When the cops are the criminals

[MachineGhost]

Allegation: Convict strikes up brief, friendly conversation with another detainee in courthouse holding cell. Yikes! The other detainee is accused of murdering a prison guard, and officers take exception to the friendly exchange. So they beat the convict nearly to death. Internal affairs: Nothing to see here. Second Circuit: Ah, but there is.

Corrections officers in these United States often throw inmates in isolation for infractions large, small, and nonexistent. At what point does an extended stay in segregation violate one’s rights? Seventh Circuit: Dunno, but more than 30 days and less than six months.

Tenth Circuit: No qualified immunity for an Albuquerque, N.M. police officer who, “all for his personal pleasure, on no governmental business of any kind,” activated the sirens in his squad car and sped through town, eventually running a red light and causing a fatal accident.

[MediumTex]

Only vaguely on topic, but interesting:

Thomas Silverstein, who has been described as America’s “most isolated man,” has been held in an extreme form of solitary confinement under a “no human contact” order for 28 years. Originally imprisoned for armed robbery at the age of 19, Silverstein is serving life without parole for killing two fellow inmates (whom he says were threatening his life) and a prison guard, and has been buried in the depths of the federal prison system since 1983.

***

Tommy Silverstein, now 59, has written a long “declaration,” the purpose of which “is primarily to describe my experience during this lengthy period of solitary confinement: the nature and impact of the harsh conditions I have endured in spite of a spotless conduct record for over 22 years, and my lack of knowledge about what, if anything, I can do to lessen my isolation.” After apologizing “for the actions that brought me here in the first place,” particularly the murder of corrections officer Merle Clutts, Silverstein contends that he has “worked hard to become a different man.” He continues, “I understand that I deserve to be punished for my actions, and I do not expect ever to be released from prison…I just want to serve out the remainder of my time peacefully with other mature guys doing their time.”

The bulk of the declaration is a detailed account of Silverstein’s experiences and surrounding in a series of what constitute the most secure and isolated housing in the federal prison system: in the notorious Control Unit at Marion, the supermax prototype; at USP Atlanta in a windowless underground “side pocket” cell that measured 6 x 7 feet (“almost exactly the size of a standard king mattress,”); at Leavenworth in an isolated basement cell dubbed the “Silverstein Suite”; on “Range 13? at ADX Florence, where the only other prisoner was Ramzi Yusef; and finally in ADX’s D-Unit, where he can hear the sounds of other prisoners living in neighboring cells, though he still never sees them.

The following is from Tommy Silverstein’s description of his life at USP Atlanta:

    The cell was so small that I could stand in one place and touch both walls simultaneously. The ceiling was so low that I could reach up and touch the hot light fixture.

    My bed took up the length of the cell, and there was no other furniture at all…The walls were solid steel and painted all white.

    I was permitted to wear underwear, but I was given no other clothing.

    Shortly after I arrived, the prison staff began construction on the side pocket cell, adding more bars and other security measures to the cell while I was within it. In order not to be burned by sparks and embers while they welded more iron bars across the cell, I had to lie on my bed and cover myself with a sheet.

    It is hard to describe the horror I experienced during this construction process. As they built new walls around me it felt like I was being buried alive. It was terrifying.

    During my first year in the side pocket cell I was completely isolated from the outside world and had no way to occupy my time. I was not allowed to have any social visits, telephone privileges, or reading materials except a bible. I was not allowed to have a television, radio, or tape player. I could speak to no one and their was virtually nothing on which to focus my attention.

    I was not only isolated, but also disoriented in the side pocket. This was exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have a wristwatch or clock. In addition, the bright, artificial lights remained on in the cell constantly, increasing my disorientation and making it difficult to sleep. Not only were they constantly illuminated, but those lights buzzed incessantly. The buzzing noise was maddening, as there often were no other sounds at all. This may sound like a small thing, but it was my entire world.

    Due to the unchanging bright artificial lights and not having a wristwatch or clock, I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Frequently, I would fall asleep and when I woke up I would not know if I had slept for five minutes or five hours, and would have no idea of what day or time of day it was.

    I tried to measure the passing of days by counting food trays. Without being able to keep track of time, though, sometimes I thought the officers had left me and were never coming back. I thought they were gone for days, and I was going to starve. It’s likely they were only gone for a few hours, but I had no way to know.

