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Analyzing the recent NYTimes story on swatting and asking an important, core question raised by these incidents: "One thing missing from the article is an awareness that there's a long history of wrong-door paramilitary police raids caused by errors rather than pranksters, with victims nowhere near as rich or famous as Selena Gomez or Tom Cruise. I say this not to downplay how terrible the Hollywood raids are, but to point out that there's a larger mess here. As California lawmakers ponder ways to penalize the people who make these calls, they should also look into the possiblity that a large, frequently deployed, and easily misled militarized police apparatus is itself a part of the problem."

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NYPD Sued For Pepper Spraying Infant And 2 Children

A mother is suing the New York Police Department (NYPD) over what she says was an instance of police brutality where cops pepper-sprayed her three little children. Courthouse News Service reports that the mother, Marilyn Taylor, made the claims recently in court about the alleged August 9 incident.

Taylor says that police officers pepper sprayed her three children, who are 5-months old and 2 and 4 years old. She claims that as she was on her way to board a Manhattan-bound L Train, officers stopped her and her husband and accused them of trying to skip a fare. Taylor was pushing a stroller with her two-year-old through a service door rather than the regular turnstile.

That’s when the police officers allegedly pepper sprayed Taylor, and the spray hit her children. The lawsuit claims that “the pepper-spray caused the children to scream out and choked the two-year old, who went into fits of vomiting.”

Taylor was arrested, and she said that cops pushed her down the stairs so harshly that the handcuffs bruised her wrists and lower back, according to Courthouse News Service. The officers who carried out the alleged brutality are named in the suit: Maripily Clase, Suranjit Dey and Jermaine Hodge.

Taylor’s husband, named Dehaven McClain, had to get all three children home by himself.

A day after the incident, Taylor says she “received an adjournment in contemplation of a dismissal, meaning the charges would be tossed if she did not get arrested again within a certain time,” according to the news outlet.

The lawsuit provides more details on the aftermath of the attack. “After the attack, mother and father suffered ongoing eye injuries and all three children suffer emotional harms, and are now afraid to ride the subways and become afraid when they see police officers. The four year-old cried herself to sleep for weeks, and after the incident the two-year-old began waking up in the night crying for her mother,” the complaint reads.

Taylor has said that the officers have continued to harass her since the August 9 event.

The family is seeking punitive damages for what they say were civil rights violations, assault, battery, negligence, and violations to the state and federal constitutions, according to the Courthouse News Service. The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.

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Sometimes you just have to laugh

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Why don't black New Yorkers trust the NYPD?

