by James Bovard

To serve and protect, police are allowed to slander and destroy. Cops in many states and localities have acquired the right to lie about their shootings, searches, and practically anything else. Police have routinely planted drugs, guns, and other evidence to incriminate innocent people, while police labs have engaged in wholesale fraud blighting tens of thousands of lives.

Supreme Court rulings turned a trickle of police perjury into a torrent. In 1967, the Supreme Court, in the case of McCray v. Illinois, gave policemen the right to keep secret the name of their “reliable informant” they used to get search warrants or target people for arrest. Law professor Irving Younger observed at the time: “The McCray case almost guarantees wholesale police perjury. When his conduct is challenged as constituting an unreasonable search and seizure … every policeman will have a genie-like informer to legalize his master’s arrests.” The Supreme Court created a judicial playing field on which police were the only witnesses who can safely lie.

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that government officials are immune from lawsuits even when their brazen lies in court testimony resulted in the conviction of innocent people. The court fretted that “the alternative of limiting the official’s immunity would disserve the broader public interest.” Honest government was not one of the “broader public interests” the court recognized that day.

In 1992, Myron Orfield, a Minnesota state representative and University of Minnesota law professor, conducted a confidential survey of Chicago judges, prosecutors, narcotics agents, and public defenders on Fourth Amendment issues. One Chicago prosecuting attorney observed that “in fifty percent of small drug cases [police] don’t accurately state what happens.” Twenty-two percent of Chicago judges surveyed reported that they believed that police are lying in court more than half of the time they testify in relation to Fourth Amendment issues; 92 percent of the judges said they believed that police lie at least “some of the time.” Thirty-eight percent of the Chicago judges said they believed that police superiors encourage policemen to lie in court. One judge did not even know how perjury was defined under the Illinois Criminal Code. After Orfield read him the technical definition, the judge replied: “Then there is sure a hell of a lot of perjury going on in this courtroom.”

In 1994, the Mollen Commission reported that “the practice of [NYPD] police falsification in connection with such arrests is so common in certain precincts that it has spawned its own word: ‘testilying.’” Federal appeals court chief judge Alex Kozinski observed in 1995: “It is an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges that perjury is widespread among law enforcement officers.” Former San Jose, California, police chief Joseph McNamara observed that “hundreds of thousands of law-enforcement officers commit felony perjury every year testifying about drug arrests.”

In Tulia, Texas, Tom Coleman, an undercover cop on the federally funded Panhandle Drug Task Force, carried out drug stings in 1999 that resulted in the arrests of 46 people — equal to 10 percent of the black population of the town. There were no independent witnesses to back up Coleman’s accusations of pervasive drug dealing in the low-rent farming community. As United Press International noted, Coleman “made no video or audio recordings during his 18-month investigation. No drugs were found during the drug sweep and later he said his only notes were scribbled on his leg.”

But his leg and his word sufficed for mass arrests, including 12 people sentenced to prison who had no prior criminal record. “Dozens of children became virtual orphans as their parents were hauled to jail. In the coming months, 19 people would be shipped to state prison, some with sentences of 20, 60, or even 99 years,” the Village Voice reported. The NAACP of Texas denounced the crackdown as “the ethnic cleansing of young male blacks of Tulia.” For his exploits, Coleman received the Texas Lawman of the Year award, presented by Texas Attorney General (and future U.S. senator) John Cornyn. Defense lawyers and civil-rights activists eventually exposed Coleman’s vast frauds. Gov. Rick Perry pardoned 35 convicts who had been wrongfully tarred by his accusations, but only after some of them had spent four years in prison. Coleman was later convicted of perjury but was sentenced only to probation.

Almost a thousand people have seen their convictions overturned in recent decades in cases that involved perjury or false reports by police or prosecutors. A 2018 New York Times investigation of police lying revealed “an entrenched perjury problem several decades in the making that shows little sign of fading.” More than 100 NYPD “employees accused of ‘lying on official reports, under oath, or during an internal affairs investigation’ were punished with as little as a few days of lost vacation,” the New York Civil Liberties Union reported in 2018.

It’s a small step from fabricating guilt on the witness stand to creating guilt by planting evidence. Many police shootings have been exonerated by “throwdown” guns carried for emergency frame-ups. In 2001, a federal investigation resulted in the arrest of 13 Miami police connected to fabricating evidence or planting guns at the scene of three people who the police unjustifiably killed. In 2018, eight members of the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force were convicted for planting guns on police shooting victims and other abuses. Police carried toy guns in their glove compartments or kept BB guns in their trunks to place at the scene of police shootings that might otherwise look like murder. More than 800 court cases were dismissed or overturned because of the Gun Trace Task Force’s crime spree.