    I was so disoriented in Atlanta that I felt like I was in an episode of the twilight zone. I now know that I was housed there for about four years, but I would have believed it was a decade if that is what I was told. It seemed eternal and endless and immeasurable…

    There was no air conditioning or heating in the side pocket cells. During the summer, the heat was unbearable. I would pour water on the ground and lay naked on the floor in an attempt to cool myself…

    The only time I was let out of my cell was for outdoor recreation. I was allowed one hour a week of outdoor recreation. I could not see any other inmates or any of the surrounding landscape during outdoor recreation. There was no exercise equipment and nothing to do…

    My vision deteriorated in the side pocket, I think due to the constant bright lights, or possibly also because of other aspects of this harsh environment. Everything began to appear blurry and I became sensitive to light, which burned my eyes and gave me headaches.

    Nearly all of the time, the officers refused to speak to me. Despite this, I heard people who I believed to be officers whispering into my vents, telling me they hated me and calling me names. To this day, I am not sure if the officers were doing this to me, or if I was starting to lose it and these were hallucinations.

    In the side pocket cell, I lost some ability to distinguished what was real. I dreamt I was in prison. When I woke up, I was not sure which was reality and which was a dream.

LINK

[Libertarian666]

Only vaguely on topic, but interesting:

Thomas Silverstein, who has been described as America’s “most isolated man,” has been held in an extreme form of solitary confinement under a “no human contact” order for 28 years. Originally imprisoned for armed robbery at the age of 19, Silverstein is serving life without parole for killing two fellow inmates (whom he says were threatening his life) and a prison guard, and has been buried in the depths of the federal prison system since 1983.

***

Tommy Silverstein, now 59, has written a long “declaration,” the purpose of which “is primarily to describe my experience during this lengthy period of solitary confinement: the nature and impact of the harsh conditions I have endured in spite of a spotless conduct record for over 22 years, and my lack of knowledge about what, if anything, I can do to lessen my isolation.” After apologizing “for the actions that brought me here in the first place,” particularly the murder of corrections officer Merle Clutts, Silverstein contends that he has “worked hard to become a different man.” He continues, “I understand that I deserve to be punished for my actions, and I do not expect ever to be released from prison…I just want to serve out the remainder of my time peacefully with other mature guys doing their time.”

The bulk of the declaration is a detailed account of Silverstein’s experiences and surrounding in a series of what constitute the most secure and isolated housing in the federal prison system: in the notorious Control Unit at Marion, the supermax prototype; at USP Atlanta in a windowless underground “side pocket” cell that measured 6 x 7 feet (“almost exactly the size of a standard king mattress,”); at Leavenworth in an isolated basement cell dubbed the “Silverstein Suite”; on “Range 13? at ADX Florence, where the only other prisoner was Ramzi Yusef; and finally in ADX’s D-Unit, where he can hear the sounds of other prisoners living in neighboring cells, though he still never sees them.

The following is from Tommy Silverstein’s description of his life at USP Atlanta:

    The cell was so small that I could stand in one place and touch both walls simultaneously. The ceiling was so low that I could reach up and touch the hot light fixture.

    My bed took up the length of the cell, and there was no other furniture at all…The walls were solid steel and painted all white.

    I was permitted to wear underwear, but I was given no other clothing.

    Shortly after I arrived, the prison staff began construction on the side pocket cell, adding more bars and other security measures to the cell while I was within it. In order not to be burned by sparks and embers while they welded more iron bars across the cell, I had to lie on my bed and cover myself with a sheet.

    It is hard to describe the horror I experienced during this construction process. As they built new walls around me it felt like I was being buried alive. It was terrifying.

    During my first year in the side pocket cell I was completely isolated from the outside world and had no way to occupy my time. I was not allowed to have any social visits, telephone privileges, or reading materials except a bible. I was not allowed to have a television, radio, or tape player. I could speak to no one and their was virtually nothing on which to focus my attention.

    I was not only isolated, but also disoriented in the side pocket. This was exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to have a wristwatch or clock. In addition, the bright, artificial lights remained on in the cell constantly, increasing my disorientation and making it difficult to sleep. Not only were they constantly illuminated, but those lights buzzed incessantly. The buzzing noise was maddening, as there often were no other sounds at all. This may sound like a small thing, but it was my entire world.