Put aside for a moment the bombast and rhetoric. Minorities in NYC make up most of the victims of violent crime. Black New Yorkers are more likely than other New Yorkers to be robbed, beaten, murdered, killed by stray bullets, hassled by drug dealers, threatened not to snitch. While it is almost a requirement for progressives in NYC to hoist tired "revolutionary" chants of "hey hey, ho ho" and knowing discuss how the racist cops murder our black youth in the streets to perpetuate a 21st century slave plantation for Mayor Bloomberg, none of that cant is particularly useful. It's the blue-collar, unionized, Republican-leaning, and increasingly-diverse NYPD who will be able to do something for you if you are a crime victim, not some 22-year-old smug narcissist wearing Ruling Class(tm) Underoos and a Harvard t-shirt underneath his $200 American-Apparel "Smash the State" logo hoodie, sure that he's got the answers to all of your problems. But as the most recent installment of NYPD Confidential points out, the black community in NYC has "historically distrusted the police." The reasons go back to the time when Terry stop and frisks had been approved by the Supreme Court a mere 5 years earlier. NYPD Confidential gives a roll call that starts 2 years before Amadou Diallo was even born: "In 1973, Thomas Shea, a white police officer, shot and killed Clifford Glover, a 10-year-old black boy fleeing across a vacant lot with his grandfather, whom Shea was pursuing. A jury of 11 white men and a black woman found Shea not guilty. In 1976, Robert Torsney, a white police officer, stopped Randolph Evans, a 15-year-old black youth, in Brooklyn. For no apparent reason, Torsney put his gun to Evans’s head and shot him dead. An all-white jury found Torsney not guilty. In 1983, Michael Stewart, a 23-year-old black man was arrested by transit police for smoking a joint at Union Square subway station. He died in police custody. Six white transit officers were acquitted of his death." Heap on top of this the weird paramilitary law of NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly's Stop and Frisk sweeps. NYPD Confidential has this from "a retired black NYPD commander" discussing the impact on the community: "You have to understand there is a lot of anger and frustration among young people who are tired of cops searching them at will and disrespecting them without lawful authority. They [the police] are no different than a robber who runs your pockets. A cop comes up and says, ‘Empty your pockets,’ and you feel disrespected, like they are robbing your dignity. Just because they wear a uniform doesn’t make it any more right.” Another "former top police official" suggests a possible answer to one of the most vexing questions about Kelly and his devotion to Stop and Frisk. That question is: Why does Kelly -- a keenly intelligent man -- insist on Stop and Frisk when it is statistically so ineffectual at catching criminals and getting guns off the street? The official tells NYPD Confidential, “[Kelly] thinks he knows what is best about everything. If you tell him it’s not a good idea, he will double down." He also hints at a reason Kelly loves S&F despite its ineffectiveness at fighting crime: "[Kelly']s made Stop and Frisk a productivity measure.” Could it be that Kelly would rather alienate whole populations in the city through constant S&F activity than let cops sit around talking about last night's game? Is he really that single-mindedly attached to making cops do something -- anything! -- to keep them busy and "productive?" (Apparently so, if he has anything to do with the new initiative to prevent crimes before they happen by sending cops around to take pictures of valuables in your car, then run your plates to get your address so they can mail you the picture with a warning to be more careful! This is apparently how you get lower crime numbers you can brag about when crime is at historic lows -- by looking over shoulders to shame potential victims into preventing crimes that may happen sometime in the future, possibly, if things go