Tag: hit&run

On tonight’s Kennedy (Fox Business Network at 8 p.m. ET, with a repeat at midnight), I join an energetic Party Panel of Dagen McDowell and Tom Shillue to talk about how the recent face-planting of Obamacare might affect the presidential race, given defender Hillary Clinton’s attempts to run out the clock and critic Donald Trump’s vague hand-waving about what he’d do different.

Other topics on the show include a brand spanking new Fox poll showing 44-41-7-3 percentages for Clinton-Trump-Gary Johnson-Jill Stein (which is a rare bit of good recent polling news for Johnson, showing as it does a two-point bump since a week ago), plus campus anti-Halloween B.S. from offense-averse administrators, and some gruesome Hispandering from Hillary Clinton.

Speaking of Tom Shillue, here’s the full clip of me appearing on Red Eye on Friday:

It has not been a good year for the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Department, whose jurisdiction covers most of Portland, Oregon. In February, an internal audit identified disproportionate uses of force against black inmates in the county’s jails. This was followed by a series of rolling scandals surrounding Sheriff Dan Staton, including accusations of sexual harassment, hostile workplace practices, and the improper spending of discretionary funds on a new Dodge Charger.

These allegations led him to step down in August, choosing as his replacement former Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Chief Mike Reese. That appointment, however, has done little to mollify Portland’s increasingly vocal population of activists, who mostly remember Reese’s tenure for a critical U.S. Department of Justice report on the PPB’s treatment of the mentally ill.

One such activist, Teressa Raiford, has decided to launch an insurgent write-in campaign against Reese, who is otherwise running unopposed for Multnomah County Sheriff.

Raiford—who founded the police reform group Don’t Shoot Portland—tells Reason she sees her candidacy as a way to give people an actual choice in November. “I don’t believe that an election where you’re running uncontested…I don’t think that that promotes the kind of democracy or culture for change that we need.”

It’s not just the lack of accountability at the ballot box she’s concerned about. Raiford had already been working with the Department of Corrections to try to improve the way it quantifies uses of force in its facilities, and to make sure that force isn’t being employed in a retaliatory or retributive way. She says getting elected sheriff would give her a more direct role in crafting and enacting those metrics. “I would be responsible for building those quantifiers. I would be responsible for rebuilding and developing program measurements that would help us offset the violence that is happening to corrections officers and also to the people that actually live in these facilities.”

She also hopes to change the way minority communities and law enforcement relate to each other in Portland, a place she refers to as “whitelandia” and “a utopia for racism.” Right now, she says, there is less “community policing” and more “community investigation and interrogation.” As a result, “people don’t want to have a lunch with a cop, they don’t want to go have a coffee, they don’t want you to come and ask their children what their names are and where they’re going.”

Raiford believes that her background will allow her to bridge that mistrust. “As a fourth-generation Oregonian and someone that is an activist, that type of trust will be improved by my position in” the Sheriff’s Department, she says. “It would change the entire culture of the way Multnomah County does business.”

As a write-in candidate, the odds against her are high. By the time she officially announced her candidacy on Monday, many in Oregon—which votes by mail—had already cast their ballots. But Raiford says she’s expecting a lot of support from those who would not generally be involved in an election like this: “I have had a lot of different people say, ‘Oh God, you’re forcing me to use my right to vote.'”

• A vandal destroyed Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood walk of fame
• Pro-immigration protesters in New York City stopped traffic across the George Washington Bridge.
• The Pentagon will no longer seek reimbursement from California National Guard soldiers who were wrongly paid recruitment bonuses for signing up.
• Islamic State fighters have halted the advance of Iraqi forces south of Mosul.
• Russia is sending an armada into the Mediterranean Sea as their military operations in Syria ramp up.
• Spike TV picked up the mini-series Waco, about the 1993 FBI siege of the Branch Davidians.
• The universe may not be expanding at an accelerating rate, according to scientists at Oxford.

Don’t expect misuse of Pennsylvania’s civil asset forfeiture to be restrained all that much under a reform bill making its way through the state legislature. Strong legislation to try to eliminate the worst of the abuses by police and prosecutors has been gutted in order to pass. There will still be some reform, but they’re going to be modest and likely easily bypassed.