    Due to the unchanging bright artificial lights and not having a wristwatch or clock, I couldn’t tell if it was day or night. Frequently, I would fall asleep and when I woke up I would not know if I had slept for five minutes or five hours, and would have no idea of what day or time of day it was.

    I tried to measure the passing of days by counting food trays. Without being able to keep track of time, though, sometimes I thought the officers had left me and were never coming back. I thought they were gone for days, and I was going to starve. It’s likely they were only gone for a few hours, but I had no way to know.

    I was so disoriented in Atlanta that I felt like I was in an episode of the twilight zone. I now know that I was housed there for about four years, but I would have believed it was a decade if that is what I was told. It seemed eternal and endless and immeasurable…

    There was no air conditioning or heating in the side pocket cells. During the summer, the heat was unbearable. I would pour water on the ground and lay naked on the floor in an attempt to cool myself…

    The only time I was let out of my cell was for outdoor recreation. I was allowed one hour a week of outdoor recreation. I could not see any other inmates or any of the surrounding landscape during outdoor recreation. There was no exercise equipment and nothing to do…

    My vision deteriorated in the side pocket, I think due to the constant bright lights, or possibly also because of other aspects of this harsh environment. Everything began to appear blurry and I became sensitive to light, which burned my eyes and gave me headaches.

    Nearly all of the time, the officers refused to speak to me. Despite this, I heard people who I believed to be officers whispering into my vents, telling me they hated me and calling me names. To this day, I am not sure if the officers were doing this to me, or if I was starting to lose it and these were hallucinations.

    In the side pocket cell, I lost some ability to distinguished what was real. I dreamt I was in prison. When I woke up, I was not sure which was reality and which was a dream.

LINK

I wouldn't do that to a rabid dog. It would be much kinder to kill him, although I'm also against official state murder ("capital punishment").

[MachineGhost]

A little context.

He is white.

He is a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood (which if you know anything about prisons, you better join up if you want to survive!).

So naturally he probably had to kill two blacks in aggravation or self-defense.  But killing the correction officer was not cool.  Does it justify cruel and unusual punishment for 28 years to serve as a warning to everyone else not to do the same?

His official website: https://thomassilverstein.wordpress.com/

It's comforting that we reserve this hell only for the most violent criminals or terrorists.  But how long of a slippery slope is it before it applies to political prisoners such as Manning or Snowdens?  Let's elect Graham and find out!

[Libertarian666]

A little context.

He is white.

He is a former member of the Aryan Brotherhood (which if you know anything about prisons, you better join up if you want to survive!).

So naturally he probably had to kill two blacks in aggravation or self-defense.  But killing the correction officer was not cool.  Does it justify cruel and unusual punishment for 28 years to serve as a warning to everyone else not to do the same?

His official website: https://thomassilverstein.wordpress.com/

It's comforting that we reserve this hell only for the most violent criminals.  But how long of a slippery slope is it before it applies to political prisoners such as Manning or Snowdens?  Let's elect Graham and find out!

In "aggravation"?

[MediumTex]

It's comforting that we reserve this hell only for the most violent criminals or terrorists.  But how long of a slippery slope is it before it applies to political prisoners such as Manning or Snowdens?  Let's elect Graham and find out!

If they got their hand on Snowden, he would almost certainly wind up at the federal Supermax prison in Colorado, which is sort of like the federal government's trophy case for the worst celebrity villains.

Here is an account of one prisoner's stay at the Supermax facility:

Jack Powers grew up in Norwich, N.Y., the son of a Vietnam veteran who beat him regularly. Powers ran away from home at 14; a few years later he was sent to prison on burglary charges. He was released in 1982, at 21, and he married and moved to Holland, Mich., where he founded a construction company and beauty salon. But by the end of the decade, both businesses had gone bankrupt, and he began robbing banks — at least 30, according to his 1990 conviction. He never armed himself; he always just slipped a note to the bank teller. He thinks his wife (now ex) turned him in.

At the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta, where he was serving his 40-year sentence, he befriended a new inmate named Eduardo Wong, a heroin smuggler with supposed ties to Chinese organized crime. “Nice guy,” Powers said in a recorded deposition. “I mean, relatively speaking.” Wong and Powers liked to play chess. “But it wasn’t that long, just a matter of weeks,” Powers said, “before things went awry.”