bad.) Regardless of his mysterious motives, the effect of Kelly's policies is clear. Again, some choice words from NYPD Confidential: "Indeed, under Kelly, Stop and Frisk arrests resemble fishing fleets trolling the oceans for tuna with giant nets that also scoop up lots of smaller fish. In human terms, Stop and Frisk may or may not have reduced crime to record levels as Kelly claims. What is certain is that Stop and Frisk has produced anger and bitterness." Putting an end to all this tampering with the daily lives of citizens as they go about their business would go a long way toward rebuilding trust. Perhaps then, once all this intrusion and hullabaloo directed at petty crimes subsided, the community might actually help the cops solve the crimes that matter. The kid you tossed and humiliated on his way to buy his grandma some milk today may be the witness who could help solve a shooting tomorrow, if only he was willing to talk to you.

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What causes wrongful convictions?

The sort-of exoneration of Louis Taylor is in the news this week. Taylor was serving 28 consecutive life sentences for the arson burning of a hotel in Tucson in 1970. He'd done 42 years already when news reports raised questions about his guilt.. The Arizona Justice Project took up his case. I say "sort-of" exoneration because the prosecutor still insists Taylor is guilty and insisted on a no-contest plea and time served sentence, which Taylor accepted in order to be released immediately instead of staying in prison for several more years to litigate his innocence. But I say "innocence" because Taylor has insisted all along that he is innocent, and there are indications that he probably is. The prosecutor offered the plea deal because convicting Taylor anew would be too hard. Why? In part, for the normal reasons -- after 40 years, witnesses and physical evidence have become unavailable for a retrial. But the prosecutor also admits that "fire investigators for the defense and the state, reviewing the remaining evidence, say a cause of the blaze could not be determined." Um, you mean, because the forensic evidence can't establish guilt? At the original trial, all the experts agreed the fire was an arson fire. But serious questions have arisen about the prosecution expert's motives and abilities. Arson science is undergoing a revolution, with many older investigative tools turning out to be junk science, not forensic proof. This is calling many, many arson findings into question. An interesting recent paper, "Predicting Erroneous Convictions" [PDF download], analyzes exonerations and "near misses," which are cases where an innocent person was being prosecuted and the prosecution was either dropped or the person was acquitted. The authors identify 10 factors present in erroneous conviction cases that are not present in near misses, and conclude that those factors can be used to predict an erroneous conviction. These factors include the withholding of exculpatory evidence by the prosecution, which is present in Taylor's case. (The prosecutor did not turn over evidence that no accelerants were found after the fire.) They also include forensic errors. That's the case in many of these old arson cases, when the science was really more like guesswork. A weak prosecution case turns out to be a major factor in erroneous convictions -- which makes sense if you consider that weak cases are less likely to be based on solid proof. This case was always weak. Among the pieces of evidence the prosecutor recently reiterated as showing that Taylor was guilty were that Taylor had matchbooks in his pocket and that he was seen watching the fire. That's weak, especially if that's among the best the prosecutor could come up with to support a crumbling conviction. Take all those factors and jam them into the pressure cooker of a high-profile, emotionally-wrenching incident, and you've got a recipe for putting an innocent person in jail. The "Predicting Erroneous Convictions" paper refers to this combination of factors as "tunnel-vision."

