Addendum to a botched drug raid

Here is a link to the actual warrant for the botched drug raid. The article states that the warrant had been uplifted to Scribd, but when you check the link you will find that the warrant has been removed from the site. I guess there is a limit to Art Acevedo's transparency when the shit hits the fan.

According to the Houston Chronicle, the police seized 18 grams of marijuana and 1.5 grams of cocaine from the house. That's right, a little more than half-an-ounce of weed and little powder.

So here's my question, did the police kick in the wrong door or did they just flat out lie in the warrant application? It's one or the other.

What say you, Joe Gamaldi?

Anatomy of a botched drug raid

Last month five officers from the Houston Police Department were injured - four were shot - in a drug raid gone incredibly wrong. At the time we were barraged with statements from HPD that the police raided the house, shot the dogs and killed the residents, Donald Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, because a confidential informant told them the couple had heroin and guns in the house.

Joe Gamaldi, the head of the local police union, claimed the police had targets on their backs and that he was sick and tired of people claiming the police were the bad guys. He even threatened to keep tabs on those who criticized the police. Woo-hoo! Over here, Joe!

The local media - never ones to look too deeply into any story involving the police - ate it up. The local media never once questioned the reliability of the informant or the rationale behind a "dynamic" entry.

But there was a problem. There was no heroin in the house. There was a small amount of marijuana and cocaine. There were rifles and shotguns, but there was no evidence that they were obtained illegally.

Neighbors and relatives told anyone who would listen that neither Mr. Tuttle nor Ms. Nicholas were involved in the drug trade. Neither had any convictions for drug activity. Neither had any convictions for violent behavior.

Police Chief Art Acevedo (doing his best to play a prevent defense) told the media that police had received a tip from an anonymous called that there were guns and heroin inside the house. Police then sent their informant into the house to get some heroin. They claim he came out with the drug and a tale the house was a veritable Wal-Mart of heroin.

If anyone knows how this shit works in Houston, it should come as no surprise that the officers went to a judge in the municipal courthouse (where the primary business of the day is traffic court) to find a judge who would sign the warrant without asking any pesky questions about probable cause or the need for a "no-knock" warrant. Needless to say, they found a very pliant judge on Lubbock Street.

Since the jump-out boys were from narcotics, no one was wearing bodycams at the time of the raid. I get it. The last thing the police want the public to see is just how much of a shit show these raids turn into.

And now an unnamed officer involved in the raid has been relieved of duty pending an investigation into the botched raid.

For those of y'all keeping score on this, the search warrant said the police believed that heroin and handguns would be found in the house. Neither were.

If anyone out there has any delusion that the police follow a rigid procedure in obtaining evidence, drafting a warrant application and discussing with a judge why the warrant needs to be served, you may now put your glasses back on and witness just how this process works.

In reality the warrant applications filed by the police - and prosecutors - are fill-in-the-blank cookie-cutter forms where the affiant cuts and pastes the basis of his suspicion. This suspicion can rarely be backed up by anything resembling articulable facts. These affidavits are presented to judges who preside over traffic courts who sign them without raising any questions.

The result is what happened in Houston last month. This should be Exhibit A in a lesson as to why the war on drugs has been an abject failure.

See also:

Blakinger, Keri, et al. "Houston police officer connected to deadly raid, shootout relieved of duty," Houston Chronicle (2/8/2019)

Reigstad, Leif, "A no-knock raid in Houston led to deaths and police injuries. Should police rethink the process?" Texas Monthly (2/12019)

Blakinger, Keri and Stephen Tucker Paulson, "Police identify powder recovered in deadly drug raid" Houston Chronicle 2/2/2019)

Drugged driving in Tornado Alley

I saw a tweet on Twitter yesterday about a six-state initiative to cut down on drugged driving. This weekend in Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Oklahoma, police will be "cracking" down on drugged driving in an initiative cleverly titled Driving High? Kiss Your License Goodbye.

There's just one little problem. While alcohol mixes with the blood in the lungs which allows the use of a breath test to estimate the amount of alcohol in a person's body, drugs don't.