That scandal percolated for years because Maryland treats planting evidence as the equivalent of jaywalking. A Baltimore policeman was convicted in 2018 of “fabricating evidence in a case in which his own body camera footage showed him placing drugs in a vacant lot and then acting as if he had just discovered them.” A man was jailed for six months for those drugs before the charge was dropped. The policeman kept his job because, as the Baltimore Sun explained: “Under Maryland law, officers are only removed automatically if convicted of a felony. Fabricating evidence and misconduct in office are both misdemeanors.” An ACLU lawyer groused that he “cannot imagine a more screwed-up, idiotic way of trying to manage a police department or any other public office” than continuing to employ a cop convicted for fabricating evidence.

Bogus drugs produce more scandals than police throwdown guns. In 2019, Jackson County, Florida, sheriff’s deputy Zach Wester was charged with 50 counts of racketeering, false imprisonment, fabricating evidence, and drug possession for framing more than a hundred motorists he stopped. Wester would pull cars over for crossing the center line and then plant baggies of narcotics in their vehicles. As Reason reported: “Wester kept unmarked bags of marijuana and methamphetamines in the trunk of his patrol car, manipulated his body cam footage, planted drugs in people’s cars, and falsified arrest reports to railroad innocent people under the color of law. His victims, many of whom had prior records or were working to stay sober, had their lives upended. One man lost custody of his daughter.” Wester’s perfidy exceeded his mastery of his body cam, and his videos undid him. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for planting drugs.

While planting drugs usually involves a smattering of victims, Massachusetts shattered all records. In 2012, Massachusetts State Police drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan was arrested for falsifying tens of thousands of drug tests, “always in favor of the prosecution,” as Rolling Stone reported. Dookhan would add narcotics to tests which came back negative or would boost the weight so that a person could be convicted of drug dealing instead of mere possession. Her zealotry knew no bounds, such as the day “she testified under oath that a chunk of cashew was crack cocaine.” Dookhan’s brazen lab frauds went unnoticed even though she routinely certified samples as illicit narcotics without ever testing them. Supervisors marveled at her productivity, and colleagues called her “Superwoman.”

Five months after the Dookhan scandal broke, another Massachusetts state lab chemist, Sonja Farak, was arrested at home and charged with tampering with evidence as well as heroin and cocaine possession. The state Attorney General’s office quickly announced that it “did not believe Farak’s alleged tampering would undermine any cases.” Governor Deval Patrick assured the media: “The most important take-home, I think, is that no individual’s due process rights were compromised” by Farak’s misconduct.

No such luck. Farak had personally abused narcotics from her first day on the job in 2004 — sometimes even cooking crack cocaine on a burner in the lab and snorting meth and cocaine in courthouse bathrooms when she was called to testify. She detailed her abuses in hundreds of pages of diaries. But the state attorney general’s office insisted that she had only started consuming narcotics on the job a few months before her arrest, and they blocked all efforts to expose the full extent of Farak’s abuses. Massachusetts government officials could not be bothered to rectify the unjust convictions. Slate reported in 2015 that “district attorneys take the position that … prosecutors have no special duty to notify defendants that their convictions might have been obtained with evidence that was falsified by government employees.” Most of the victims could not afford lawyers to challenge their convictions.

More than 50,000 convictions were overturned, and the ACLU hailed “the largest dismissal of criminal cases as a result of one case in the history of the United States of America.” Hundreds of convicts were released from prison. But as Anthony Benedetti of the Committee for Public Counsel Services observed, “the damage has been done. Jobs have been lost, people have been unable to get jobs, housing has been lost, some people have been deported.” More than 20 states have had crime lab scandals since the turn of the century.

Police unions have finagled legislation that routinely enables cops to trample the truth after  they shoot civilians. Maryland police were protected by a “Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights” that prohibited questioning a police officer for 10 days after any incident in which he used deadly force. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, “a lawyer or a police union official is always summoned to the scene of a shooting to make sure no one speaks to the officer who pulled the trigger,” the Washington Post reported. Union lawyers were kept busy because that police department had the highest rate of shooting civilians in the nation. A 2001 Washington Post investigation revealed: “Between 1990 and 2001 Prince George’s police shot 122 people…. Almost half of those shot were unarmed, and many had committed no crime.” All the shootings, including those that killed 47 people, were ruled “justified.” The Maryland legislature purportedly repealed the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights law in 2021, but the replacement law was quickly exploited to cover up police abuses. Yanet Amanuel of the ACLU of Maryland groused: “Every time there is an opportunity to give the community control of the police, Maryland Democrats at every level who say they support police accountability squander it by backing amendments pushed by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP).”