Wong became a target of members of the Aryan Brotherhood, who threatened to kill him if he didn’t procure cash for them. Powers warned Wong about the seriousness of his situation, but Wong hesitated. One afternoon, a group of men ran onto their tier and stabbed Wong multiple times while Powers was held in the cell next door at knife point. After they ran off, Wong stumbled into Powers’s arms, blood gushing from his neck. “John, help me,” he said. Powers managed to carry Wong down several floors to the prison hospital, where he died.

During the murder investigation, Powers was moved to a protective custody unit. Shortly after his transfer, though, the face of an Aryan Brotherhood member appeared at the food slot of his door. “If you tell on my boys,” the man warned, “I’m going to chop your head off.” But Powers had a teenage son in Syracuse he wanted to reconnect with, so in exchange for what he believed would be a sentence reduction, he agreed to appear as a witness for the government. Three of the four Aryan Brotherhood members he testified against were convicted and received life sentences.

Powers had no history of mental illness before his incarceration. But after Wong’s murder, he began to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifested in the form of panic attacks, near-constant anxiety and nightmares in which inmates with weapons cornered Powers in an isolated area of the prison. By 1999, he had not received his sentence reduction and had become convinced that the B.O.P. was planning on transferring him out of protective custody. So he decided to escape.

He put a dummy in his bed, hid inside a grate in the rec yard and scaled the side of a building with a homemade grappling hook. From the rooftop, he jumped over a 16-foot electric fence, then climbed a second barbed-wire fence with FedEx boxes tape to his arms and legs. Once outside, he stole a car and headed to Syracuse to see his son.

When his son didn’t answer his phone, he tried to visit his half sister. (She wasn’t home, but when he spotted a neighbor struggling with a lawn mower, he cut her grass.) The police picked him up after two days. A reporter from The Syracuse Post-Standard interviewed Powers at the local jail and asked him whether he would do it again. The article reads as a lighthearted human-interest feature about a gentleman bandit, and Powers’s affirmative answer became the kicker. “Without life’s normal sensations and emotions and feelings,” Powers said, “what have you got?”

In October 2001, Powers, now considered a flight risk, was transferred to the ADX — where all three of the Aryan Brotherhood members Powers had testified against were serving their own sentences. Powers’s PTSD intensified. Tagged as a snitch and, more damaging, as an enemy of the Aryan Brotherhood, even unaffiliated prisoners avoided speaking to him. The guards, Powers said, treated him differently as well. If the whole unit is against a prisoner, he explained, “it’s like, the majority prevails. If they’re trying to be cool with the rest of these guys, then they can’t be cool with you.”

Over the next decade, Powers, by any rational accounting, lost his mind. He cut off both earlobes, chewed off a finger, sliced through his Achilles’ tendon, pushed staples into his face and forehead, swallowed a toothbrush and then tried to cut open his abdomen to retrieve it and injected what he considered “a pretty fair amount of bacteria-laden fluid” into his brain cavity after smashing a hole in his forehead. In 2005, after slicing open his scrotum and removing a testicle, Powers was sent to the medical center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Mo., for treatment, where a psychiatrist determined he was “not in need of inpatient psychiatric treatment or psychotropic medication” and that his behavior “was secondary to his antisocial disorder.” When he was returned to Springfield four years later, after slashing his wrists and writing “American Gulag” in blood on his bedsheets, the doctor wrote, “Considerations that [Powers] has some form of psychosis, thought disorder or mental illness are unfounded.”

In 2007, an inmate named Jose Vega was placed in the cell directly below Powers. Vega had come to the ADX after attacking an associate warden with a razor blade at another prison. He had received a diagnosis of depression, and because he was sick and disruptive — flinging feces and urine at the staff — the guards came to despise him, according to Powers. But he and Vega began talking through the drains of their sinks. (Prisoners in neighboring cells could communicate through the plumbing if they used toilet-paper rolls to blow the water from the U-shaped pipes, called sink traps, that ran beneath their basins.) For the first time in years, Powers had someone he considered a friend. They would chat about the prison, their families, legal issues. Vega had lost his television privilege, so Powers would place his own headphones near the sink drain and play music loud enough so that his friend could listen, too.

At times, a guard would provoke Vega. He became convinced that staff members were sneaking into his cell at night and assaulting him. Powers knew that was impossible — the heavy cell doors could not be opened without Powers hearing — but he said that guards did withhold Vega’s mail and intentionally dropped his food on the floor. One guard told Vega that he might as well kill himself, because things weren’t going to get any better. “They started to break him,” Powers said. “Almost like you see with pro wrestlers, like a tag-team-type thing, where one of them passes it off to the next and to the next and to the next.”