With alcohol we can trace a curve showing the accumulation of alcohol in a person's body and we can calculate (or, as I prefer, guesstimate) the length of time it will take that person to eliminate the alcohol. We can't do that with drugs. Since marijuana is illegal, there has been no testing to determine accumulation or elimination rates.

Furthermore, with alcohol we can pick a concentration that demarcates the line between being intoxicated and not being intoxicated. We can quibble over the number but there is testing data available that shows the effect of higher levels of alcohol over time. No such luck with drugs.

I think I can visualize how this initiative is going to work. The police will conduct a traffic stop on anyone committing a minor traffic (or equipment) violation after hours. If the person has the odor of an alcoholic beverage on their breath it will become a DWI stop, complete with roadside sobriety tests and breath or blood tests at the scene or at the station. If the person doesn't have the odor of an alcoholic beverage on their breath it will become a drugged driving stop since there can't possibly be any other reason a motorist might be speeding, not using a turn signal or driving with a burned out tail light.

Those accused and arrested for drugged driving will have to wait weeks for the results of blood tests to come back. Prosecutors will then argue that the presence of inactive metabolites for any number of drugs are evidence that the motorist was under the influence of drugs at the time of driving. Little thought or consideration will be given to the fact that the inactive metabolites of many drugs find their ways to the body's fatty tissues where they stay, not bothering anyone or anything, for anywhere from three days to a month.

Prosecutors will also argue that the presence of prescription medications indicates the motorist was driving under the influence of drugs, too. Little consideration will be given to the actual concentration of the drug in the body or whether or not that concentration is lesser or greater than a therapeutic dosage. Prosecutors will argue that the presence of alcohol and any prescription medication is a clear sign of intoxication without regard for the actual chemistry of the substances involved.

But, hey, with strong Fourth Amendment protections and judges who take seriously their gatekeeper role when it comes to scientific evidence, there's nothing to worry about this weekend in Tornado Alley, is there?

h/t Marine Glisovic and Shane Ethridge

What has Jeff Sessions been smoking?

Why does the US government even care about marijuana? Every state in the country has its own laws regarding hippie lettuce - there is no need for the federal government to be involved.

Hasn't anyone in Washington ever heard of the 10th Amendment? Hasn't anyone learned about the concept of federalism?

Jeff Sessions is just the latest Republican officeholder to cast federalism aside when it doesn't suit his needs. His recent decision to reverse the Obama-era hands-off policy with regard to cannabis shows just how out of touch old, white wingnuts are - and just how hypocritical they are.

Voters in states across the country have decided that the existing chronic laws make little or no sense. There is a growing understanding that the happy grass is more akin to alcohol - a perfectly legal drug - than it is to cocaine and other narcotics. Many local jurisdictions have taken steps to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of weed by offering pretrial diversions or treating the offense like a traffic ticket.

As an aside, part of this change in attitude toward wacky tobacky has to do with the fact that the majority of users are white. And when upper income white folks find themselves inconvenienced in their indulgences, well, that's a problem.

Regardless of one's feelings about bud, I would hope that we could agree that there is no need for los federales to be involved in most drug prosecutions. States have laws governing the use and possession of various narcotics and illegal drugs. There is no need for the federal government to stick its nose in state criminal matters. It makes a whole lot more sense for these cases to be prosecuted in local jurisdictions.

But, as I have pointed out on countless occasions, the familiar conservative call for limited government generally only considers those circumstances when the government has issued regulations for the protection of workers or the environment. Conservatives, by and large, have been fine with the intrusion of the government into matters involving individuals.

One interesting unintended consequence of Mr. Sessions' desire to turn otherwise law-abiding citizens into criminals may be a larger push to not just decriminalize pot, but to legalize it instead. Already 29 states, comprising about 60% of the US population, have legalized marijuana in some form or another. Eight states have legalized the personal possession of grass.

There will be a backlash to Mr. Sessions' attempts to re-impose prohibition on the 420. There are plenty of Republican lawmakers at the state and national level who have come out in opposition to this new direction. Jeff Sessions is fighting a rear-guard action he can't win. He can only hope not to step in it too deeply.

See also: "Jeff Sessions helps the cause of legalizing pot," Chicago Tribune (1/10/18)

Taking away freedom on the cheap

One of our worst nightmares is being wrongly arrested by the police and getting lost in the criminal (in)justice system. Thanks to a cheap drug test kit, many folks around the country have had the pleasure of being arrested, having their cars impounded, losing their jobs and their apartments for no reason at all.