Pennsylvania has some of the worst civil asset forfeiture laws in the country when it comes to protecting the property rights and due process rights of citizens. Civil asset forfeiture is the process by which police and prosecutors seize and attempt to keep the property of people suspected of crimes. The word “suspected” matters. Because this is a “civil” process, people do not actually have to be convicted of crimes (or even charged!) in order to risk losing their property.

The twisted incentives created by this civil process leave it wide open for abuse, and the property-protecting activists of the Institute for Justice has been fighting for reforms. Pennsylvania has been one of their targets. They filed a class action lawsuit against the city of Philadelphia prompted by the case of a couple who risked losing their home to the city because their son was caught allegedly selling $40 worth of drugs. From IJ’s analysis, law enforcement agencies and prosecutors in the state have raked in more than $150 million over 13 years.

Senate Bill 869 was an attempt to significantly reform this forfeiture process. Two of the proposed changes would have been huge deals. The first would have required criminal convictions in order to attempt to seize and keep somebody’s property. That would essentially eliminate the “civil” part of civil asset forfeiture. The second major change would have required the money seized to go through a government general fund rather directly into the budgets of police or county attorneys’ offices. This would have eliminated a significant incentive that encourages law enforcement to seize whatever they can. It also, incidentally, would have stopped local law enforcement from bypassing state restrictions by turning to the Department of Justice’s asset forfeiture “Equitable Sharing” program. Law enforcement agencies can partner up with the DOJ for raids and then funnel the forfeitures through the federal program rather than the state, which also allows them to bypass tougher rules the state would apply. But the federal program requires that law enforcement agencies have their own funds to accept the money. The change to sending the money to the general fund would keep local police from bypassing state rules and running to the feds.

But those two reforms are gone now. David Gambacorta of Philadelphia Magazine researched and discovered that the state’s District Attorneys Association pressured legislators to pull back on those two components. Of course, those two were the components that were most important to preventing abuse.

But there’s still reform in the legislation and it’s not completely worthless. The bill will increase the standard of proof to “clear and convincing evidence” that the property or money being seized is connected to a crime. That’s one step below the amount of evidence required to convict somebody of a crime. And it will increase reporting requirements by law enforcement agencies and counties and also make it easier for citizens to find out how to attempt to get their stuff back.

Still, IJ thinks that reporting requirement is not nearly enough and is hoping the House will give SB 869 some teeth back:

Even if the bill becomes law, it will not require reports to identify seized and forfeited assets, detail whether a seizure was challenged, record whether a suspect was convicted, or describe how property was disposed of (e.g. returned to an owner, sold, destroyed or retained by police). Reporting such details would shine a light on this source of secretive government funding.

Moreover, current reports are accessible only under the Commonwealth’s time-consuming Right-to-Know Law, and the attorney general can make documents inaccessible to open records requests.

This means lawmakers are not getting vital information. In coming years, they must revisit whether a person acquitted of a crime should forfeit property and whether law enforcement should continue to fund operations using forfeiture proceeds. Policy debates must be based on facts—not conjecture. The best fix is to adopt a central tracking system and public website and to require agencies to post all seizures, forfeitures and uses of proceeds.

Unions and the hotel industry joined forces to convince New York lawmakers to pass the nation’s strictest regulations for room-sharing, but the new law seems to stand on shaky legal ground and is already facing a lawsuit.

“New York is heading straight for the buzz-saw of federal law,” says Berin Szoka, president of Tech Freedom, a nonprofit technology policy organization.

The new law, signed a week ago by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, would impose fines of up to $7,500 for advertising rentals with a term of less than 30 days. Technically, those rentals were already illegal—the state had already banned rentals of less than 30 days back in 2010—but the new law is a direct attack on websites like Airbnb and other room-sharing services that connect would-be renters with hosts.

The problem, says Szoka, is that federal law already bars states from doing exactly that. In the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Congress prohibited states from holding online platforms responsible for the speech of their users.

“That safe harbor has been vital for the development of Internet services,” he says. “Yet it seems state legislators keep forgetting it exists. That means we keep going round and round the merry-go-round of illegal legislation and pointless litigation.”

That interpretation will be tested in court again. Hours after Cuomo signed the law on Friday, Airbnb sued New York over it. The state says it will not enforce the law until the suit is settled.

