e dot dot dot
a mostly about the Internet blog by

October 2019
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
   
   


Hundreds Of Law Enforcement Agencies Are Still Allowing Bad Cops To Provide Testimony

Furnished content.


Thanks to untrustworthy cops, people's lives are being destroyed. It's more than just bogus stops and bogus arrests. It's more than faulty field tests that tell cops innocuous substances are illegal drugs. It's more than a judicial system that's tilted against criminal defendants, even as the system claims we're all innocent until proven guilty.One of the reasons the system is tilted against defendants is prosecutors' refusal to turn over exculpatory evidence. More than one judge has noted the "epidemic of Brady violations." Named after the 1963 Brady v. Maryland Supreme Court decision, Brady evidence is anything that might help the defense argue against the government's case. There's an obligation placed on prosecutors, far too many of which feel is optional. Nearly 100% of criminal prosecutions end in plea deals, giving prosecutors a convenient way of closing cases before they even need to consider their evidentiary obligations.Brady lists are lists of officers considered too untrustworthy to testify in court. This could be because they've been caught lying on the stand. This could be because of a lengthy history of misconduct. Law enforcement agencies rarely fire bad cops. But, occasionally, they'll inform prosecutors they don't want these officers testifying because of their internal affairs rap sheets.This information should be handed over to defendants, but it very rarely is. The easiest way to dodge this obligation is to not create the lists in the first place. If you don't know who's a bad cop, you can't possibly inform the defense that your key witness is impeachable. Win-win for the government. An investigation by USA Today shows the creation and maintenance of Brady lists appears to be another thing law enforcement considers to be optional.

At least 300 prosecutors’ offices across the nation are not taking steps necessary to comply with the Supreme Court mandates. These places do not have a list tracking dishonest or otherwise untrustworthy officers. They include big cities such as Chicago and Little Rock and smaller communities such as Jackson County, Minnesota, and Columbia County, Pennsylvania.
Others make as minimal effort as possible, following the letter of the Supreme Court ruling, but not the spirit. Records are incomplete, perhaps deliberately so.
USA TODAY identified at least 1,200 officers with proven histories of lying and other serious misconduct who had not been flagged by prosecutors. Of those officers, 261 were specifically disciplined for dishonesty on the job.
This failure to uphold their mandated obligations isn't some victimless paperwork crime. People are going to jail for years because prosecutors and police agencies refuse to hand over this information to criminal defendants. Bad cops take the stand and get people locked up even when their past dishonesty should make them no more trustworthy than the average street thug.Because there are hundreds of dishonest cops in the nation, thousands of criminal prosecutions are tainted by testimony provided by officers who never should have been allowed to take the stand. When lists are compiled, it generally takes a court order to get this information to defendants. It's almost impossible to get these lists released to the general public, even though lists of untrustworthy cops is very definitely of public interest.In one case detailed in USA Today's report, a man was locked up for 11 years for driving under the influence. It was never disclosed to him or the court the officer who arrested him had been disciplined for manipulating DWI stops to ensure he was called on to testify as often as possible, ensuring a steady flow of overtime. The only evidence against the man was the officer's word: there was no roadside test, no breathalyzer, and no blood test. It all came down to a bad cop saying someone was drunk. For that, the man lost 11 years of his life.This is another "Brady epidemic." This horrific stat was generated by a single law enforcement agency.
USA TODAY reviewed discipline files for Little Rock police officers going back 15 years, then compared them with court records. The analysis found officers who the department determined lied or committed crimes were witnesses in at least4,000 cases.
If this investigation shows anything, it shows hardly anyone on the "rule of law" side actually wants to follow rules or laws. Investigations like these will help apply pressure to prosecutors and police departments, but these are the most entrenched of (self) interests and it won't be easy to change the culture that has allowed this abuse of the judicial system to become so prevalent.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story


Read more here

posted at: 12:00am on 29-Oct-2019
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

0 comments, click here to add the first



Bus Company Threatens To Sue College Newspaper Over Satirical Story

Furnished content.


What is it with college bus companies? For years we've covered the insanity of Suburban Express and its attacks on customers for criticizing the company, and now we have a story that impacts my own alma mater. Coach USA is a large bus holding company that runs a bunch of different bus companies, including ShortLine, which runs regular coach bus service between downstate New York and upstate New York, making it a popular option for students from the New York City metropolitan region going to college at Binghamton, Ithaca, Cornell, Albany or Elmira. It's been around for quite some time -- and like many college bus transportation services, the subject of jokes.CU Nooz, a satirical news site that I'm pretty sure began its existence long after I left town, recently had a satirical article (which is basically all the site does) mocking the Shortline Bus. And Coach USA responded by sending an utterly ridiculous cease & desist letter.

