committee members pushing for an investigation with new members more sympathetic to prosecutors.

Perry was confronted with the possibility that the government over which he presided may have abused it’s most awesome and sacred power. And instead of skepticism of government, he showed deference. Instead of demanding transparency, he actively obfuscated. Instead of exposing and demanding accountability for a possibly historical government error, Perry used his own power to keep himself and his constituents ignorant, lest they begin to question whether government should have such power. And it’s not as if there aren’t ample other examples of the flaws with Texas’ death penalty and its criminal justice system. Hell, Texas has one county that that has seen more exonerations than all but a few states.

If it helps, think of the the death penalty as a “government program.” It’s one thing to support this government program. It’s something else to refuse to believe your favorite government program could ever do wrong. And it’s downright pathological to be so confident in your favorite government program’s infallibility that you actively undermine an investigation into said government program’s possible flaws.

And he’s doing it again. In the Hank Skinner case, Perry has actively fought DNA testing that could confirm the innocence (or guilt) of another Texas man on death row. Skinner was at one point hours from execution before the Supreme Court intervened (the intervening justice was Antonin Scalia, believe it or not). In Skinner’s case, the prosecution actually began to conduct DNA testing on crime scene evidence, then stopped when the first tests confirmed Skinner’s version of events. Perry again justified willful ignorance in this case by simply noting that he’s personally convinced of Skinner’s guilt. As if there aren’t dozens of examples of what appeared to be clearly guilty people who were later exonerated by DNA. With Skinner, Perry is not only choosing willful ignorance over transparency, he’d rather risk executing another innocent person than possibly undermine support for the government’s power to execute its citizens.

I understand the law and order instinct on the right. I also understand why people support the death penalty. But you can hold both of those positions and still be disgusted by Rick Perry’s actions in the Willingham and Skinner cases. In fact, I’d say that if you’re going to claim the banner of limited government with any integrity, you damned well ought to be.

Seems appropriate this week: Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn.”

• An ode to Chris Mullin.
• Now: Porn causes terrorism.
• Bill Cosby’s face in jello.
• Facebook page for Miss. Attorney General Jim Hood stops taking comments, apparently because of the response to my article on the Leigh Stubbs case.
• Onetime Agitator guest blogger Libby Jacobson on the alleged shrinking middle class. Bonus: Comes with misleading, vertically stretched line graph from the Center for American Progress.
• Okay, this is funny.
• This seems promising.
• Time-lapse video from Taipei 101.
• A. Barton Hinkle on the U.K. riots.

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Leigh Stubbs’ brother-in-law left a few comments at Huffington Post that are worth reposting here:

I am Leigh Stubbs brother in law and I appreciate the author and the Huffington Post for featuring Leigh and the Innocence Project of Mississippi.

I would like to share a few comments about this article. Leigh was a college student when she approached her Mother and Father about her addiction. She sought help and completed the program at Caty Hill and she has been drug free since then. She was portrayed as a lesbian by Prosecutor Lampton to insight prejudice in the Lincoln County Mississipp­i Jury. Her sexuality is her business and not mine or Prosecutor Lamptons! The Circuit Judge Mike Smith served more as a prosecutor than a judge, telling Leigh’s father that he would sentence her to the maximum on every count BEFORE THE TRIAL BEGAN . . .

Leigh has spent the last 10 years teaching inmates in the GED program and working on various work details at Central Mississipp­i Correction­al Facility. She remains upbeat and looks forward to the day that she is home. Several people have commented about her smiling in her prisoner identification photo, Leigh smiled so her mother would enjoy her photo! . . .

It is hard to believe that Leigh’s been in prison for over 10 years. Only last month did the Mississippi Supreme Court recognize the merit in the Petition filed by the Mississippi Innocence Project on Leigh’s behalf. Thank you to former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Diaz and Chuck McRae, who showed moral courage in their dissent…saying the trial result would have been different had the judge not allowed West to testify as an expert in fields he was clearly not and expert in. We respect these men without reservatio­n and their words have sustained our families during difficult times, as have the prayers and support of our friends old and new.

Hey, maybe Lawrence O’Donnell could talk about this new Reason.tv video on his show tonight. I mean, only if he can find some time between discussing Richard Belzer’s tattoos and Sarah Palin’s eating habits.

• Words most looked-up by NY Times readers. Fantastical isn’t one of them.
• Tea-party businessman moves to recall Fullerton city council members who have sided with police in the Kelly Thomas killing. I’d love to see Tea Party groups do more of this.
• Why are restaurant websites so terrible?
• Whither the anti-war movement?
• “95% sure it’s badger.”
• Woman may face criminal charges after recording police beating a man with a flashlight. Note that even the one cop who was fired had a long history of use of force issues, and was fired a day after getting a disability pension.

Split, Croatia.

Ken at Popehat has details on the city’s latest efforts to use an anti-cyberstalking law to intimidate whoever is posting Internet cartoons that mock the local constabulary.

A few items on the Leigh Stubbs case that didn’t make it into my article yesterday:

First, the state’s reply to the Mississippi Innocence Project’s post-conviction petition does argue a couple other reasons why West’s testimony shouldn’t be cause for a new trial other than the procedural issues. They’re both pretty lacking.

The first is that the state included the name of an FBI agent associated with the agency’s analysis of the videotape on the list of potential witnesses it gave to the defense. This, the state argues, was sufficient to fulfill its Brady requirement to disclose potentially exculpatory evidence. Providing the actual FBI report wasn’t necessary. If Stubbs’ attorney didn’t contact that agent and press him enough to learn about the report, that’s not the state’s fault.

There was no explanation as to why the FBI agent was included on the list. And if the attorney did know about the repot but didn’t follow up or bring it up when cross examining West, you’d think Stubbs would have a pretty darned good claim for ineffective assistance of counsel. Of course, the state argues against that, too.

Another of the state’s arguments is that West explained in his testimony that the images in the surveillance tape were “difficult to see” and that the purpose of his testimony was merely to “allow people to look at the video and come to their own conclusions.” The state writes, “In other words, he was trying to assist the jury,” instead of conclusively telling them what’s in the video.

Problem is, that line is lost in West’s BS about his NASA-like enhancement software, which is then followed by pages and pages of him explicitly telling the jury exactly what is in the video. Hayne and West do this often. They include a line or two of mild qualification in their testimony, then go on ad nauseum with baseless opinions and conclusions. It’s the latter that sticks with the jury. It’s the former that Mississippi appeals courts consistently cling to in refusing to throw out their testimony.

One other item of note. I mentioned in the article that Dunn Lampton was the U.S. Attorney who twice indicted then-sitting Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz. (Diaz was acquitted in both trials. He’s also now suing Lampton.) That experience altered the way Diaz viewed the criminal justice system. He became a strong defender of the rights of the accused, and a vocal opponent of the death penalty. It was Diaz who wrote the strongest opinion denouncing Hayne in the Tyler Edmunds case, and who in that opinion and others attacked Hayne and West, writing on a couple occasions that Hayne should be barred from testifying in Mississippi courtrooms. (In fact, if it weren’t for Diaz, Edmonds would likely still be in prison.)

The unfortunate coda: Diaz then lost his bid for reelection in 2009, in part because of Lampton’s indictments, and in part because a series of TV ads bought by a Virginia-based law-and-order activist group that denounced Diaz for his opinions in three cases. As I wrote at the time, two of the ad’s claims were misleading at best. The third was the case of Jeffrey Havard, a man currently on death row in Mississippi thanks primarily to Hayne’s testimony. His testimony in that case has since been criticized by more reputable forensic pathologists, but Havard is still on death row.