Oct 20
More details are emerging regarding the torture and interrogation warehouse used for years by the Chicago Police Department. See here. At least 6,000 “suspects” were arrested and taken to the warehouse over the years. The Chicago PD maintained NO BOOKING RECORDS at the site, and thus hid arrestees from lawyers and their families while the …
Sep 19
Under common law, any cop (or anyone else, for that matter) who arrested another person without probable cause to believe a crime was committed was AT LEAST liable for false arrest. (Actually, under 19th-century common law, actual guilt and not mere probable cause was the standard.) But after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. …
Jun 02
Stephen R. Reinhardt is one of America’s most premier “liberal” (in the old, traditional, suspicious-of-government sense) judges on the high federal bench. For years he has used his seat on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to protect criminal defendants from the overreach of the American police state. Now Reinhardt has authored an enlightened …
Apr 18
The Washington Post is out with a report that the FBI’s Forensic experts falsely testified in hundreds of criminal trials that hair samples taken from crime scenes matched hair folicles taken from defendants. In every one of these cases, the FBI was lying, exaggerating or overstating the strength of the alleged hair match. In many …
Mar 02
The Washington Post, the voice of the Washington government establishment if there ever was one, has launched a scary news story about the purported growth of private (meaning, in this sense, contract, or privately-owned police companies licensed under a special Virginia statute) policing. The Washington Post story warns of private officers who may be undertrained. …
Feb 26
Today the U.S. government is constantly invoking “State Secrets Privilege” to shut down lawsuits against the government and keep the American people from knowing the truth about government affairs. When Americans file lawsuits against the government or its blood-brother corporate agents, the government asserts “state secrets privilege” to force the courts to throw out the …
Feb 16
In Lysander Spooner’s great essay, “No Treason,” Spooner wrote: No body of men can be said to authorize a man to act as their agent, to the injury of a third person, unless they do it in so open and authentic a manner as to make themselves personally responsible for his acts. None of the …