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Is Locational Privacy Achievable?

Locational privacy -- the ability to keep others from assembling detailed knowledge about you and your activities by analyzing logs of your movements -- is one of the front lines of current privacy law. (See this excellent paper put out by the EFF for more information on locational privacy.) Legal issues arising from this area are at play in two recent Supreme Court cases, United States v. Jones (from 2012) and Florida v. Jardines (from last week). In what some saw as a very unlikely decision, the Supreme Court last year gave some support to the concept of locational privacy in the case United States v. Jones, 132 S.Ct. 945 (2012). The Jones decision held that "the Government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constitutes a 'search'" under the Fourth Amendment. Jones was an especially interesting case because the Supreme Court's decision was unanimous, although it drew out of the Supreme Court two opposing views on how to analyze locational privacy issues. While all of the justices agree that the decision of the appeals court (the D.C. Circuit) to suppress evidence gathered via the GPS tracker should be affirmed, the Court split right down the middle over why. Cops put a GPS tracker on Jones' car without his knowledge or consent and without a warrant. They used the GPS tracker to collect data about the location of his car 24 hours a day for a month. This data was used against Jones in a criminal trial at which he was convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Jones was sentenced to life in prison. The trial court refused to suppress the GPS tracking evidence. The D.C. Circuit reversed, on the grounds that Jones had a reasonable expectation that the sum total of the movements of his car over the course of a month would be private from 24 hour a day automated monitoring and collation. This was a surprising adoption of the so-called "mosaic" theory of locational privacy. This is the notion that, when evaluating data collection about one's movements, one has a reasonable, protected 4th Amendment interest in the privacy of the picture of one's life that can be assembled from many hundreds of individual public movements, even if it is not necessarily reasonable to expect that the individual public movements making up that mosaic are all private in and of themselves. The Supreme Court upheld the D.C. Circuit. Justice Scalia wrote an opinion for the majority which rejected locational privacy and the mosaic theory. Instead, Justice Scalia relied on the same "property" based analysis he espoused in the Jardines case last week: cops conducted a search, for 4th Amendment purposes, when they planted a GPS tracking device on Jones' car without his consent. The government had been arguing that the GPS tracking wasn't even a "search" under the 4th Amendment since all of the data it collected was public information -- the location of Jones' car at all times was readily knowable by any member of the public who decided to look at the car. Scalia rejected this. He said that the 4th Amendment recognized what the government had done as a search because the government had trespassed against Jones' property (the car) when it attached the tracker. The effect is that, if the government had paid agents to follow the car and see it as any other member of the public could have done, that would be OK, but putting a device on the undercarriage of Jones' car without his permission was not OK. Agreeing with Scalia on this argument were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy and Thomas. Justice Alito wrote a concurrence, saying he agreed with the outcome for a different reason. He rejected the trespass theory, and instead adopted the Court's traditional theory by asking whether the government intrusion on Jones violated a "reasonable expectation of privacy." Alito endorsed the mosaic theory: he agreed with the D.C. Circuit that it was reasonable for Jones to expect privacy from continuous monitoring of every single movement of his car over a month, and that it was therefore a search when the cops did so. Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan agreed with this reasoning. (It appears that, in Alito's view, doing this by technological means was the crucial problem. If the cops had done so by standard means, it seems, Alito would say it was fine. The idea seems to be that the cost of "manually" tracking someone for a month, and the difficulty of keeping the subject of such tracking from realizing he's being followed, will provide a natural limit on such activity by the cops.) The woman of the hour was Justice Sotomayor. She joined Justice Scalia's opinion because, she said, the trespass theory gives us an "irreducible constitutional minimum: When the Government physically invades personal property to gather information, a search occurs." On this basis, she disagreed with Alito, who did not see the physical trespass as the decisive point. At the same time, however, Sotomayor agreed with Alito that "physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance." She noted that, "[w]ith increasing regularity," cops will conduct the same kind of "mosaic" monitoring that was done in this case without having to physically place a device on the subject's property. Instead, they'll use smartphones or native GPS devices. Sotomayor positioned herself to be the decisive voice on how these issues will come out in the future by departing from Scalia and saying that, in cases where there is no physical trespass, locational privacy is a reasonable expectation when it comes to cops assembling a mosaic of movements via continual monitoring. Sotomayor gets her cake and eats it too. We see the same tension between Scalia's "trespass" based approach to search cases and the traditional "reasonable expectation of privacy" approach in Florida v. Jardines, where the Supreme Court struck down the bringing of a drug dog onto the defendant's porch by police to sniff his house. Scalia wrote the majority there as well, but again it was a Pyrrhic victory. Scalia's preferred outcome won, but his trespass rationale failed. Scalia wrote that the homeowner's implicit permission for people to come to his front door to knock there did not mean he gave consent for someone to bring a dog with them when they did so. Scalia is trying to load a lot into the trespass theory here because he is philosophically opposed to reasonable expectations of privacy and doesn't want to decide the case on that basis. Unfortunately for Scalia, most of the other justices in Jardines thought reasonable expectation of privacy was exactly the way to decide the case. This includes Justices Kagan, Ginsberg, and Sotomayor, all of whom joined the concurrence by Kagan which said the dog sniff violated such a reasonable expectation. It also included Justice Alito (dissenting), along with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy and Breyer. All of them disagreed that this was a search at all, joining Alito's explanation, which was based on the idea that there's no reasonable expectation of privacy from dog sniffs. That means even Roberts and Kennedy (who had agreed with Scalia about the trespass theory in Jones) let the case be decided on the reasonableness of the privacy expectation. (They may just not have cared enough to write a separate dissent agreeing with Scalia's theory but disagreeing with his result.) So where are we on locational privacy? We have at least 5 (and maybe more) justices agreeing that the issue should be decided by examining how reasonable it is for a person to expect privacy from continual monitoring of their location. And we have 5 justices on record saying that it is reasonable to expect privacy in the sum picture emerging from continual monitoring even where that monitoring only tracks individual pieces of data that are publicly-available. So, if they're consistent (and barring other factors), we might expect the Supreme Court to strike down mosaic monitoring gleaned from public sources, cell phone records, or other assemblages of data into a holistic profile, IF the police do not get a warrant for such monitoring. What does that mean for cops? GET A WARRANT, and not just a subpoena, to be on the safe side if you want to identify a unique individual from a collection of cell phone movement data, as researchers did in one recent study, or if you want to create a map and profile of a particular individual's movements over time based on cell phone and other data.