Factor in the pressure some folks have to plead guilty by appointed attorneys in order to get out of jail quicker and you have a situation that should shock the conscience of our nation. Yet it's something we are more than happy to sweep under the rug.

Last week the New York Times Magazine ran an article about the real life aftermath of the cheap roadside test kit focusing on the ordeal faced by one Amy Albritton from Louisiana. Her nightmare occurred right here in my hometown, Houston.

She and a friend were stopped by officers when they were in town for her friend's job interview. One officer claimed to have found a syringe needle in the visor and a (coerced) search of the car then turned up a powder-like substance (that Ms. Albritton said was BC headache powder) and a grain of something on the floorboard.

The officer who broke open the test kit claimed it showed the grain of something was, in fact, a piece of crack cocaine. Ms. Albritton was arrested (her friend disclaimed any knowledge of the substance and, since it was her car, she took the ride downtown) and charged with possession of a controlled substance - a state jail felony punishable by up to two years in prison.

There are no established error rates for the field tests, in part because their accuracy varies so widely depending on who is using them and how. In Las Vegas, authorities re-examined a sampling of cocaine field tests conducted between 2010 and 2013 and found that 33 percent of them were false positives. Data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab system show that 21 percent of evidence that the police listed as methamphetamine after identifying it was not methamphetamine, and half of those false positives were not any kind of illegal drug at all. In one notable Florida episode, Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies produced 15 false positives for methamphetamine in the first seven months of 2014. When we examined the department’s records, they showed that officers, faced with somewhat ambiguous directions on the pouches, had simply misunderstood which colors indicated a positive result.

The next morning Ms. Albritton met with a gentlemen who told her he was her court-appointed attorney. While she claimed innocence, he told her that the prosecutor would offer her 45 days (under a provision of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure that allows certain felonies to be punished as misdemeanors) and that she would be in jail for much longer if she actually chose to fight her case. She gave in and pled guilty before Judge Vanessa Velasquez.

A later test of the substances by the Houston Police Department Crime Lab (who apparently tested substances from closed cases on a regular basis but never notified anyone of the results - among other sins that have been documented previously) showed that the substance in question was not crack cocaine. The tests also showed that there was nothing in the needle and that the powdery substance was BC powder.

All of this was a day late and a dollar short for Ms. Albritton who lost her job and was now hamstrung with a felony conviction due to her wrongful arrest.

Now, if we know that these kits are inherently unreliable and that their accuracy is affected by light and temperature and other environmental factors, why do we allow these tests to be the basis of criminal charges that have serious ramifications for the people involved? Why aren't we waiting for the results of actual lab tests before we file charges against someone? Why are we holding folks in jail for non-violent drug offenses simply because they can't afford to post a bond? And why the fuck are attorneys pressuring their "clients" to plead guilty without the benefit of a lab report?

Field tests provide quick answers. But if those answers and confessions cannot be trusted, Charles McClelland, the former Houston police chief, says, officers should not be using them. During an interview in March, McClelland said that if he had known of the false positives Houston’s officers were generating, he would have ordered a halt to all field testing departmentwide. Police officers are not chemists, McClelland said. “Officers shouldn’t collect and test their own evidence, period. I don’t care whether that’s cocaine, blood, hair.”

Another question, posed by former Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland, is why do we allow the folks who want to arrest someone to run the test that determines if someone gets arrested? Shouldn't that testing be done by someone who is (nominally) not a part of the police department?

Yet another question is why we continue to charge people who possess trace amounts of drugs with felony offenses?

This is reality for a sizable portion of the population yet you will never hear a politician talking about how innocent people get caught up in our criminal (in)justice system. You will never hear then talk about the gross inequities in how different people are treated. Instead you will hear nothing but the common platitudes of those who claim to be tough on crime in order to please white suburbanites whose idea of a colorblind society is an all-white neighborhood.

Sleeping with the enemy

The war on drugs. You remember the war on drugs, don't you?

