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June 2021
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Alabama Deputy Sued After Cuffing An Arrestee So Tightly His Hand Had To Be Amputated

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There's a saying lots of cops and cop defenders use. It rhymes, so it's easy to remember and even easier to deploy carelessly anytime someone expresses doubts about excessive force or excessive sentencing.

"Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."
Thanks, Baretta. I'm not sure how Robert Blake feels about this catchphrase after his trip through the criminal justice system, but it nonetheless persists.But what happens if you don't do the crime, still do the time, and then have something truly awful happen to you as a result of your forced "interaction" with local law enforcement? Well, things like this happen... things that should never happen.
Before Giovanni Loyola was arrested in February 2020, he enjoyed using his hands and worked mainly in construction. Now the 26-year-old is unable to fasten his own belt or tie his shoes, his attorney said.Loyola had segments of fingers removed in several operations last year, and doctors ultimately had to amputate his entire left hand. According to a federal civil rights complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama last month, the amputation was the result of injuries sustained from being left for hours in overly tight handcuffs after a disorderly-conduct arrest.
Yeah, that's the "time" Loyola will be doing for the rest of his life for the "crime" of telling sheriff's deputies there was no altercation happening at his home. The lawsuit [PDF] (which the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post apparently can't afford to make available at its website) says Jefferson County (Alabama) deputy Christopher Godber showed up at Loyola's mothers house in response to reports two males were fighting and carrying weapons.Loyola was watching TV at the time and no fighting was happening at the residence. Apparently, Deputy Godber didn't care for the "nothing to see here, please move along" answers he was receiving from Loyola. So, he needlessly escalated the situation.
When Plaintiff answered the door he asked the deputies standing there what was wrong. Deputy Godber, without answering and without asking permission to enter the home, reached inside the doorway, grabbed Plaintiff by the wrist and jerked him outside the home and down the steps.Deputy Godber then slammed Plaintiff against a car, threw him to the ground and punched him in the face with his fist.Deputy Godber then cuffed Plaintiff’s hands together behind his back extremely tightly and placed his knee on Plaintiff’s upper back with Deputy Godber’s weight on the knee.
According to the lawsuit, Deputy Godber had a good 50 pounds on the person he was restraining, not to mention the advantage of having both of his hands uncuffed. Godber still holds the advantage, months after this arrest, with Loyola losing one hand to Godber's refusal to loosen the cuffs.Loyola then spent the weekend in jail. He was arrested for "contempt of cop:" disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. Outstanding warrants for traffic violations kept him in jail for ten more days. He was given no medical treatment while incarcerated. By the time he was released, it was too late to save his hand.
After Plaintiff got out of jail on February 28, 2020, his left wrist was still in tremendous pain. He went to Christ Health Center where the physician provided him with a medical excuse stating that “[h]e was found to have a severe problem with blood flow to his left hand and is in need of emergent surgery.”Plaintiff was admitted to St. Vincent’s East and remained there until March 2, 2020. 28. On February 28, upon admission to the Emergency Department, the notes state that Plaintiff had “gray fingertips and concern for necrosis of the left hand. He has had increasing pain in his fingertips after he was handcuffed 4 days ago and sent in from Christ Health Center for rule out of dissection.”
First, surgeons removed two fingertips. But the necrosis had advanced too far to save the hand.
Plaintiff went home but returned to the hospital on March 17, 2020, complaining of extreme pain in his fingers. Plaintiff was admitted to the hospital on March 17, 2020 and remained there until March 25, 2020. Those medical records state that “He reports he was arrested about 3 weeks ago and after wearing handcuffs his fingers turned blue and became painful.”Over the next ten months Plaintiff went to Saint Vincent’s Hospital and then to UAB for continued treatment of his hand, but due to the injuries inflicted on him by the deputies’ improper use of handcuffs, Plaintiff’s left hand has had to be amputated.
Apart from the obvious senseless permanent injury inflicted on Loyola, the lawsuit also alleges other Fourth Amendment violations, like the illegal seizure of Loyola by the deputy who dragged him out of his house before throwing him to the ground and cuffing him, And there was a supposed "safety sweep" of the house no one was fighting in -- one that happened with all residents outside of the home and (obviously) without a warrant."Don't do the crime." But no crime had occurred until Deputy Godber escalated the situation by reaching across the house's threshold to grab Loyola. Anything that happened past that point was pretty much manufactured by the deputy's deployment of force. The incident report claims Loyola was "drunk and belligerent" but those aren't criminal acts, especially since Loyola was still in his own home -- right up until Deputy Godber dragged him out of it. Calling the violent arrest an "altercation" is just standard exonerative prose -- something seen in pretty much every report covering deployments of excessive force.This call could have been handled without an arrest and without a man losing his hand and his livelihood. But it wasn't because the law enforcement officer on the scene decided it had to go the way it did. At the end of this -- even if Loyola wins in court -- Deputy Godber will still have his job and both of his hands. At worst, he may only be out of a job temporarily. But the punishment inflicted on Loyola by Godber will last a lifetime.

