So you’d think that the last person to do something stupid that could be caught on a dashcam would be the officer in whose car that same dashcam was mounted and operating. You’d be so, so wrong:

The video, obtained by Lance Goode and his attorney/public defender as part of discovery purports to show an officer dropping what looks like a bag filled with a white substance and then kicking it out of sight while Goode is inside his home entertaining other officers. Goode is then charged with possession of oxy:

Goode said he was not able to find a valid insurance card so he went looking for it in the residence while [Officer Timothy] Henderson followed. [K-9 Officer Roger] Newton, in the video, circles the car, waving a flashlight inside Goode’s car before returning to his cruiser.

Goode said the officers told him they would tow the vehicle and Goode gave an officer his key. The officers allowed Goode to take his possessions out of the car before they towed it, Goode said.

In the video, Goode opens the trunk and removes several items that he takes into a house, with Henderson following.

Newton, Goode said, can be seen in the video dropping a plastic bag filled with white pills. Newton looks around, Goode said, before kicking the bag behind two trash cans.

A minute or so later, a third cruiser pulls up, at which point Goode is arrested and put into the back of a cruiser.

It took a year, but Goode’s case was nolled and Newton has been placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

the land of steady racism

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about the town of East Haven, CT hurtling towards “sundown town” status, caused largely by alleged institutional racism and bias towards minorities – lately specifically Latinos. In that post, I mentioned that there was a federal civil rights lawsuit pending and that the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice had opened an investigation into these alleged discriminatory practices of the East Haven Police Department. This past week, the DOJ issued its report in the form of a letter [PDF] sent to the East Haven mayor and boy is it damning (media coverage here).

Some of its key findings:

• The East Haven Police Department (EHPD) conducted disproportionate traffic stops of Latinos. Latinos accounted for 24.8% of the stops in the 4pm-12am shift, which is typically the busiest. The numbers for the other shifts were 17.8% and 14.7%.
• However, comparing the percentage of Latinos stopped to the percentage of Latinos in the population reveals a starker difference. Latinos accounted for 19.9% of all traffic stops, but make up only 8.3% of East Haven drivers (and 15.5% of East Haven and surrounding towns).

In making these stops, the DOJ found that the EHPD targets Latino drivers and employs tactics not used against non-Latinos:

• Officers heavily patrol known Latino areas, lying in wait for people leaving predominantly Latino-oriented businesses.
• Other methods use include following cars until a traffic violation occurs, out-of-state license plates known to be “forged”, citing speeding but writing little to no information about the speeding on the ticket itself.
• Latinos face harsher treatment after being stopped: they are more likely to be arrested and have their cars towed for traffic violations than non-Latinos.

The DOJ further charges that the EHPD haphazardly employes immigration policies against Latino drivers and points out that the EHPD and East Haven have had a long standing problem with policing of minorities, citing a recently concluded federal lawsuit which alleged discrimination against African Americans (Jones v. Town of East Haven, et. al.).

The most shocking thing about all of this (or the least surprising, depending on how naive you are) is that the DOJ got all the above information from the EHPD itself: from 2 years’ worth of police reports and interviews with officers and community members.

The institutional coddling of these discriminatory practices is mind-blowing. From the news report:

East Haven may be unique, if only because of a tangle of politics and the close friendship between East Haven’s Republican mayor, Joseph Maturo Jr. and his chief of police, Leonard Gallo.

Maturo was originally mayor from 1997 to 2007 and he hired Gallo as chief in 1998. But Gallo was put on administrative leave by Maturo’s Democratic successor as mayor, April Capone, in 2010, a result of the allegations of racial profiling and excessive use of force by East Haven Police.

After Maturo won in the November elections, he almost immediately returned Gallo to full duty as chief — an astounding move given the ongoing civil rights and grand jury investigations into police actions during Gallo’s tenure.

And more:

The 23-page report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division cited top police officers for “creating and condoning a hostile and intimidating environment for anyone seeking to provide relevant information in this investigation.”

“We also learned that Chief Gallo had warned staff that the Department of Justice had agreed to provide him with the names of individuals who cooperated with the investigation,” according to the civil rights report. And that, federal officials insisted, was completely and utterly untrue.