Drugs are bad. They must be eradicated. We must imprison every person with dark skin who uses, buys, delivers or sells drugs. Cocaine is the drug of the affluent, therefore we must increase sentences for those we catch with crack.

Of course, in the meantime we're going to remove most regulations regarding prescription medications so the Big Pharma can market its wares directly to the public. Hey, got a problem? Here's a pill.

Down in Mexico the failed strategies of Felipe Calderon resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of drug cartel members, users, hangers-on and the unfortunate folks who got in the way. Sorry, it's a high price to pay, but here's a check for some cool new weapons.

Now comes word that the United States government - the very people who launched this failed campaign - had members of the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico on the payroll. Los federales, it turns out, was helping the Sinola cartel eliminate its competition.

Meanwhile, as high ranking members of the cartel get away with murder, our local jails and prisons are filled to the gills with drug addicts and low-level drug dealers. Oh, but we're supposed to welcome the creation of drug courts that function on the principle that defense attorneys who work for their clients serve only to gum up the works. If we can only co-opt them to be part of "the team" we can keep these folks under the thumb of the government.

But I digress.

The use of informants by law enforcement agencies isn't anything new. The practice is insidious. It also gives defense attorneys a target to take pot shots at in front of a jury.

In choosing to use an informant who is allowed (or encouraged) to break the law, the government is making a decision that certain crimes are more important than others and that certain lawbreakers are more worthy than others. When the police allow informants to break the law the police are abandoning their core mission.

The practice also calls into question the image of the prosecutor as a defender of society. It's a bit hard to hold yourself out as a paragon of virtue when you're turning your back as your witness is out there committing criminal acts. And if you're doing that for the sake of winning a conviction, what won't you do to obtain that same conviction?

The criminal (in)justice system isn't just a game. Those are real people sitting in the courtroom looking at the jury and wondering what fate awaits them.

And those were real people who were murdered in Mexico by the drug cartels. Those were real people that lost their lives because our government decided to cut a deal with the most vicious of the cartels in exchange for information on the others.

That's our government that has spent billions of dollars on a failed war on drugs over the past 30 years while it was partnering up with the leadership of a drug cartel in the 2000's.

If the allegations are true then the entire narrative of the Mexican drug war changes. Instead of the violence being escalated in response to actions taken by the Mexican government, the violence was escalated because one cartel had an ace up its sleeve.

There are those, the Washington Post included, who don't buy the allegations. It would be too unseemly for our government to be in bed with the vicious Sinaloa cartel. Really? What about our funding and encouragement of right-wing death squads in Honduras and El Salvador? What of our support for the Indonesian government after the massacres in East Timor? What about our continued support to the apartheid regime in South Africa?

I don't know how much I buy the allegations. On the one hand it seems so far out there that it's hard to imagine top officials in the FBI and DEA agreeing to do it. On the other hand our government has committed, and allowed others to commit, heinous acts over the years.

A broken record

On the way to the municipal courthouse during the lunch hour yesterday I happened upon a discussion on the local public affairs show Houston Matters on KUHF. The topic was the state of Texas prisons. One of the guests was Ray Hill who hosts Execution Watch on KPFT and who used to host The Prison Show.

I've provided a link to the program but, unfortunately, the broadcast isn't broken down into sections.

The show contained a bit of a history lesson about the Texas prison system. Up until the last 30 years, Texas prisons used a building tender system to maintain discipline in the units. Prison officials would actually pick inmates to run the buildings on a daily basis. Predictably this led to greater violence and harsher conditions. That system was tossed out as a result of the Ruiz v. Estelle lawsuit that put Texas prisons under federal control for years.

What I found most interesting was the fact that the prison population has grown by nearly 900% over the past 30 years while the population of Texas has only doubled. What's wrong with this picture?

I think we can all agree that there are some folks behind bars that really need to be there. But that number is a whole lot less than you might think. The population explosion in our prisons went hand-in-hand with the failed war on drugs. Drug addicts don't need to be in prison. Prison therapy is not an effective method of helping folks cope with their addictive behavior.

Instead of spending roughly $18,000 a year to house an addict in prison, why don't we spend the money on community-based drug treatment programs? I've mentioned this before, but we need to change our model for handling drug addiction. We need to treat it as the public health problem that it is, not as a criminal problem.