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posted at: 12:00am on 08-Jun-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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European Commission Betrays Internet Users By Cravenly Introducing Huge Loophole For Copyright Companies In Upload Filter Guidance

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As a recent Techdirt article noted, the European Commission was obliged to issue "guidance" on how to implement the infamous Article 17 upload filters required by the EU's Copyright Directive. It delayed doing so, evidently hoping that the adviser to the EU's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), would release his opinion on Poland's attempt to get Article 17 struck down before the European Commission revealed its one-sided advice. That little gambit failed when the Advocate General announced that he would publish his opinion after the deadline for the release of the guidance. The European Commission has finally provided its advisory document on Article 17 and, as expected, it contains a real stinker of an idea. The best analysis of what the Commission has done, and why it is so disgraceful comes from Julia Reda and Paul Keller on the Kluwer Copyright Blog. Although Article 17 effectively made upload filters mandatory, it also included some (weak) protections for users, to allow people to upload copyright material for legal uses such as memes, parody, criticism etc. without being blocked. The copyright industry naturally hates any protections for users, and has persuaded the European Commission to eviscerate them:

According to the final guidance, rightholders can easily circumvent the principle that automatic blocking should be limited to manifestly infringing uses by "earmarking" content the "unauthorised online availability of which could cause significant economic harm to them" when requesting the blocking of those works. Uploads that include protected content thus "earmarked" do not benefit from the ex-ante protections for likely legitimate uses. The guidance does not establish any qualitative or quantitative requirements for rightholders to earmark their content. The mechanism is not limited to specific types of works, categories of rightholders, release windows, or any other objective criteria that could limit the application of this loophole.
The requirements that copyright companies must meet are so weak that it is probably inevitable that they will claim most uploads "could cause significant economic harm", and should therefore be earmarked. Here's what happens then: before it can be posted online, every earmarked upload requires a "rapid" human review of whether it is infringing or not. Leaving aside the fact that it is very hard for legal judgements to be both "rapid" and correct, there's also the problem that copyright companies will earmark millions of uploads (just look at DMCA notices), making it infeasible to carry out proper review. But the European Commission also says that if online platforms fail to carry out a human review of everything that is earmarked, and allow some unchecked items to be posted, they will lose their liability protection:
this means that service providers face the risk of losing the liability protections afforded to them by art. 17(4) unless they apply ex-ante human review to all uploads earmarked by rightholders as merely having the potential to "cause significant economic harm". This imposes a heavy burden on platform operators. Under these conditions rational service providers will have to revert to automatically blocking all uploads containing earmarked content at upload. The scenario described in the guidance is therefore identical to an implementation without safeguards: Platforms have no other choice but to block every upload that contains parts of a work that rightholders have told them is highly valuable.
Thus the already unsatisfactory user rights contained in Article 17 are rendered null and void because of the impossibility of following the European Commission's new guidance. That's evidently the result of recent lobbying from the copyright companies, since none of this was present in previous drafts of the guidance. Not content with making obligatory the upload filters that they swore would not be required, copyright maximalists now want to take away what few protections remain for users, thus ensuring that practically all legal uses of copyright material -- including memes -- are likely to be automatically blocked.The Kluwer Copyright blog post points out that this approach was not at all necessary. As Techdirt reported a couple of weeks ago, Germany has managed to come up with an implementation of Article 17 that preserves most user rights, even if it is by no means perfect. The European Commission, by contrast, has cravenly given what the copyright industry has demanded, and effectively stripped out those rights. But this cowardly move may backfire. Reda and Keller explain:
the Commission does not provide any justification or rationale why users' fundamental rights do not apply in situations where rightholders claim that there is the potential for them to suffer significant economic harm. It's hard to imagine that the CJEU will consider that the version of the guidance published today provides meaningful protection for users' rights when it has to determine the compliance of the directive with fundamental rights [in the case brought by Poland]. The Commission appears to be acutely aware of this as well and so it has wisely included the following disclaimer in the introductory section of the guidance (emphasis ours):"The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the case C-401/192 will have implications for the implementation by the Member States of Article 17 and for the guidance. The guidance may need to be reviewed following that judgment".In the end this may turn out to be the most meaningful sentence in the entire guidance.
It would be a fitting punishment for betraying the 450 million citizens the European Commission is supposed to serve, but rarely does, if this final overreach causes upload filters to be thrown out completely.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

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posted at: 12:00am on 08-Jun-2021
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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