Thirteen other states have similar “law enforcement bills of rights” that give sweeping privileges to police accused of crimes, including automatic delays before they have to answer any questions about their shootings. The Florida Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights entitles police to receive “all witness statements … and all other existing evidence … before the beginning of any investigative interview of that officer.” In a 2019 George Washington Law Review article on delays in interviewing police who shoot citizens, one police chief commented that “showing evidence in advance allows [police] to tailor their lies to fit the evidence.” Another police chief observed that that process simply gives police suspects “time to fabricate a better lie.”

In July 2023, the NYPD Civilian Complaint Review Board agreed to permit police to “watch surveillance footage, bystander videos and other video recordings [including body cam] that investigators plan to ask them about before giving their versions of what happened,” Gothamist reported. Police received that special treatment even though they had made almost 150 false or misleading official statements to the review board since 2020.

Many of the procedures discussed in this article exemplify how truth doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell against police unions. Regardless of how many brazen coverups occur, politicians will continue providing favored treatment in return for the cash and votes that unions deliver. Regardless of how many thousands of innocent citizens are slandered or worse, any resulting testimony or accusations will continue to be “close enough for government work.”

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/police-have-the-right-to-lie-and-slander/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

by James Bovard 

Just before he leaves office, President Biden is commuting the prison sentences of 2,500 people who have been convicted of non-violent drug offenses. Biden stated, “This action is an important step toward righting historic wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and providing deserving individuals the opportunity to return to their families and communities after spending far too much time behind bars.”

Biden’s last-minute drug-war commutations raise several questions.

First, why did he wait until now to release those people from prison? Given his professed concern for righting wrongs, correcting sentencing disparities, and giving people more time with their families, why didn’t he issue those commutations during his first week in office? Why did he force those people to spend four more unnecessary years in prison?

Second, and more important, why were those people in prison in the first place? In other words, what business does the federal government (or any government) have punishing people for engaging in purely peaceful behavior, even if it is considered harmful?

That’s the question that all too many Americans simply refuse to ask. Having been born and raised under a vicious drug war, they view drug laws as something permanent, immutable, and perpetual. From the first grade on up, they were indoctrinated into believing that government has a legitimate role in controlling what people ingest and punishing them when they ingest something that the government hasn’t approved.

Control of people is what the drug war is all about. All of the drug-war enforcement measures have one aim in mind: to prevent people from possessing and ingesting what the government says is harmful to them. Amazingly, with the exception of libertarians, no one finds that objectionable.

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote his famous book The Road to Serfdom. While Hayek was referring to the push toward government regulation and economic control, it would be difficult to find a better example of America’s serfdom society than the drug war. With its power to determine what people possess, ingest, and distribute, the federal government has firmly established that it is the master and that the citizens are the serfs. Drug laws demonstrate perfectly that, for all practical purposes, the federal government owns the American people. They exist to serve the government.

Why shouldn’t people be free to possess, ingest, and distribute anything they want, no matter how harmful it might be? Why should the government wield the authority to send them to jail for any period of time, short or long? Why should there be any drug laws at all? After all, we don’t have laws against the possession, ingestion, and distribution of alcohol and tobacco. Why not the same for other drugs?

There is also a utilitarian question that needs to be asked? What good are drug laws? Sure, they enable the government to punish people who engage in self-destructive activity. But so what? People have always engaged in self-destructive activity. Moreover, despite all of the harsh measures that government has taken to enforce its drug war — which Biden and presidents before him have acknowledged with their pardons and commutations — people continue to engage in self-destructive activity.

The drug war has done nothing to change that aspect of human nature. What the drug war has done is make society worse. Consider the drug cartels and the drug gangs and the massive violence that has come with them. The cause? The drug war. Without drug laws, there would be no drug cartels or drug gangs or drug violence.

Or consider the massive assault on civil liberties brought on by the drug war: asset-forfeiture laws, no-knock raids, unjustified stopping of people and pat-down searches, and warrantless searches. Consider also mandatory-minimum sentences, assaults on financial privacy, and money-laundering laws. Consider also the never-ending parade of much-publicized record drug busts and criminal prosecutions.

None of it has worked to achieve a drug-free society. Yet, the drug war just keeps going and going and going. Just mindlessly repeating the same patterns, with every U.S. president striving to show how good and caring he is by issuing last-minute commutations and pardons of people for crimes that should never have been crimes in the first place.

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/bidens-sordid-legacy-ravaged-rights-and-liberties/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

BY James Bovard

First They Came for the Op-Ed Writers

On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk—who was wearing a hajib—is a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University.

She was abducted and vanished into the maw of the federal prison system. The Trump administration ignored a federal court order and took Ozturk from Massachusetts to Louisiana federal detention facilities.