The letter, obtained by The Sun and sent by Coach USA's assistant general counsel, called the piece libelous and threatened legal action if not pulled off of CU Nooz's website. The article, originally entitled Student Spent Entirety of Fall Break on Shortline Bus spoofed the travel experience of a fictional student on a nonexistent ShortLine route, saying that long bus journeys prevented her from spending time at home.
CU Nooz has responded by updating the article in question, so that its new title is:
UPDATE: Student Didn't Spend Entirety of Fall Break on Shortline Bus, Because Shortline Sent Us Cease and Desist
Good job. It now includes an editor's note up top:
Update: In response to receiving a cease and desist letter from Coach USA's assistant general counsel demanding CU Nooz remove the libelous article concerning Shortline's bus services as well as libelous comments attributed to representatives of Shortline, this article has been updated to reflect that the student did not, in fact, spend the entirety of Fall Break on the Shortline Bus.
It also put in a bunch of strikethroughs and "edits" within the story, which is pretty funny in its own way:
>In what was supposed to be a quick long-weekend visit to friends and family back home, Kayla Gladstone '22 spentDID NOT SPEND the entire duration of Fall Break on a Shortline service from Ithaca to Washington DC.As an experienced Shortline rider, I thought this would just be a quick 17-hour jouney home, said Gladstone DIDN'T SAY. At least the charging port worked sometimes if I didn't breathe too hard, and a few times when I was lucky the WiFi would even load the login page.
Perhaps my favorite edit, is they stuck a "NONEXISTENT" before the word "route" to emphasize that the route in question didn't even exist.The original cease and desist was clearly ridiculous and censorial. Coach/ShortLine appears to have wasted money on lawyers who either gave them bad advice or still followed through on the bus company's ridiculous demand to silence someone gently mocking them.Even worse, according to the Cornell Daily Sun, Shortline's execs acknowledge they understood it was satire, which basically is them admitting that they had absolutely no legal claim here in the first place. They can't even plead that they had no sense of humor. Just that they're assholes.
Shortline understands that the article was satirical, but if anyone unknowingly was doing a search on ShortLine services and this article came up they would not see that it was fake news, Hughes said.
That assumes that anyone doing a search would be too stupid to recognize satire. Either way, it's long been established that parody/satire is not defamatory, and the company itself has now admitted its satire.Incredibly, the only defense that Shortline gives in response to this was a manager there saying that the article "wasn't funny to us." Yeah, that's not the standard for defamation, either.While CU Nooz clearly did not need to change its article, it did so in a pretty hilarious way that drew more attention to the bullshit legal threat. Oh, and also, it looks like the site isn't planning to let up either. It's now published a new story called 8 Bus Companies We'd Rather be Sued by Than ShortLine.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story


Read more here

posted at: 12:00am on 29-Oct-2019
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

0 comments, click here to add the first



October 2019
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
   
   







RSS (site)  RSS (path)

ATOM (site)  ATOM (path)

Categories
 - blog home

 - Announcements  (0)
 - Annoyances  (0)
 - Career_Advice  (0)
 - Domains  (0)
 - Downloads  (3)
 - Ecommerce  (0)
 - Fitness  (0)
 - Home_and_Garden  (0)
     - Cooking  (0)
     - Tools  (0)
 - Humor  (0)
 - Notices  (0)
 - Observations  (1)
 - Oddities  (2)
 - Online_Marketing  (0)
     - Affiliates  (1)
     - Merchants  (1)
 - Policy  (3743)
 - Programming  (0)
     - Bookmarklets  (1)
     - Browsers  (1)
     - DHTML  (0)
     - Javascript  (3)
     - PHP  (0)
     - PayPal  (1)
     - Perl  (37)
          - blosxom  (0)
     - Unidata_Universe  (22)
 - Random_Advice  (1)
 - Reading  (0)
     - Books  (0)
     - Ebooks  (0)
     - Magazines  (0)
     - Online_Articles  (5)
 - Resume_or_CV  (1)
 - Reviews  (2)
 - Rhode_Island_USA  (0)
     - Providence  (1)
 - Shop  (0)
 - Sports  (0)
     - Football  (0)
          - Cowboys  (0)
          - Patriots  (0)
     - Futbol  (0)
          - The_Rest  (0)
          - USA  (0)
 - Technology  (1055)
 - Windows  (1)
 - Woodworking  (0)


Archives
 -2024  March  (170)
 -2024  February  (168)
 -2024  January  (146)
 -2023  December  (140)
 -2023  November  (174)
 -2023  October  (156)
 -2023  September  (161)
 -2023  August  (49)
 -2023  July  (40)
 -2023  June  (44)
 -2023  May  (45)
 -2023  April  (45)
 -2023  March  (53)
 -2023  February  (40)


My Sites

 - Millennium3Publishing.com

 - SponsorWorks.net

 - ListBug.com

 - TextEx.net

 - FindAdsHere.com

 - VisitLater.com