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Supreme Court: Cops Need Search Warrant to Bring Drug-Sniffing Dog on Your Porch

The Supreme Court just handed down its decision in Florida v. Jardines. The Court agreed with the Florida Supreme Court that bringing a drug-sniffing dog onto a person's front porch constitutes a search of a residence that requires a search warrant. The events that birthed this case are pretty straightforward: police brought a drug-sniffing dog onto a guy's front porch, where the dog "alerted" to the presence of drugs. Cops then got a search warrant based on that evidence, and found marijuana plants growing inside when they searched the house. The Florida Supreme Court said that the cops violated the 4th Amendment of the US Constitution when they brought the dog onto the porch. The 4th Amendment says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." You will note that the 4th Amendment doesn't say that all searches of homes need a warrant; it merely says what conditions must be met for a warrant to be issued. The first part, restricting when searches can happen, forbids "unreasonable" searches, not warrantless searches. For a long time, the Supreme Court has reconciled the tension between the "reasonableness" part of the amendment and the "warrant" part of the amendment by saying that searches of homes are "presumptively unreasonable" unless the police have a warrant. Then they've found that there are exceptions, which have become numerous enough that they threaten to make the rule meaningless. However, in recent years the Supreme Court has been emphasizing that the home is special, and expanding the protection of the home against government searches. Justice Scalia, one of the most "conservative" of the justices, has led this approach. (He wrote the majority opinion in this case.) Traditionally, there are two ways to analyze searches: the "property" approach look at whether the search involved a government intrusion onto private property and, if so, finds the search illegal (generally) without a search warrant. The other approach stems from a case called US v. Katz, and involves checking whether the area that the government invaded was one in which a person had a "reasonable expectation of privacy." If so, then the cops needed a warrant; if not, then invading that space without a warrant will likely be reasonable. (In the Katz case, the Court decided that Katz had a reasonable expectation that he wouldn't be eavesdropped on while using a closed telephone booth, and found the recording of his call without a warrant to be an illegal search.) Under the "property" approach, a search warrant is needed to search a home unless there's some exception -- for instance, if a murderer is chased into the home by cops, or the house is on fire and the cops need to save kids inside and stumble upon a kilo of heroin, or if there is a marijuana plant on the windowsill in plain view of the public street. There is also an ambiguous area around the house -- the porch, the yard, the walkway, etc. It goes by the quaint name of the "curtilage." This area gets some protection from government intrusion. It's been a while since there were major cases about this area, and the last bundle of them eroded the protection of the curtilage quite a bit: a police helicopter can fly over and spy weed in your backyard without a warrant, a cop on a ladder on a public street can peer over your backyard fence and use what he sees, cops can use what they see when they walk across your yard to knock on the door like anyone else could do. In some ways, Jardines is a curtilage case, but in some ways it's a case about the use of forensic tools to peer inside homes. The Court said that the cops were OK going up on Jardines' porch to knock on the door as any other visitor would do. But the Court referred to the permission the public has to enter the curtilage to approach the house and knock as a "license." And that license, says the Court, is limited in scope. It is not a license to bring a dog into the curtilage. Justice Scalia wryly observes that coming onto someone's curtilage with a dog is the sort of thing people would usually call the cops over. It's an intrusion. Because of this, Justice Scalia writes, use of the dog in the curtilage is a violation of the privacy of the home (the curtilage is considered a quasi-part of the home). For this reason, Justice Scalia doesn't believe it necessary to decide whether Jardines had a reasonable expectation of privacy -- this is strictly a property case, in Scalia's view. Justice Kagan wrote a concurrence, agreeing with the result reached by Scalia but explaining that she believed that Jardines was illegally searched whether on a property analysis or a reasonableness analysis. Jadines has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the curtilage. Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor joined that opinion. Dissenting was Justice Alito, who wrote that dogs have been domesticated for 12,000 years and that there's nothing outré about bringing one with you when you approach someone's front door to knock on it. Justice Alito points out the weakest part of Scalia's argument, but perhaps the point where real change in search and seizure doctrine may grow. The Supreme Court has long held that a dog sniff outside a vehicle or near a person's baggage is not a search at all. But here, Scalia hinges his analysis on the entry of a dog into the curtilage. He wants to say that's a trespass and therefore bad, but as Alito points out, there's nothing weird about bringing a dog with you when you go knock at someone's door. The really weird thing, the thing that makes the homeowner rightly enraged, is that the dog is a drug-sniffing dog. If someone brings one onto your property, you know they are searching you for drugs. Three justices (Kagan, Ginsberg, and Sotomayor) were on-board with saying that it is reasonable to expect privacy from a dog-sniff on your property. Justice Kagan compared this to the cops bringing a high-powered telescope onto your front porch and setting it up to look through your windows -- implicitly acknowledging that a dog-sniff is a search. Justices Scalia and Thomas disagree -- a dog-sniff is NOT a search, they want to maintain, but bringing a dog onto a front porch to do it is a trespass and therefore makes the entry onto the porch (as opposed to the sniff itself) an illegal search. Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kennedy and Breyer, disagree and don't see this as a search. Their position is consistent with prior cases on dog sniffs. So what's the real takeaway? Perhaps -- just perhaps -- there's a chance that the Court might finally acknowledge the error underlying all of this mess: that a dog sniff is, and always has been, a search. It's exactly what Kagan called it -- the same as the use of an advanced forensic tool to search an area inaccessible without the use of that technology.