On the morning of May 1, 2010, Vega was found dead in his cell. He had hanged himself with a bedsheet. After Vega’s death, Powers shaved his head and began decorating his body with what he would describe as his “Avatar stripes,” a reference to the striped blue aliens in the James Cameron movie. Using a razor blade to make tiny cuts in his skin and then rubbing carbon-paper dust into the wounds, Powers tattooed spiky black slashes along his arms, legs, neck, skull, under his eyes and around his Adam’s apple. A photograph from 2011 presents an astounding transformation: The smirking, shaggy-haired young bank robber who entered the federal prison system in 1990 no longer existed, and the man who replaced him looked like something out of a nightmare.

***

In 2013, Aro and a U.S. attorney representing the B.O.P. spent two days questioning Powers in a filmed deposition (the source of much of the preceding account of his time at the ADX). The video frames Powers, dressed in the standard prison uniform, seated behind a table, his hands shackled. At one point, he tells a lawyer he can’t remember the last time he was in a room with so many people, probably years ago. He’s thoughtful and deliberate, obviously intelligent. Despite the litany of horrors he relates, you can almost understand how people might have judged him sane.

***

Simultaneous to the settlement negotiations, however, the B.O.P. unilaterally began effecting certain (though by no means all) of the requested changes at the ADX. New mental-health programming was added, additional psychologists were hired and a new unit for high-security mentally ill prisoners opened in Atlanta. As predicted, a number of the inmates named in the suit have been transferred out of the ADX — including Powers, who was sent to a high-security prison in Tucson last year.

Powers couldn’t cope with the openness of the new facility. Aro believes the B.O.P. acted with good intentions, but it dismally failed to acclimate a man who spent much of the previous 13 years alone in a cell. Prisoners’ cell doors were left unlocked for much of the day, but Powers rarely ventured out into communal areas, and his mood turned ugly. After he struck a staff member during an argument, he was put in solitary. There, with a drill bit fashioned out of a battery, he managed to bore a hole through the top of his skull in an attempted trepanation.

Aro and Golden had both grown close to Powers over the course of the lawsuit. Separately they told me how protective they felt about him and how worried they were about his continued self-destructive behavior. Changes are very likely coming at the ADX, in no small part thanks to Powers’s story. But it seemed entirely possible that he might not survive to see the outcome.

LINK

[MachineGhost]

Allegation: Parole officer sexually harasses parolee who reports it to the PO’s supervisor. The supervisor fails to intervene and indeed threatens parolee with (further) punitive measures. Seventh Circuit: No qualified immunity for the supervisor.

Driver pulls onto highway shoulder, passes out. Jefferson County, Mo. police officers wake him up; he’s confrontational, so they beat him up. Whoops! He wasn’t drunk; he was in diabetic shock. Eighth Circuit: The officers are entitled to qualified immunity.

[MediumTex]

Allegation: Parole officer sexually harasses parolee who reports it to the PO’s supervisor. The supervisor fails to intervene and indeed threatens parolee with (further) punitive measures. Seventh Circuit: No qualified immunity for the supervisor.

Driver pulls onto highway shoulder, passes out. Jefferson County, Mo. police officers wake him up; he’s confrontational, so they beat him up. Whoops! He wasn’t drunk; he was in diabetic shock. Eighth Circuit: The officers are entitled to qualified immunity.

Those sound like the right outcomes.

[MachineGhost]

[quote=http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... /71064934/]Two little girls in Overton, Texas, figured out a way to keep their lemonade stand open despite being shut down by police for lacking a proper health permit.

Sisters Zoey, 7, and Andria Green, 8, opened the stand Monday to raise money to take their father to a water park for Father's Day. But Texas law requires a health permit to sell certain foods, including lemonade, and police chief Clyde Carter told the girls to close the stand.

"I was a little confused," Andria told KYTX-TV about the incident.

Zoey and Andria's mother, Sandi Green Evans, said she was miffed about the ordeal.

"Their father works in the oil field and is gone a lot, so this is something they wanted to do for him," she said. "They are both little entrepreneurs."

Other people in the neighborhood were also frustrated.