In its lawsuit against New York, Airbnb argues that the law will impose “irreparable harm” that would stretch beyond the borders of a single state. The lawsuit says it’s not clear whether hosts or the online platform would be liable for fines issued under the law.

“In order to be assured of avoiding liability, including potential criminal prosecution, Airbnb would be required to screen and review every listing a host seeks to publish,” the lawsuit contends, according to the New York Times.

In a statement, Airbnb said Cuomo was rewarding a special interest—”the price-gouging hotel industry”—at the expense of thousands of New Yorkers who use Airbnb.

The ban could also be challenged on First Amendment grounds, since courts have long held that the U.S. Constitution protects commercial speech as long as it’s not fraudulent or criminal.

As I wrote in June when the law was passed by the state legislature, the state might have found a way to get around federal protections for free speech in this instance. Since short-term rentals were already illegal, New York could argue that it’s not limiting free speech but rather targeting speech that serves criminal purposes—even if it’s absurd that anyone renting an extra bedroom in their home could be considered a criminal.

It’s a tenuous argument, but it’s probably the only way the New York law will survive a First Amendment challenge. It also has frightening implications. If policymakers are allowed to make an end-run around free speech by making the subject matter of that speech illegal, it could give politicians an incentive to push for more over-criminalization as a means to further restrictions on speech. That’s a nasty combination.

Amid a nationwide series of civil rights lawsuits challenging what criminal justice groups call modern-day debtor’s prisons, Illinois state officials announced Thursday that the state will work toward overhauling its jail practices over the next four years.

Illinois officials and the Pretrial Justice Institute, a criminal justice advocacy group, said Wednesday that the state is joining the institute’s national 3DaysCount campaign, which urges states to reform their practices for jailing defendants prior to trial.

Specifically, the campaign works with states to reduce the severity of some low-level offenses and adopt risk-assessment tools to better determine which defendants can be safely released, rather than kept in jail to await trial. Illinois already has a pilot program using new risk-assessment tools in three counties, and the new push will include all three branches of the state government.

The announcement comes on the heels of a class-action civil rights lawsuit filed this month against Cook County that alleges the county’s bail system is unconstitutional and traps poor defendants in jail simply becuase of their inability pay.

The two lead plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, Zachary Robinson and Michael Lewis, were both jailed for their inability to make bail after being arrested on theft charges. Illinois requires a 10 percent deposit on bonds, and neither could afford the $1,000 and $5,000 bail payments, respectively. According to the lawsuit, Robinson has been in jail since January and lost his minimum wage job. Lewis, who is a caretaker for his 72-year-old grandmother, has been in jail since the beginning of October.

“Every day, thousands of human beings in Cook County, each presumed innocent as a matter of law, remain in jail for the duration of their case simply because they cannot afford to pay a monetary amount set without relations to their ability to pay,” the lawsuit, filed by the group Civil Rights Corps, says. “The large and disproportionate majority of these persons are African Americans.”

Since the national debate on policing that erupted after the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, investigations have revealed how some cities and counties raise significant amounts of their revenue through the punitive enforcement of minor fines and code violations. Numerous lawsuits have been filed over the past 16 months—including in Georgia, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Alabama, Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana—alleging that cities and counties are essentially operating unconstitutional debtors’ prisons for those who can’t afford to pay.

The name of the 3DaysCount campaign, says Cherise Fanno Burdeen, the CEO of the Pretrial Justice Institute, comes from research that shows even three days in jail can negatively impact a defendant’s job, housing, and family situation.

“After only three days in jail, low-risk defendants will come out higher risk,” Burdeen says. “We destabilize them.”

Illinois state representative Carol Ammons says the state courts need to move toward a risk-assessment program for defendants awaiting trial “that is validated and evidence based,” rather than simply on whether one can afford bail.

“People that are not high-risk are sitting in county jail losing their jobs, homes, and in some cases and their own health and family are put at risk,” Ammon says. “It doesn’t improve safety, because if I have enough resources I can bond out. It doesn’t mean I’m safer. That’s the system we want to get rid of.”

In an August amicus brief to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of a mentally ill Georgia man who was jailed for six days when he couldn’t afford to post bail, the Justice Department said bail schemes that don’t consider an indigent defendant’s ability to pay violate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and “are not only unconstitutional, but they also constitute bad public policy.”