We promote drug courts like they are some new panacea that will turn defendants clean with a little bit of tough love. The problem is that, no matter how much we candy it up, a drug court is still a criminal court; and criminal courts deal in acquittals and convictions. Criminal courts only function properly when there are adversarial parties arguing both sides of a case. Whenever we start to put prosecutors and defense lawyers on "teams" we are undermining the adversarial system and weakening the protections the Founding Fathers set out for criminal defendants.

Our jails and prisons are filled to the breaking point with folks whose only transgressions are an inability to get through the day without the use of illegal stimulants or depressants. Those folks don't need their liberty taken away. They need to be able to carry out their day-to-day lives with the addition of therapy provided by counselors who aren't interested in violating their probation and sending them to jail or prison.

Those folks don't need to be exposed to the culture of violence and depravity we find in our prisons. They shouldn't have to live with the fear of being sexually assaulted on a daily basis.

The system is clearly broken and is in dire need of fixing.

The unintended consequences of a campaign pledge

Back when the late Mike Anderson was running for DA against incumbent Pat Lykos he attacked her over and over again for her decision not to try so-called trace cases. Under the Lykos administration, if someone were arrested for possessing less than .01 grams of cocaine, the case was either dismissed or the defendant was offered a plea to a paraphernalia case.

There were a multitude of reasons for the policy. First, if there was less than .01 grams of residue, there wasn't enough for both the state and the defense to test the sample. Second, during her 2008 campaign, Ms. Lykos said the criminal (in)justice system couldn't cure every problem and that some folks were better off seeking treatment for their addictions. Third, the Harris County Jail was full to the gills and the county was having to lease jail space in other counties in Texas as well as in Louisiana. 

The situation was untenable. Not that Chuck Rosenthal and his team of true believers gave a second thought to the consequences of their actions.

Well Ms. Lykos wasn't part of the good ol' boy network so she had to go. Mike Anderson took up the banner of Holmes worship and pledged to undo everything that Ms. Lykos had done in office. One of his promises was to start prosecuting trace cases as felonies once again. The police and true believers thought the rapture had come and Mr. Anderson was swept into office.

Once there Mr. Anderson began the process of changing office policy. No longer would the Harris County District Attorney's Office go soft on those wrongdoers who had less than .01 grams of drug residue on their person. Nope. If you give them a break, the next thing you know someone else is going to want some leniency on some other crime. Damn that slippery slope!

Under Mike Anderson's watch, trace cases were prosecuted as felonies but defendants were offered so-called 12.44a sentences. That designation refers to a provision in the penal code that allows the court to assess misdemeanor punishment on state jail felony convictions.

And so, predictably, the inmate population in the Harris County Jail began to creep higher toward full capacity. Someone was going to have to to do something quick. The voters had already nixed the idea of issuing bonds to build a fourth jail downtown. County commissioners weren't keen on the idea of spending money to house inmates in other counties.

Interim District Attorney Devon Anderson, the widow of Mike Anderson, acknowledges there is a problem -- something that Mr. Anderson never did. Of course she told the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council that she wasn't worried about filing felony charges against folks possessing less than .01 grams of cocaine. She, on the other hand, was worried about the number of defendants who were punished under Section 12.44a of the Penal Code. She said she was concerned about the number of first time offenders who were now walking around with felony drug convictions.

She said she preferred treatment to incarceration. But she never said she was opposed to prosecuting the cases as felonies. And there's the disconnect.

If you charge folks with a felony and they can't post bond, the attorneys appointed to plead them out are going to try either to get the charges reduced to misdemeanors or, at worst, to get the prosecutor to offer county time for a felony conviction under 12.44a. Folks who are out on bond for a trace case are unlikely to go to prison or jail in exchange for a plea (though there are exceptions). They'll take their felony deferred or probation and walk on out of the courthouse.

Such pleas are rarely offered to someone sitting in the holdover - unless they are willing to put up a fight on their case. Besides, the folks who can't post bond tend to have backgrounds and live in circumstances that make them bad risks for probation.

Ms. Anderson points to her background as a drug court judge (before getting booted out of office in 2008) - but y'all already know my opinion of drug courts. The criminal (in)justice system does a very poor job of reducing addiction. Those who suffer from addiction are going to fall off the tracks from time-to-time on their way to recovery. When they do suffer a relapse, treatment and counseling - not prosecution - is the answer. 