How bizarre is this institutional protection? EHPD officers told DOJ officials (that’s the fucking Federal Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, in case we were unclear) that the DOJ officials’ safety could not be guaranteed by the EHPD when they went on ride-alongs. Ponder that for a second.

The DOJ found an abject lack of any internal policing mechanisms and that the EHPD hadn’t ever bothered to compile the statistics to see if racial profiling existed with its department, something that’s required by C.G.S. 54-1m. In addition, the DOJ noted that a large number of entries into the EHPD’s database seemed to be missing ethnicity data or the data seemed to be misreported.

EHPD is at a crossroads: either admit that there are problems and work toward fixing them or deny it all and face lengthy and costly lawsuits brought not only by civilians, but also the Department of Justice. As a new year dawns, one can only hope that concern for the safety of officers and the constitutional rights of its residents rises above deep-seated racism and pride.

wait, does that count as Arson?

Look, I dislike guns. I dislike them a lot. I don’t believe that people kill people, rather that guns – the objects from which projectiles are discharged at a high rate of velocity, thereby permitting them to enter the bodies of individuals, causing fatal damage to bodily organs – kill people. I’d rather there weren’t any, or at the very least, we had stringent gun control laws.

But do you know what I dislike more? Stupid laws and even stupider interpretation of laws that criminalize perfectly legal conduct. Somehow, despite my strict personal opposition to guns, it is still legal to carry a licensed firearm in Connecticut. In public. Openly.

Yet, for some reason, the state’s “top criminal justice official” – a made up title if I ever heard one – wouldn’t recommend it. Why, you might logically ask, is it not a good idea? For the same reason that photographers across the country are being arrested for videotaping police encounters with civilians: because no one knows the law (see also this post by Balko on an issue similar to the one in the instant post).

I’m not making this shit up.

Mike Lawlor, already featured in one post today for his sage legal prognostications, offers up another:

“In almost every situation you can imagine this happening in, it qualifies as breach of peace,” he said. “If you walk into a restaurant with a gun it’s almost by definition a breach of peace.”

That results in an arrest and sets in motion a chain of events that usually results in the revocation of an issued pistol permit, he said. And that’s the way it should be, Lawlor said. Anyone who walks into a McDonalds plainly carrying a firearm either intends to alarm people or is irresponsible, he said.

“Almost by definition”? Oh, really? Challenge Accepted! Here‘s the relevant Breach of Peace statute:

(a) A person is guilty of breach of the peace in the second degree when, with intent to cause inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, such person: (1) Engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior in a public place; or (2) assaults or strikes another; or (3) threatens to commit any crime against another person or such other person’s property; or (4) publicly exhibits, distributes, posts up or advertises any offensive, indecent or abusive matter concerning any person; or (5) in a public place, uses abusive or obscene language or makes an obscene gesture; or (6) creates a public and hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which such person is not licensed or privileged to do. For purposes of this section, “public place” means any area that is used or held out for use by the public whether owned or operated by public or private interests.

Openly carrying a licensed weapon into a public place doesn’t fit subsections (1), (2), (3), (4), (5) or (6). You know what that means? It’s not, by definition, a breach of peace. But maybe he was tired from all that prognostication and encountered a “slip of the tongue”. Maybe what he meant was “Creating a Public Disturbance”. Contrived Challenge Accepted! Here‘s the statute:

(a) A person is guilty of creating a public disturbance when, with intent to cause inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, he (1) engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior; or (2) annoys or interferes with another person by offensive conduct; or (3) makes unreasonable noise.

I’m no legal scholar, but I see three strikes there. Yerrrrout! (I don’t…just…don’t ask.)

What Lawlor is essentially saying is that one shouldn’t legally carry a legal, licensed firearm in public, which one legally can do, because cops are stupid and don’t know that law and you’ll get falsely arrested for perfectly legal activity. So he’s doing you a public service, really. It’s like telling people not to walk around with large, brown plastic glasses and a 70s pornstar mustache because people may mistake you for a child molester and then you’ll get arrested and whatnot.

