Our Boys In Blue

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Mongrel
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Tue Sep 13, 2016 11:07 am

WaPo: WV cop fired for not killing a man

He made the correct decision too. Too bad two other cops showed up and gunned the guy down anyway and were prasied for doing so! JFC this story is doing evrything it can to be infuriating.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Mon Sep 26, 2016 2:21 pm

Chicago Sun-Times: 22 Police shootings this year and not one of the recordings has any audio

Cops, apparently unhappy with orders from top Chicago Police Department brass to wear microphones, recently took matters into their own hands on the Northwest Side: They threw them onto the roof of the Jefferson Park police station.
...
Also, he said, more than 80 percent of the cameras have non-functioning audio “due to operator error or, in some cases, intentional destruction.”


If they don't fire a bunch of cops over this, that force might as well be done.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Cait » Mon Sep 26, 2016 3:38 pm

That's nearly a year old. Did any cops get fired over it?

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Mon Sep 26, 2016 3:43 pm

Don't see any recent articles on it...

Well, now folks, what do you think are the odds of an American cop actually being fired for evidence tampering and obstruction of justice are?

Yeah.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Yoji » Mon Sep 26, 2016 5:15 pm

Timothy Loehmann- a man who, judging by his firing from a neighboring police department, had no business in law enforcement- fatally shot a 12-year-old boy playing with a BB gun in an open-carry state within seconds of arriving at the scene, and he got away with it. If that doesn't fill you with despair... well, you may not have been paying attention.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Mon Jan 16, 2017 9:27 pm

WARNING: This is probably only interesting to our resident law-profession folks (Paco and... I think we have 1-2 more? I forget who, sorry!). But it might be interesting to some of the rest of you who like Popehat, etc. Anyway, this is the story of my friend Clay and the State of Missouri's current attempt to waive due process for no other reason than pure sloth.

Clay works as an appeals attorney in MO (he used to be solo, but he had a kid last year kid so he got into a bigger firm as their in-house appeals guy while also still doing some on the side by himself). He's somehow wound up doing a lot of appeals to the MO supreme court, last-chance sorta stuff, weird cases. And of course the stories he has of the ways the MO legal & "justice" system go wildly and absurdly out of their way to completely fuck people who are already so profoundly fucked already would drive a person mad... if I weren't already mostly deadened to the fact that this is how things work down in the US, and in most states really.

Anyway, in the last few months he's had a case (which he just got to argue today), which is ridiculous even by the soul-crushing standards of the previous perversions of justice he's had to appeal. Here's the original summary in his own words:

RawMeat wrote:So, friend of a friend had a case where Jackson County cops have this 6-checkbox form for warrants, where you can just checkbox what you think you'll find and then sign it affirming that you have probable cause to find those things when you do the search. One of those things is the "corpse clause" that says roughly something like "a dead body or fetus or parts thereof."

Cops were searching for a stolen coach purse and an ipad. Cop that filled out the form checked the corpse clause. Attorney moved to quash the search warrant and anything found pursuant to it as invalid, because there was no probable cause to find a corpse. State did a bunch of response motions arguing that it was just a typo and they didn't find anything pursuant to that clause anyway. They have a hearing and the cop comes in and testifies that, no, he did it on purpose, because sometimes you go in and you find a dead body and you have to get a new warrant to seize the dead body and that's a pain in the ass. Also that, no, he had no reason to suspect that there was a dead body in the defendants' house.

Trial judge loses his mind and literally says that there "is no laziness exception to the Due Process clause" and quashes the warrant and excludes all the evidence found from the search.

State appeals (because they can appeal during the middle of a case, obv). And argues that it's fine since (1) they didn't find anything pursuant to the clause and (2) anyway there is this "line item veto" type thing you can do with a warrant when one of the items checked is not appropriate.