Our courts operate in an adversarial environment. The theory is that the truth (or something vaguely resembling it) will emerge though two parties telling competing stories. When one side rolls over and plays dead - or, in the parlance of the specialty courts, works as part of a team - the adversarial system doesn't work as planned and the defendant is always the one getting jobbed.

The answer to reducing the county's jail population isn't to prosecute trace cases, the answer is to make treatment available for those who want it - regardless of their ability to pay. Drug addiction is a public health issue - not a criminal issue - and until we begin to treat it as such, we will never make any headway in reducing the problem.

Time for a little road trip

Two DA's are sitting at the bar. The first one tells the second that there's lots of money to be made from drug forfeitures. The second one tells the first there ain't nothing like a little secret slush fund. The first DA then comes up with what he thinks is a brilliant idea. He finishes off his 3.2% beer and orders another round. Then he leans over and drops his voice.

"I've got it. I know a way to make a fucking killing on this. I'll set up a dragnet on I-40. Then I'll hire some private company to come in, train the officers and give them a cut of the take. We'll make so much fucking money we can roll cigarettes with it!"

After hearing the idea, the second DA decided he had had enough to drink so he put down his glass, dropped a few bucks on the bar, told his buddy goodnight and got the hell out of the bar.

"What a plan! I'm a genius! What on earth could possibly go wrong?" the first DA shouted as his friend beat a path to the parking lot.

Now I'm certain that my version of the genesis of Caddo (OK) District Attorney Jason Hicks' plan is a complete fabrication. I just wish the scheme itself was.

Mr. Hicks found out just what could go wrong when his money-making machine fell off the rails because an employee of Desert Snow LLC thought it would be a good idea to pull over a pregnant woman and question her even though he wasn't a certified law enforcement officer. The controversy caused the DA to put an end to his scheme.

Mr. Hicks' deal with Desert Snow called for the company to get a 25% cut of any funds confiscated on days the company was out in the field training and 10% on any other day. Up until Mr. Hicks suspended the program, over $1 million was seized during traffic stops. Not all of the money was seized from folks arrested for carrying drugs, however. It appears that the police and their paramilitary partners had a bad habit of confiscating money from folks even when nothing illegal was found in the car. All it took for the profit motive to take hold was a drug dog doing some kind of dance around a car.

The entire scheme raises questions about what drives law enforcement decisions in Caddo County. How many of those traffic stops were legitimate? How many of them involved following a car until a driver inevitably broke some traffic law? How many of those stops were motivated by the desire to make some money?

And what does the scheme say about whether Mr. Hicks is fit to serve as the chief law enforcement officer of Caddo County? Just what does it say about his judgment and his motivation?

There is no question that folks are driving around on our nation's roadways transporting drugs. It's an inevitable result of our "got a problem, take a pill" culture. But if we are going to subject people to the long and intrusive arm of the law, that decision should be based on probable cause and not on maximizing profits.

Jason Hicks betrayed the people of Caddo County. He betrayed the good people of Oklahoma. More importantly, he betrayed his office and the oath he took to uphold the law.

Tased and confused

Oh, the ubiquitous taser. A nonlethal alternative to the trusty sidearm.

Except that isn't the way it turned out. As Scott Greenfield reminds us, the first rule of policing is to make it home for dinner alive. That rule trumps all others for those who wear a badge.

The vast majority of officers never fire their weapons except at the gun range. And that's the way it should be. Deadly force should be the ultimate last resort - because if you're wrong, there's no going back.

And what that means is instead of slowly escalating the use of force, in order to make sure they make it home for dinner, officers start with the taser instead of using it as the last best alternative to deadly force.

Up in Fort Worth, Texas, police executed a "no-knock" warrant on a house suspected to contain the bones of a cocaine distribution operation. The warrant was signed at 3:35 pm on Thursday. When they arrived, the police kicked in the unlocked front door and shortly thereafter had Jermaine Darden face-down on the floor.

Mr. Darden weighed over 300 pounds and was asthmatic. While laying on his stomach, Mr. Darden began to have a hard time breathing. He tried to roll over to his side to make it easier to breathe.