"This was such an innocent endeavor that turned into all kinds of government red tape," neighbor Nelwin Perry said. "It is upsetting, especially since I saw how hard the girls were working out in the heat."

But while trying to figure out the proper permit required, the girls and their mother discovered a loophole: They can give their lemonade away for free and take donations.

Andria and Zoey said they plan to open their booth from 10 a.m. to noon Saturday.

"I'm sad that we closed it down, but I'm happy that we get to open it back up," Zoey said.

Splash Kingdom, the water park where the girls planned to take their father, gave the girls free passes after local news media covered the story and two local radio stations donated tickets to Six Flags.[/quote]

[MachineGhost]

[quote=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking ... space.html]According to a recent report from the Police Reform Organising Project, at least two men have been arrested and charged on grounds of the M–word, "presumably because they were taking up more than one seat and therefore inconveniencing other riders". Rather than simply throwing out the charges, the judge issued an order that only guarantees that the men won’t suffer further repercussions if they avoid getting arrested again in the near future. It's all part of a numbers driven crackdown on subway behaviour that's also seen arrests for break dancing, walking between the cars and – collective air punch – people putting their feet on the seats. Nobody's been arrested for playing dubstep on audio–leaking headphones yet, but it's surely only a matter of time. [/quote]

[MachineGhost]

After 9/11, officials rounded up hundreds of mostly Muslim immigrants and threw them in prison—where they were subjected to strip searches, beatings, and solitary confinement—without making much effort to determine if they were actually guilty of anything. Their suit against John Ashcroft, Robert Mueller, and other top officials can go forward, says a divided Second Circuit panel.

Mocksville, N.C. police officers suspect police chief of embezzlement, other improprieties. Anonymously, they report their concerns to state officials who send out an investigator friendly with the chief who helps identify the complaining officers. The chief fires the officers. Fourth Circuit: Which may have violated the First Amendment.

Man spends over 40 years in solitary confinement; his murder conviction is overturned. Let him out pending retrial? Fifth Circuit: No, the warden says he’s a flight risk and a dangerous character.

DEA agents and Richland County, Ohio sheriff’s officers conspire with a confidential informant to frame innocent men of drug crimes. District Court: Qualified immunity all around. Sixth Circuit: Yeah, no.

[MachineGhost]

Man pulls off the road after his van backfires. Kansas City, Mo. police arrive; a 911 caller has reported gunshots. Van continues to backfire; police fire at man eight times, miss. Can he sue? Eighth Circuit: No, the police behaved reasonably.

Man wins $900,000 default judgment against St. Louis, Mo. cop who allegedly searched him without cause, stole his money, and filed a false police report. Cop refuses to pay up. Bounced from state court for procedural reasons, can man go to federal court? Eighth Circuit: Absolutely; the Rooker-Feldman doctrine does not apply, and Younger abstention is inappropriate.

Female inmates doing landscaping work at Oklahoma Governor’s Mansion allege they were raped by mansion employees. Can they sue prison guards who, alerted to the situation, did not intervene? Tenth Circuit: Yes.

[MachineGhost]

The pigs and their crony protectors are at it again!  The victim was white this time.

[quote=https://www.rt.com/usa/318897-michigan- ... y-lawsuit/]The family of an unarmed teen who was shot dead by a sheriff’s sergeant after flashing his car’s lights at him has filed a federal lawsuit against the officer. The move comes four months after the officer was cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the homicide.

Deven Guilford, 17, was driving along a Michigan highway on a cold February night and flashed his car’s headlights at a police SUV to indicate that it had “improperly or misaimed headlights,” according to the lawsuit. The teenager was subsequently pulled over by Sgt. Jonathan Frost, who was driving the SUV and had stopped two other drivers for also flashing their lights at him that night, the complaint said.

The incident was caught on Frost's bodycamera.

After he was stopped, Guilford – who had been holding up his phone to record the incident – refused to put his hands behind his back or give Frost his license and registration, leading to the officer demanding that the teen step out of his vehicle. 

“Put your phone down and get your hands behind your back,” Frost said with his Taser aimed at Guilford. When the teen wouldn’t comply as the officer was trying to handcuff him, Frost fired his Taser into Guilford. The stun gun wasn't fully effective because only one of two probes embedded into the teen, and Guilford retaliated to the shocks by getting up and pummeling the officer, according to the prosecutor.