Western District actually hears the case en banc and splits 6-5 on the case. With the majority saying that it's fine because of the line item veto thing and then spends like 5 pages explaining why the cops should not do this. The dissent says that (a) the veto only applies for "good faith" mistakes, and admitting that you are lazy is not a good faith mistake; (b) that it's stupid to tell the cops not to be lazy, but also tell them that it's totally fine since you're not going to suppress any evidence when they intentionally do this; and (c) if you've authorized the cops to search for microscopic blood particles, it sort of consumes the entire warrant and it's impossible to say that "nothing was found pursuant to the corpse clause."

At this point the friend of a friend contacted me to figure out how to apply for transfer to the Missouri Supreme Court and I helped him with that. About a week ago, he contacted me to tell me they accepted transfer and he doesn't know what to do. I explain that I know what to do and would love to get involved if his clients could scrape up really any amount of dollars, but even just enough to pay for a hotel in Jeff City would be nice.

Friday, he tells me that his "crazy meth head clients" are unwilling to pay any money (and have not even paid him). So... I really wanna argue at the supreme court again, but it would be for free, which is a pain. Also, at the supreme court you can re-file your brief and fix it up. I looked at his brief and it's less than 3 pages and those three pages are really bad. Like, not even the content, but like the form. It looks like somebody did some kind of art project in microsoft word and called it their brief. So... realistically, this would be at least 2 weekends worth of work. But... it would be a supreme court argument and a likely win, because, it seems like it should be a win. However, it doesn't have to be a win, so it might be 2 weekends of work, for which I'm not getting paid, and which is ultimately just a waste of time where I think "how can this possibly be Missouri law."

My wife thinks I should just do it. So, I guess she's OK with it. I'm not really sure what to do. I also don't know how in the world this can be the law.


We all encouraged him to do it, but honestly, he likes doing these Supreme Court cases, so I doubt any encouragement was needed.

He argued the case today, so we got an update:
RawMeat wrote:I told the Court that it was embarassing that I had to come down to the Missouri Supreme Court to argue whether the police get to lie to judges when obtaining warrants and whether its OK for the prosecutor to admit to making up a fantasy situation to justify police lying to obtain search warrants and then when all of the lies are discovered, the Attorney General gets to argue that it's not really a big deal. This was perhaps more candor than they bargained for.

I spent the morning preparing in the law library next to the dred Scott display, so I did resist the urge to tell them to try and be on the right side of history this time. 8-)

I did miss the opportunity to point out that judge Wilson (ex prosecutor Obv) was analyzing the breach of the 4th amendment by looking at the fact that the cops found stuff... Well cases can't get here when they don't find stuff.

I did ask him why the fuck we need to have an entire body of law dealing with police malfeasance in obtaining warrants, which also felt refreshing.


Also, this bit in the brief was fun:
Further, Estes admitted, and the State acknowledged, this was done because the Fourth
Amendment’s requirement that searches be made with probable cause is a huge hassle
which would have required Estes to obtain another warrant to investigate a corpse, if
Estes had come across a corpse (referred to as a “piggyback warrant”). Tr. 12-13, 16;
App.’s Br., pp. 9-11.


Here's the audio of the hearing, if you want to listen (Clay starts around the 12 min mark)
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Blossom
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Blossom » Tue Jan 17, 2017 7:25 pm

There is no possible reason to justify direct malfeasance, and by allowing the cop to go in with a blanket warrant for microscopic blood particles and then piggyback warrants for everything they DO find, you've effectively waived the warrant requirement completely. Deciding in favor of the state here is throwing out the 4th Amendment entirely. His case is a clear winner and the decision should absolutely fall in his favor.

It probably won't.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jan 17, 2017 8:23 pm

Yeah, the initial trial judge losing his mind sums it up perfectly "[there] is no 'laziness exception' to the Due Process clause!"
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jan 17, 2017 8:25 pm

On the other hand, if MO decides to be stupid, then maybe he gets to argue a case to SCOTUS.