The police, accustomed to folks asking how high when commanded to jump, never thought that a heavy man with a breathing problem might be in a dangerous position on his stomach. Instead of viewing Mr. Darden's actions as an attempt to breathe, they determined he was resisting arrest. Instead of listening to the other people in the house who knew Mr. Darden's problems, they made the decision to show Mr. Darden that he wasn't to do anything without their permission.

So, despite the fact that the officers outnumbered the people in the house, and despite the fact that the officers had the ability to use deadly force, they tased Mr. Darden.

And, at 5:06 pm that afternoon, Mr. Darden was prounouced dead in the emergency room at John Peter Smith Hospital.

Now it was time to concoct a story to explain how something could go so wrong. Mr. Darden had to be tased. He was resisting arrest. The officers' safety was endangered. They only had one choice - either they could tase Mr. Darden or they could shoot him at point blank range. Knowing that not even the most naive person would believe that was warranted, they pulled out the taser.

Let's face it. Mr. Darden was a bad guy. He was in a house that served as the distribution center for a coke operation. Who you gonna believe in that scenario? The police who were shutting down a drug operation or a dope dealer?

And that's exactly what they expect you to do.

Like we don't have enough laws on the books

The other day my eye was caught by a Grits for Breakfast post about the number of bills proposed this legislative session that would either create new criminal offenses or enhance penalties for existing crimes.

At some point we need to have a little bit of sanity in Austin. We don't need a bevy of new criminal offenses. What we need is some serious analysis of what's now on the books. We need to ask our legislators whether our existing penal code makes sense - and whether we can afford to keep doing what we're doing.

At the rate we're going there is going to come a day when everyone on this state is either a convicted criminal or on paper. Hell, we might need to start charging fetuses with something or another so that they will be under the government's thumb from the get-go.

Of course it's better politics to say "there ought to be a law..." whenever something bad happens to someone else - unless that law would, in some way, restrict the ability of a god-fearing Texan to load up on as many guns and rifles as he can fit in his survival bunker and as much ammo as he can fit in his tote from the Container Store. No one gets elected because they got rid of an unnecessary provision of the penal code - hell, it's in there for a reason, ain't it?

We need to take a serious look at our drug laws. What we're doing isn't working - and I don't think anyone would disagree. The first thing I would do is reduce - by one degree - the punishment for all drug possession offenses. It makes no sense to charge a person with a state jail felony for possessing less than a sugar packet-full of cocaine. It makes little sense to arrest a kid for possessing less than two ounces of marijuana.

Possession of less than two ounces of marijuana should be a Class C misdemeanor fine-only offense. In many counties if you're charged with possession of marijuana you can negotiate a plea to a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia, a fine-only offense, instead. Why bother with the charade any longer?

At some point I would hope we realize that the criminal (in)justice system is not designed to handle public health issues like addiction. And I don't care how many "drug courts" you come up with - addicts need treatment and, if that treatment is going to be successful, it needs to be voluntary. We don't need the courts waiting to pounce on the recovering addict who falls off the wagon now and then. He or she needs encouragement - not a seat on a hard wooden pew or a bed in the jail.

Instead of increasing the number of crimes and jacking up sentences, we need to spend money on drug treatment and rehabilitation programs so that the addicts caught up in our criminal (in)justice system - mostly lower income blacks and Latinos - don't end up in a revolving door to the jail.

But then, actually addressing a problem isn't nearly as sexy for a legislator as standing in front of a microphone and telling the voters that "there ought to be a law..."

Prying eyes in the desert

Had up to here with airport security, TSA, drones and government data-mining of phone calls and e-mail? Well, the latest device in the government's ongoing war against your right to be left alone are license plate recognition devices in the Arizona desert.

That's right. Clusters of cameras have been placed in the Arizona desert - in some cases quite far from the Mexican border. These clusters include both regular surveillance cameras as well as devices that read license plate numbers and send the data to a site in Virginia for storage. The device also records the date, time and location of the car tracked.

Of course the government claims this is the latest tool needed to fight the scourge of drugs. The information retrieved by the devices can then be shared with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies for whatever purpose they deem necessary.