But the Trump administration knew Ozturk had criticized the government of Israel a year earlier, enough to seal her doom according to the latest iron-fisted political correctness dictates. She co-authored one piece for the Tufts student newspaper criticizing the university’s refusal to divest from Israel despite “credible accusations of…. indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson justified the takedown: “DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.” Ozturk never mentioned Hamas in her op-ed. Ozturk has not been linked to any campus protests at Tufts or elsewhere. The feds have failed to reveal any evidence Ozturk supports Hamas. She simply co-wrote an opinion piece. As the New York Post noted on Friday, DHS “alleged that Ozturk was a supporter of Hamas but has yet to provide any evidence to that effect.” On Friday evening, federal judge Denise Casper blocked the Trump administration from deporting Ozturk and ordered the administration to respond by Tuesday to Ozturk’s legal challenge (now aided by the ACLU) to her detention.

The video of the arrest spurred tidal waves of online cheering. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about the case while traveling in Guyana, he justified revoking Ozturk’s visa:

If you apply for a visa… and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings, and cause chaos—we’re not giving you that visa.

Rubio added: “It’s crazy—stupid, even—for any country to let people in who say, ‘I’m going to your universities to riot, take over libraries, and harass people.’ We gave you a visa to study and earn a degree—not to become a social activist tearing up our campuses.”

Rubio promised: “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”

Is criticizing a foreign government now considered proof of lunacy in the White House? Does the Trump administration consider op-eds to be a weapon of mass destruction?

The First Amendment doesn’t specify that it only applies to people that the White House approves. Former ICE Chief of Staff, Deborah Fleischaker, slammed the targeting of Ozturk as “a First Amendment violation. ICE had a policy in place that said that First Amendment activity was not to be the basis of enforcement action. That’s not why you enforce.”

Has the Trump administration gone full Nixon barely two months after the inauguration? In 1973, Nixon White House aide, Tom Charles Huston, lamented in congressional testimony the tendency of the FBI “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”

The Nixon administration’s systemic paranoia led it to launch preemptive attacks on its suspected opposition, from secretly searching psychiatrists’ offices to bugging the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate. Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 did not save him from the exposure of the cover-up of White House crimes.

The Trump administration is demanding that universities provide the feds with details on the  “national origin/ethnicity/shared ancestry” of students who were involved in protests that were allegedly antisemitic. Is the Trump administration going to require colleges to conduct DNA tests to determine the precise amount of Arabic, Turkish, or Iranian pedigree of suspects? Lawyers suggested that the “list was meant as a tip sheet that the administration might use to target or deport foreign students who participated in protests,” according to the Washington Post. One lawyer predicted a “witch hunt” would result from such lists.

Trump policymakers have a simple solution to end the protests: prohibit some universities “from having any foreign students if it decides too many are ‘pro-Hamas,’” according to senior Justice and State Department officials. One senior Justice Department official told Axios:

What you’re going to see in the not-too-distant future is the universities that we can show that we’re not doing anything to stop these demonstrations in support of Hamas — or encouraged enrollment by activists —  we can stop approving student visas for them, and they can no longer admit [any] foreign students.

American history demonstrates that persecution that starts with foreigners often snowballs into targeting American citizens. Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed in congressional testimony: “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and…give ammunition to America’s enemies.” In other words, critics were traitors—regardless of how many civil liberties Ashcroft actually destroyed. And the definition of pernicious speech continually expanded. In 2004, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, stumping for President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, told audiences: “Political criticism is our enemy’s best friend.”

To subvert freedom of speech after 9/11, it wasn’t necessary for the feds to formally nullify the First Amendment. One of the nation’s most prominent pundits, Michael Kinsley, admitted in 2002 that he had been listening to his “inner Ashcroft”: “As a writer and editor, I have been censoring myself and others quite a bit since September 11.” Kinsley conceded that sometimes it was “simple cowardice” that sparked the censorship. I experienced plenty of such cowardice from editors after 9/11 and long beyond.

The Ozturk case provides an opportunity to clarify the meaning of free speech in American life.  Five years ago, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, some progressive prosecutors acted as if looting and burning were simply free speech on amphetamines.  The legal impunity that protestors received helped spur widespread carnage and billions of dollars of property damage.

Few Americans would object to deporting foreign students who destroy property or physically assault other people. But Ozturk was merely guilty of using words that are detested by the current administration. Are Trump’s policymakers using the same “guilt by association” standard the Biden administration used to persecute anyone near the Capitol on January 6, 2021? Biden’s Justice Department acted like anyone who merely “paraded without a permit” near the Capitol that day was guilty of insurrection and deserved a harsh prison sentence. Is any criticism of Israeli policy  now the legal and moral equivalent of insurrection?

More than 30 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter on Thursday to Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding information on the case in which the video “looked like a kidnapping.” But what if the Trump administration believes itself entitled to kidnap anyone who espouses an idea it disapproves? And what will be the next opinion to sanctify broad daylight federal kidnappings?

https://mises.org/mises-wire/first-they-came-op-ed-writers?

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.