Earlier this year, the Justice Department also released a “dear colleague” letter on the illegal enforcement of fines and fees warning municipalities that “courts must not employ bail or bond practices that cause indigent defendants to remain incarcerated solely because they cannot afford to pay for their release.”

Opposing these lawsuits and reform efforts is the American Bail Coalition, a trade group representing bail bondsmen. In an amicus brief in the Georgia case on behalf of the ABC, former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement wrote that “bail is a liberty-promoting institution as old as the republic.”

“Plaintiffs would have this Court effectively abolish monetary bail on the theory that any defendant is entitled to immediate release based on an unverified assertion of indigency,” Clement wrote. “Nothing in the Constitution supports that extreme position. In fact, the text and history of our founding charter conclusively confirm that monetary bail is constitutional.”

The student-governments of rival schools Oregon State University and the University of Oregon have announced a temporary partnership, which is kind of like how it would be if Negan from The Walking Dead could somehow join forces with Ramsay Bolton.

And why are these villains teaming up? (UO and OSU, not Negan and Ramsay.) You can probably guess: they want to play Halloween costume police.

In a strongly worded email to students at both campuses, student-government presidents Rachel Grisham and Quinn Haaga warned their communities that acts of cultural appropriation “are not acceptable.” Full stop.

Seriously:

Cultural appropriation is the act of borrowing or using aspects of a culture by another culture, typically a dominant culture. Around the time of Halloween, we often see people dressing as a culture or a character, which is offensive and reinforces negative stereotypes. These costumes reinforce racism, sexism, and classism. As active and respectful members of the OSU and the UO communities, we expect everyone to not engage in cultural appropriation.

Or what? is a tempting response. Unfortunately, we know exactly what will happen to transgressors. The University of Oregon, for example, harbors one of the most dangerous bias response teams I’ve written about. Students who push the line, as far as costumes are concerned, can expect to be investigated.

The idea that students should avoid particular costumes because they happen to involve other cultures is absurd, and this email unintentionally points out exactly why. Note that its authors have inadvertently outlawed practically all Halloween costumes in their zeal to punish cultural appropriation, which isn’t even a bad thing that should be discouraged in the first place.

Can I dress up as Ramsay? He’s a character, after all, and I wouldn’t want to appropriate Westerosi culture.

One of my very favorite comedians on the Red Eye circuit is Andrew Schulz, co-conspirator of The Brilliant Idiots podcast. In the continued truancy of Hollywood Mike Moynihan, Schulz filled out the Triangle of Truthiness in the latest edition of The Fifth Column. He talked about getting turfed by Jerry Seinfeld, comedying about race as a New York white boy, and getting jumped on the Upper East Side back before the Big Apple was the safest big city in America.

Other questions addressed this week: Did Gary Johnson blow his chance? Why and when did the black vote go 90 percent Democratic? Is it possible to talk for 15 minutes about a racism documentary I’ve never seen? Will Kmele Foster find some way to criticize that ballyhooed Saturday Night Live sketch? I also do some ranting about James O’Keefe’s latest duck video, Schulz disputes the pharmacological sameness of meth and Adderall, and various swear words are uttered and pondered. Listen heah:

Here are the locations at which you can download, interact with, recommend to your friends about, and write reviews of, The Fifth Column: iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, wethefifth.com, @wethefifth, and Facebook.

A robbery suspect has filed a lawsuit in federal court over a kick in the head he received from an Allenton, Pa. police officer while on all fours on the ground. Attorneys for Hector Medina-Pena, who is suing, got a hold of video as part of the discovery in his criminal trial. One attorney called the actions of the officer, Joseph Iannetta, “absolute aggression.”

The city disagrees. “The actions of officer Iannetta have been thoroughly reviewed by command staff and the solicitor’s office and found to be appropriate under the circumstances,” Allentown’s city solicitor, Susan Ellis Wild, told the Call. “We look forward to the evidence in this case demonstrating that his actions were appropriate.”

In a statement to the Washington Post, Wild called Iannetta, who has worked for the department for 14 years, a “highly decorated” police academy instructor with “training far above and beyond the required training.”