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London and NYC stop and frisk comparison

Vocativ has a few interesting charts and an analysis comparing NYPD stop and frisk practices with London PD stop and search practices:

Read the article here.

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DNAinfo.com on the proposed new NYPD Inspector General oversight office.

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Day 4, Thursday March 21st

Officer Serrano took the stand today. Himself stopped multiple times by the police given his Hispanic-in-Harlem demographic-magnetism, he presented absolutely damning evidence about quotas from his 42nd precinct in the Bronx. Much of this came...

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"Male blacks 14 to 21"

From the Floyd stop and frisk trial: Male blacks, ages 14 to 21, are “the right people" to stop and frisk. Especially if they are on the streets of Mott Haven in the Bronx, "the right location," because there are lots of robberies and grand larcenies in that area. Just ask Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack of the 40th Precinct in the Bronx. He should know. He's a top-ranking cop, in charge of a busy precinct. There are only a handful of higher-ranking cops in the entire 35,000 person NYPD. Who better to articulate what the NYPD's actual policies are and how to carry them out? What's that you say? You're a young black male with the misfortune to live in Mott Haven? And you're not a thief or mugger? You are innocent of any crime? I'm so sorry. You will have to assume the position for the sake of the vision of the greater good held by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Don't worry, it'll be over quickly. (But we may need to repeat this procedure again and again in the coming weeks, months, and years -- strictly for your own protection and good, mind you.) After all, you are the right person -- see, aren't you black and young? And you are in the right place -- see, isn't this Mott Haven? Please, stop yelling or I will have to arrest you! You're causing a scene! Put your hands behind your back. Stop resisting! What do you mean, "unconstitutional"?

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Mike, take a hike

The City Council finally has the votes and the cajones to put an inspector general in place to monitor NYPD practices and policies that cannot be reviewed effectively by any other oversight mechanism. Maybe now we can finally address scandal after scandal of the Bloomberg-Kelly years -- from the ludicrous quasi-martial law of stop-and-frisk in the city's minority neighborhoods, to the revelation of widespread flaking by narcotics cops and even their supervisors, to the extreme violence and false arrests that permeated NYPD responses to the RNC and OWS protests. But here comes that tiring mayor, with his tired fear-mongering about how putting the blood and freedom of minorities and political dissidents on the altar of the commonweal is a necessary tradeoff for having a genteel, safe city full of bike lanes and no smoking zones and outside green plazas. As if we can't have it all! As if we can only feed the best of our culture by squeezing the blood from the poor and other outsiders! Here he is in his mouthpiece, the editorial page of the Post, cursing the IG bill: Make no mistake about it. This bill . . . will put the lives of New Yorkers and our police officers at risk,Bloomberg said yesterday during a speech to business leaders. Bloomberg said having an inspector general that can do away with effective police tactics like stop-and-frisk would bring crime levels back to the bad old days of the ’70s and ’80s, when the murder rate was through the roof. We have come too far to forget the lessons we’ve learned,Bloomberg said. And those who are taking record low levels of crime for granted are making a terrible and tragic mistake. We cannot afford to play election-year politics with the safety of our city, and we cannot afford to roll back the progress of the past 20 years. Mayor Bloomberg, it was really nice knowing you. Can I just say, it is such a pleasure knowing that I will not see your name on the ballot when I vote for mayor later this year. Don't let the boogie man bite your butt on the way out!