It's absurd that it's even possible that that might happen at all though.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Grath » Tue Jan 17, 2017 8:54 pm

Mongrel wrote:On the other hand, if MO decides to be stupid, then maybe he gets to argue a case to SCOTUS.

It's absurd that it's even possible that that might happen at all though.

That's assuming we still have a functional SCOTUS by then.

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jan 17, 2017 9:01 pm

Wheeeeeeeeeeee
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Joxam » Mon Jan 23, 2017 5:17 pm

Louisiana makes resisting arrest a hate crime.

I wonder how long until someone who is protesting an actual hate crime and uses the 'go limp' tactic gets charged with a hate crime.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Büge » Mon Apr 10, 2017 12:18 pm



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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Mon Apr 10, 2017 2:25 pm

Even better: It turns out the guys in masks are part of some "Community Engagement Unit" and not the SWAT team or undercover guys.

You can't make this stuff up.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby beatbandito » Mon Apr 10, 2017 8:14 pm

Man, 90s RTSes had the dumbest cut scenes.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon Apr 10, 2017 8:33 pm

“Lol,” another [commentator] said, “my son said that he wanted to be a cop so I showed him this, now he wants to be a pokemaster. Progress!


To be semi-fair, the guy is operating in the swampy outskirts of the Orlando metro area, and the drug panic there seems to be very real. If anything this is indicative of how much white people tend to look like fucking nerds these days when it's time to Get Tough.

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Bal » Tue Apr 11, 2017 4:14 am

I have no doubt that Sheriff has watched heroin destroy whole communities and would love to feed the dealers to the gators for more or less legitimate reasons. The problem is militarization of the police.

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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jun 16, 2017 5:45 pm

Wow, they couldn't even convict the guy who shot Philando Castile? WTF level of immunity is this?
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Yoji » Fri Jun 16, 2017 6:22 pm

I used to exclusively play a protection paladin in World of Warcraft, and even my bubble didn't grant as much immunity.

Makes you wonder what exactly it takes for a cop to be found guilty of unjustly killing a black man.

*wavy imagination lines*

Local news was covering the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new Kid-Kitten Hardhat Alliance Center in Williamette, Illinois. Leading the ceremony was one George Eaglemann, a wealthy philanthropist and known black man famous for his founding and funding the Grandma's Wish Coalition for Warm Cookies Straight from the Oven. Holding an oversized pair of ceremonial scissors, he gave an uplifting speech about how all lives are precious, regardless of one's race, ideology, gender, fur length, claw status, or hat color, prompting a stirring ovation from all in attendance. Even the cameramen seemed to choke up at his remarks.

Without warning, a police motorcycle shoves its way though the crowd, stopping several yards away from Mr. Eaglemann's podium. The officer, clad in powered SWAT armor, dismounts, declares himself as Officer Duke McMurder (badge no. FU-666-CK), and screams at Mr. Eaglemann to drop the weapon. Before he can even breathe the word "what," the philanthropist was shot ten times by the 20mm caseless munitions launcher on Officer McMurder's right wrist. Mr. Eaglemann's body slumped onto the podium and remained motionless for several seconds until the embedded delayed-action explosive rounds started detonating, splattering nearby girl scouts with blood and gore. One round exploded his head like a wet melon, sending an eyeball flying into the agape mouth of a pregnant woman standing nearby. Just before the broadcast was cut, Officer McMurder could be seen kicking the philanthropist's mangled body and screaming on his radio about the suspect resisting arrest. The entire event was broadcast live to news stations statewide.

As of the time of this report, Williamette PD is still investigating whether Officer McMurder's use of force was appropriate. The officer himself is currently reassigned to desk duty.
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Re: Our Boys In Blue

Postby Thad » Fri Jun 16, 2017 7:21 pm

It's been awhile since I took an anatomy class, but...are eyeballs explosion-proof? It's just that I'm always seeing these comics and movies where there's an explosion and somebody's detached but fully-intact eyeball is flying out of it.

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