“Get your fucking hands up,” an officer is heard screaming at Medina-Pena, followed by “get down on the fucking ground,” and later, “get down on the ground or I’m going to fucking shoot you.” Medina-Pena then dropped to the ground and got kicked in the head. Ianetta’s kick broke Medina-Pena’s jaw and sent him to the hospital for three days, according to the lawsuit, which also claims the officer kneed Medina-Pena in the back of the head, smashing his face into the road.

The lawsuit alleges city officials failed to properly train Iannetta and other officers and allowed misconduct to become part of the police department’s customs and policies. According to the lawsuit, Iannetta was the subject of more than a dozen investigations related to violence in the last decade, and the subject of a 2013 federal lawsuit that the city settled in September for $350,000.

Medina-Pena was in an SUV that matched the description of a getaway vehicle in an armed robbery. He was seen on surveillance camera breaking mirrors in the bathroom of the establishment before it was robbed. According to the Call, the other three men were released when they said they didn’t know anything. Medina-Pena’s lawsuit claims police found no weapons or other contraband on him.

Watch a portion of the video below:

Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court 25 years ago this month. To mark the occasion, Thomas’s jurisprudence has been examined by journalists, praised by admirers, and assailed by critics.

Foremost among the critics is Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker. Toobin’s dislike of Thomas is well known. Also well known is the fact that Toobin has a bad habit of disregarding the truth when it comes to writing about Thomas. For instance, in February 2014 Toobin labelled Thomas an “embarrassment” because the justice was supposedly half-asleep most of the time on the bench. “His eyelids look heavy,” Toobin wrote. “Every schoolteacher knows this look. It’s called ‘not paying attention.'”

That false description was promptly challenged by court-watchers of various ideological stripes, all of whom agreed that Toobin was full of it. In reality, Thomas is often quite energetic during oral arguments. He doesn’t ask questions (well, he mostly doesn’t ask questions), but he does actively confer with his neighboring justices, particularly Justice Stephen Breyer, and sometimes, according to Thomas, he even suggests the questions that Breyer and other justices do ask. In other words, Toobin’s nonsense was debunked.

Toobin’s latest critique of the conservative justice is titled “Clarence Thomas’ Twenty-Five Years Without Footprints.” According to Toobin, Thomas has left no “footprints” on the Court because he “has never been assigned a landmark opinion.” Thomas is a “radical” and a “court of his own,” Toobin charges. “After years at the periphery of the Court, Thomas looks destined to serve out his term at the even more distant fringe.”

This is a pretty dumb argument, even by Toobin’s standards. As any student of the Supreme Court could tell you, some of the most influential justices in American history never wrote a majority opinion in the area of the law in which they ultimately had the most influence. Those particular justices tended to write in dissent—or wrote lone concurrences—yet their arguments slowly but surely moved the Court in their preferred “radical” direction.

For example, consider liberal hero Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Holmes penned many opinions during his three decades on the Court, but the one that is cited again and again as proof of his wisdom and influence is his solo 1905 dissent in Lochner v. New York, the famous case in which the majority overruled a state economic regulation on the grounds that it did not serve the health or safety of the public and violated the constitutional right to liberty of contract secured by the 14th Amendment. “I think that the word liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment is perverted,” Holmes declared, “when it is held to prevent the natural outcome of a dominant opinion.” Holmes wanted the regulation to be upheld.

In 1905 Justice Holmes was on the Court’s “fringe” when it came to the judicial protection of economic liberty. But Holmes’s interpretation found its audience among the assorted politicians, lawyers, intellectuals, and activists who comprised the burgeoning Progressive and New Deal movements. (In the moist words of New Deal adviser and future SCOTUS Justice Felix Frankfurter, Holmes “is led by the divination of the philosopher and the imagination of the poet.”) In time, those politicians, lawyers, intellectuals, and activists came to occupy the commanding heights of American government, including the Supreme Court bench. Guess what happened then? In March 1937, two years after Holmes’ death, a majority of the Supreme Court adopted Holmes’s anti-Lochner interpretation. “The Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract,” the Court ruled in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish.

In short, it’s cheap and foolish to dismiss a justice for leaving no “footprints” at the Supreme Court simply because that justice is best known for going it alone. At SCOTUS, today’s lone voice can become tomorrow’s majority opinion.