The altercation continued in the ditch by the side of the road, and Frost drew his gun and shot Guilford seven times. While the officer was left with a bloodied face, Guilford ended up dead in the snow.[/quote]

[Libertarian666]

The pigs and their crony protectors are at it again!  The victim was white this time.

The family of an unarmed teen who was shot dead by a sheriff’s sergeant after flashing his car’s lights at him has filed a federal lawsuit against the officer. The move comes four months after the officer was cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the homicide.

Deven Guilford, 17, was driving along a Michigan highway on a cold February night and flashed his car’s headlights at a police SUV to indicate that it had “improperly or misaimed headlights,” according to the lawsuit. The teenager was subsequently pulled over by Sgt. Jonathan Frost, who was driving the SUV and had stopped two other drivers for also flashing their lights at him that night, the complaint said.

The incident was caught on Frost's bodycamera.

After he was stopped, Guilford – who had been holding up his phone to record the incident – refused to put his hands behind his back or give Frost his license and registration, leading to the officer demanding that the teen step out of his vehicle. 

“Put your phone down and get your hands behind your back,” Frost said with his Taser aimed at Guilford. When the teen wouldn’t comply as the officer was trying to handcuff him, Frost fired his Taser into Guilford. The stun gun wasn't fully effective because only one of two probes embedded into the teen, and Guilford retaliated to the shocks by getting up and pummeling the officer, according to the prosecutor.

The altercation continued in the ditch by the side of the road, and Frost drew his gun and shot Guilford seven times. While the officer was left with a bloodied face, Guilford ended up dead in the snow.

It does not show very good judgment to fight with an armed person who has essentially no concern about being thrown in prison for killing you.

Of course this does not mean that the officer was justified, but reality is sometimes a bitch.

[Pointedstick]

Sounds like two people of roughly equal levels of mental and social development just doing their thing. Unfortunately for the teenager, his adversary was a police officer.

[MachineGhost]

Can military police surveil civilians and, upon identifying a lawbreaker, alert civilian police? Absolutely not, says an en banc panel of the Ninth Circuit, holding the dragnet in question violated naval policy, DOD policy, and the Posse Comitatus Act. But the evidence can still be used against the defendant.

Rio Arriba County, N.M. sheriff’s son drives like a jerk in unmarked car; motorist flips him off. Sheriff’s son initiates high-speed pursuit, eventually cornering motorist. The sheriff, a passenger in the pursuing vehicle, pulls a gun on the motorist, beats him. Sheriff: “You want to see my badge? Here’s my badge, motherfucker.” Motorist arrested, charged with bogus crimes. District court: A 10-year sentence is appropriate for the sheriff. Sheriff: The court unfairly allowed prejudicial testimony regarding my three prior road-rage incidents. Tenth Circuit: Nope nope nope.

[Ad Orientem]

And now for the other side of the story...

FOND DU LAC, Wis.

Stopped in his patrol cruiser, Trooper Trevor Casper searched for a gray Toyota Corolla on a busy stretch of Highway 41. Behind the wheel was Steven Timothy Snyder, a bank robber and killer on the run. When Casper spotted Snyder about 5:30 p.m., he eased his cruiser into southbound traffic, following the Corolla at a distance, keeping his lights and siren off.

[About this story: To identify trends among fatal shootings by police, The Post studied whether the individuals killed were unarmed or armed with weapons and reviewed the actions they took in the immediate moments before police shot them. The Post has compiled a database of all fatal shootings nationwide by officers in the line of duty in 2015.]

But Snyder soon realized he was being followed. Outside the Pick ’n Save grocery store, he abruptly turned his car around. He raised his semiautomatic pistol and opened fire, striking Casper in the neck.

Snyder and Casper jumped out of their cars while they were still rolling. The 21-year-old trooper, armed with a .40-caliber Glock, and the 38-year-old bank robber circled the cruiser, guns blazing. Casper fired 12 rounds; Snyder got off nine armor-piercing bullets, one of which penetrated Casper’s ballistic vest. And when it was over, Snyder lay dying of a gunshot wound to his back.

“Bad guy is down,” a dispatcher reported.

Casper collapsed and then dropped his gun. March 24 was his first solo day on the job — and his last. Shot three times, he became the youngest law enforcement officer killed in the line of duty in Wisconsin history. Casper is among 31 officers this year who have been shot to death by perpetrators, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. He was hailed as a hero for stopping Snyder, who had magazines of ammunition tucked in his socks and left a manifesto promising “to go down fighting hard.”