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The people inside the cases

Det. Louis Scarcella, an NYPD detective who ran the investigation that put innocent David Ranta in prison for 23 years, spoke to the NY Post. Det. Scarcella says: “They [the Brooklyn DA's Office] threw me under the bus. ... I was appalled when I got the news. I stand by the confession 100 percent. I never framed anyone in my life. You have to be a low devil to frame someone. I sleep well at night.”

Imagine the years of policing Det. Scarcella did. How many great cases does a detective make, year in, year out? How many suffering crime victims does he give closure to, how many people does he prevent from being victimized in the future? Even if the allegations of misconduct against him in this case are true, what must it feel like to know that your whole career is up for approval or disapproval on the basis of one out of hundreds of cases? Detective work is inherently messy; the truth is never obvious, someone is lying to you in every case, your whole duty is to solidify truths that may be unknowable from the eely fabric of witnesses' experience, memory, and motive. It must be done under pressure, fast, and it must be good enough to work in court. And it must be right, because if it's wrong, you can never undo the mistake or make it right. But an incident like this—a murder, a conviction, and later an exoneration—isn't just about one story. Det. Scarcella's story is deep enough to be getting on with, but there are multiple human stories intersecting here. Several deaths twine around each other, some physical and some consisting of lives taken in vain. First, there is the surprising murder of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, who survived Auschwitz only to be gunned down by a frustrated jewel thief in Williamsburg, Brooklyn 45 years later. One can't help but see how deep this story must extend beneath the tiny peak of this tragic story. Then there is the story of Chaim Weinberger, a diamond worker who saw that he was being cased by a "tall, blond, strikingly handsome guy, 'like a lifeguard on the beach,'" as he lugged a suitcase full of diamonds from his apartment building to his car for an early-morning flight to have them cut in the Dominican Republic. Weinberger saw the man following him, but managed to get his suitcase into his case and the car into gear in time to flee. Later, Weinberger was called to David Ranta's trial. He testified that Ranta was "100 percent" NOT the man who tried to rob him. Ranta was convicted anyway, and we can imagine the weight of that in Weinberger's mind as time went by and he knew an innocent man sat in jail despite his testimony. How do Weinberger's children view the justice system today? What attitudes did the experience encourage in Weinberger, and how did his experience crossfeed with his views of the outside world as he continued his life in the insular Satmar enclave in Williamsburg? There is the story of Joseph Astin, a man with a long history of stick-ups whose name was given to the cops in an anonymous tip.