The DEA has installed the devices in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Next up are plans for installing them further inland.

Writes, G.W. Schultz of the Center for Investigative Reporting:

In their unending battle to deter illegal immigration, drug trafficking and terrorism, U.S. authorities already have beefed up border security with drug-sniffing dogs, aircraft and thousands more agents manning interior checkpoints. 

Now, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has decided it wants more, and the Justice Department agency doesn't care whether someone has even set foot in Mexico.

Need I go any further?

Bet you didn't know that just by driving down the highway in Arizona, minding your own business, you were under suspicion for illegal activity. The notion is absurd. I'm also surprised that Homeland Security didn't get involved in this and claim that the devices would cut down on terrorist activity in the Southwest.

Oh, no terrorist activity in the Arizona desert? Well, that's just a little detail we don't need to worry about at this time.

This country was founded on the principle that the people have a right to be left alone by the government. The Bill of Rights enshrines that doctrine. But with a judiciary that would rather kowtow to law enforcement than exercise sound judgment, our right to be left alone has withered away to the point of extinction.

The Fourth Amendment is on life support as the result of a thousand paper cuts over the years. Judges are more worried about outcome than they are principle. You know the drill - if the court were to uphold the words of the Fourth Amendment, the bad guys would get away; therefore we must make an exception to the rule in this case... and in that case... and in this other case. You do it enough, there is no doctrine left.

We have the right to be left alone. The police don't have the right to interfere with your daily routine unless they have reasonable suspicion (itself an example of the courts taking liberties with the Fourth Amendment) that you have engaged in some type of criminal activity. These devices in the desert are only the latest method the government has dreamed up to circumvent that basic notion.

On second thought

Rudy Eugene was going to be the poster boy for the assault on bath salts. He was found in an incoherent state in Miami eating another man's face.

Bad stuff those bath salts. Ingesting the synthetic chemicals can cause paranoia, hallucinations and severe agitation. The use of bath salts has apparently reached an epidemic level in the Houston area. Just the other day police raided five smoke shops and arrested ten people for possession of bath salts.

A man from Manvel (between Houston and Galveston) died in police custody after ingesting bath salts. Well, maybe being pepper-sprayed in the face had something to do with that, too. And maybe he took bath salts - and maybe he didn't. The police were just relying on the word of his niece.

From an NPR piece on the Eugene case:

Armando Aguilar, president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police says the similarity between the face-eating attack and some other recent incidents in Miami are striking, ABC News reports: 

 "The cases are similar minus a man eating another. People taking off their clothes. People suddenly have super human strength," Aguilar said, according to ABC. "They become violent and they are burning up from the inside. Their organs are reaching a level that most would die. By the time police approach them they are a walking dead person."

There is anecdotal evidence across the country of zombie-like people going on violent rampages after snorting bath salts.What there isn't, is scientific fact. What levels of the synthetic drugs found in bath salts cause a person to hallucinate? Which synthetic drug causes people to act like zombies? Are there other substances that could cause the same reaction? Did the supposed users have mental health issues in the first place?

Maybe there are blood tests from other parts of the country that confirm a person who acted violently had the synthetic drugs found in bath salts in his body. But those reports just give us a number. A number with no context.

And that brings us back to Mr. Eugene. His girlfriend didn't believe he was using bath salts. She thought someone had either drugged him or placed a curse on him. Hey, a little irrationality every now and then never hurt anyone, right?

"The man being depicted by the media as a 'face eater' or a 'monster' is not the man she knew, she said. He smoked marijuana often, though had recently said he wanted to quit, but he didn't use stronger recreational drugs and even refused to take over-the-counter medication for simple ailments like headaches, she said. He was sweet and well-mannered, she said. 

"Eugene's girlfriend has her own theory on what happened that day. She believes Eugene was drugged unknowingly. The only other explanation, she said, was supernatural — that someone put a Vodou curse on him. The girlfriend, who unlike Eugene is not Haitian, said she has never believed in Vodou, until now. 

" 'I don't know how else to explain this,' she said."

Oh, and did I forget to mention, extensive lab tests showed that there was nothing more than marijuana in Mr. Eugene's system at the time he was shot and killed by police.

Just gotta hate when that happens.