Read the rest here...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/invest ... nder-fire/

[Pointedstick]

I wonder if the bullets were actually "armor-piercing" or if this is typical media sensationalism. Probably it was just +p round-nose 9mm or something that went through a low-quality vest.

[MachineGhost]

This is what Compassionate Conservatism looks like.

[quote=http://usuncut.com/news/550-people-have ... -in-texas/]With more than a month until the end of the year, it appears that Texas is trying to capture the title of “Worst State in America to Be Arrested,” as an ongoing report has shown that more than 550 people in the state have died in police custody so far this year. The office of Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General, has been tracking how many people have died in custody at every department at the local, county, and state level and the problem is widespread.

The report shows that “Custodial Deaths” have occurred at a wide range of law enforcement facilities, with more than half of the deaths occurring under the supervision of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The remaining deaths have occurred at local police departments, sheriff’s offices, and medical facilities throughout the state.[/quote]

[Xan]

Does that figure adjust for the enormous population of Texas compared to most states?  I'm guessing it doesn't.

Also, we lay claim to the world's most famous custodial death.  It also happens to have been the first murder to be aired on live TV.  Any guesses?

[Xan]

LHO, I assume.

You got it.

[MachineGhost]

More "compassion":

Allegation: Inmate with known infirmities relocated to cell in Beeville, Tex. prison where temperatures reach 95 degrees 27 out of 28 days before his heat-stroke death. Thirteen other inmates have died in similar conditions in Texas prisons. Fifth Circuit: Defendants must comply with discovery.

Inmate at privately run federal prison in Pecos, Tex. sues over unhygienic accommodations (among other things), but he can’t afford a lawyer. None of the seven attorneys in Pecos will take his case pro bono, nor will various legal services, and there’s no money to pay appointed counsel. District Court: So no lawyer for you then. Fifth Circuit: Compel a lawyer to take the case (for free).

And in en banc news, the Sixth Circuit will reconsider whether the U.S. Marshals must comply with a FOIA request for booking photos of Detroit’s former mayor (since convicted of corruption charges), his father (since convicted of corruption-related tax charges), and 17 cops (charged with corruption and civil-rights violations).

New Mexicans ended civil forfeiture this summer, or so they thought. Despite passing landmark legislation outlawing the use of civil forfeiture statewide, cities across the state are ignoring the law and continue to seize and keep individual’s property without convicting them of a crime. Now, a lawsuit filed today by a bipartisan pair of New Mexico State Senators seeks to shut down the city’s illegal civil forfeiture program once and for all.

[MachineGhost]

In his off hours, NYPD officer chats online with strangers about torturing, killing, and eating his wife and other women. But fantasies, even exceedingly creepy ones, are not against the law, says two-thirds of a Second Circuit panel. Dissent: He did more than fantasize, and looking up one of the women on a law-enforcement database was computer fraud and abuse.

Flint, Mich. police officers, under pressure to issue 30 citations on their shift, stop motorist for rolling through a stop sign. District court: The motorist’s testimony denying he rolled through the sign is more credible than the police’s testimony to the contrary. Suppress the evidence. Sixth Circuit: Reversed.

In an opinion featuring judicial internet research into the definition of “dominatrix,” the Seventh Circuit enjoins the sheriff of Cook County, Ill. from trying to shut down a webpage featuring classified advertisements, including “adult” ads, by threatening credit-card companies that process payments for the site. 

[Reub]

Did you see the video of the cop in the San Bernardino terrorist attack placing himself in the middle of the carnage and telling the innocents to follow him out and not to worry because he will take the bullet for them?  I doubt it.

[MachineGhost]

Did you see the video of the cop in the San Bernardino terrorist attack placing himself in the middle of the carnage and telling the innocents to follow him out and not to worry because he will take the bullet for them?  I doubt it.

How many good cops does it take to make up for all the bad?  How about we focus on the bad cops so we can get rid of them?  Pulling the wool over your eyes or waving your hand away like a fairy doesn't get that job done.  Good cops don't need any specific acclaim; it was their voluntary choice to go into such a public-serving job in the first place.  It's part of the catchet.  If they feel underappreciated, I suggest they work on getting the bad cops out of their profession instead of becoming one.