He matched Weinberger's description of the attacker, but he died in a car chase with cops before they could make a case against him. His story is tied up with that of his wife, Theresa Astin. Years later, she came forward and testified on Ranta's behalf. We can imagine what it took for her to come to court and share publicly, under oath and subject to hostile questioning, her personal history. And the details about the morning Rabbi Werzberger was shot; how Joseph had planned a robbery, but was crying as he dismantled a gun when he came back, how he told her he'd messed up and hurt a rabbi, how he told her details about the crime that weren't public. She revealed this secret part of her husband's life, and of her own life, to the court. At the same time, we must imagine that she was also revealing this to her family, to Joseph's family, perhaps to her own children. And she watched as it made no difference, as the judge declined to overturn the conviction. There's the district attorney, DA Charles "Joe" Hynes. He was the new, idealistic, passionate DA of the big big borough of Brooklyn, and this was a massive case. He put the case on trial through his office. His assistants put Det. Scarcella on the stand and pushed the case forward even when Weinberger said Ranta wasn't the killer, even when Det. Scarcella made patently ridiculous assertions about how he could do whatever he wanted with a prisoner, or how Ranta had confessed and Det. Scarcella didn't even bother to make notes. And now, today, with a DA Hynes has a long reputation for innovation as a forward-thinking DA, but also has two serious challengers in the upcoming primaries, both saying he's out of new ideas and resting on his laurels, that he can't give Brooklyn even justice. But now, DA Hynes comes to court via his recently-established Conviction Integrity Unit and dismisses the charges against Ranta, tells the court Ranta is innocent, and asks for him to be released after 23 years. Pure political calculation can't be all that's behind it. Can we imagine what's going on in DA Hynes's office, the discussions that led to his decision? And there is, of course, David Ranta. The innocent man who served 23 years in prison. Is that longer than you've been alive? Almost as long? Can you imagine this? Can you imagine what it would be to come out of prison never having held a cell phone, gone on the internet, entered a Starbucks, seen Times Square like a shopping mall instead of a red-light district? Perhaps the biggest cypher is Ranta's story. Does the exoneree serve an almost monastic function in our lives? Is he a penitent that has paid for our sins with his own life, his own flesh, his own suffering in the slow-motion hell that is imprisonment? Millions of indignities have piled on his soul and can never be removed by any amount of money, or love, or respect, or vindication. We, collectively, broke his life open and sucked all the sap out of it, and left Ranta with a shell. Or, perhaps, he would disagree with me. Perhaps...hopefully...he would say, the past can end. Every moment of fresh air, of quiet and darkness and peace, every little freedom of movement, of decision-making in daily life, are they each new dogwood blossoms on what looked like dead branches until so recently?

[criminaljusticereform]

Ah, good old audio recordings. They can reveal so much.

[criminaljusticereform]

Floyd trial updates

If you want to follow the day-to-day activity of the Floyd trial, you can get updates via the Center for Constitutional Rights' twitter feed, @theCCR Whistleblower cops continue testifying about stop-and-frisk quotas today.

[criminaljusticereform]

Jailed for 2 Decades in Rabbi’s Death, Unjustly, Prosecutors Say

"In the wintry darkness 23 years ago on a back street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a jewelry thief fleeing a botched robbery panicked and shot a Hasidic rabbi in the head. Four days later, the rabbi, Chaskel Werzberger, an Auschwitz survivor, died of his wounds. Even in the New York City of 1990, as homicides crested at 2,245, the murder stirred grief and outrage. The “Slain Rabbi” was front-page tabloid news. Mayor David N. Dinkins traveled to Williamsburg’s Satmar enclave to sit in mourning and to offer a $10,000 reward. The new Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, stood shoulder to shoulder with fur-hat-wearing Satmars, watching as they rocked back and forth and wailed as the pinewood coffin was carried out. He vowed to bring the killer to justice. Forty detectives worked the case, soon led by the swaggering, cigar-chewing Detective Louis Scarcella. Working closely with an influential Satmar rabbi, Detective Scarcella arrested a drug-addicted, unemployed printer named David Ranta. Hasidic Jews surrounded the car that carried the accused man to jail, slapping the roof and chanting, “Death penalty!” Mr. Ranta was convicted in May 1991 and sentenced to 37.5 years in maximum-security prison, where he remains to this day. He is almost certainly not guilty." It appears that Mr. Ranta may be released as early as Thursday. Much more here in the full article at the NYTimes website.

[criminaljusticereform]

Floyd v. City of New York trial NOW

New Yorkers challenging the constitutionality of the NYPD's so-called "stop-and-frisk policy" began trying their case yesterday in courtroom 15C of the Southern District of New York Courthouse, 500 Pearl Street, NYC. The trial is expected to last about 1 full month. United States District Judge Shira Scheindlin is presiding over the case. As with all but a rare few court proceedings, this one is open to the public. This is one for the history books, folks. If you have some time to observe, by all means do so! The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the plaintiffs, has a webpage with all the important case documents, a time line, and other information you can peruse. You can get updates on Twitter via #NYPDonTrial. DailyKos has a recap of the 1st day and is expected to post regular updates. Coming this afternoon: Plaintiffs Deon Dennis and Nicholas Peart describe their experiences being stopped and frisked, and 2 NYPD cops (Adhyl Polanco and Pedro Serrano) testify to the existence of stop-and-frisk quotas.