But, you might protest, it’s only Lawlor, a former legislator and now a bureaucrat. That’s not evidence of anyth-:

When asked in a phone interview last week if people are allowed to openly carry firearms with a permit, state police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance said, “Good question.”

“Does it frighten people? Yes,” he said. “There is no standard quick answer to this question.”

-Oh. Notice how he quickly answers the question “yes” and then says there’s no standard quick answer. This is dangerous because it’s indicative of a “winging it” style of policing. “Arrest first; find crime later” seems to be the motto. And we all know what happens once you get trapped in the quagmire that is the criminal justice system.

The simple solution, of course, is to make it illegal to openly carry a weapon in public:

Lawlor, a former lawmaker, said that personally he was no fan of guns but said he wasn’t inclined to have a discussion in the legislature over changing the law. It would be a difficult sell for gun rights activists, who he conceded raise some valid points. If taking out a gun is illegal under any circumstances, why would people carry them, he asked.

He said he prefers the way the law is written now, where it is on the gun owner to behave responsibly.

“You want to have a gun? Fine, but you have to accept the responsibility that goes with it.”

Funny that he exhorts gun owners to behave responsibly, but doesn’t care about the illegality of the arrests that ensue from that responsible, legal, behavior.

The Constitution requires that criminal defendants be provided with a fair trial, not merely a “good faith” try at a fair trial. Respondent here, by what may have been nothing more than police ineptitude, was denied the opportunity to present a full defense. That ineptitude, however, deprived respondent of his guaranteed right to due process of law.

Those, of course, are the (somewhat) famous opening lines to Justice Blackmun‘s dissent in Arizona v. Youngblood, which held that in order to affect due process of law, law enforcement’s actions in destroying potentially exculpatory evidence must be caused by some “bad faith”. The Court, of course, never explains “bad faith”, which results in a race to the bottom to designate all police misconduct as “incompetence” and “inadvertence”, thereby circumventing the Fourteenth Amendment.

Consider, for your entertainment, the very recent case of Martin v. The State of (Where Else?) Texas. In Martin, the defendant was pulled over by Deputy Fife Jennings for failing to signal a left turn. Upon approaching the vehicle, the Deputy smelled “marihuana” and then observed a furtive gesture which led to a patdown, which led to the Deputy feel something like a razor blade (wait for it) which led to the discovery of marihuana methamphetamine (don’t even ask). Martin, within two weeks of his arrest, sent a subpoena to the police department, asking them preserve the video of the dashboard camera. A year later, at the suppression hearing, there obviously was no video, or I wouldn’t be writing this post. Here’s a summary of the police procedure and operation of the dashcam:

The dashcam is automatically activated when an officer turns on his emergency lights. Department policy states that all video must automatically be saved for thirty days. Jennings could not say whether his machine was operating that night, but he would have noted either at the beginning or end of the shift if the device had not been functional. Jennings stated that the only way to know for sure if the video had been taken would have been if he had preserved the video.

And why did no one know if there was video and why did Jennings not preserve it to find out if the incident had been videotaped? I’ll let him tell you:

Q: And why was it not preserved?
A: Since I didn’t put it in my report it wasn’t preserved because I didn’t believe it had any type of evidential value.
…
Q: But, apparently, your opinion is . . . that if you feel that it doesn’t have evidentiary value, you don’t have to turn it in or you don’t have to preserve it, or whatever, correct?
A: Yes, sir, that was my understanding at the time.
Q: So it’s very possible that . . . you just decided in your mind that it didn’t have any evidential value, that . . . you didn’t preserve the video?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And the only way to know if there was a video that properly recorded the events of that evening would be if you had preserved that video, correct?
A: Yes, sir.

Is your head spinning? It should be. He didn’t know what was on the video, yet determined that there was no evidentiary value, so he destroyed the tape and thus the only method of determining if it did, indeed, have evidentiary value. All in violation of department policy.

As for that subpoena? Well, Jennings says he never received it, even though it was served at his department and by golly we damn well take his word for it:

The district court could have reasonably inferred from this testimony that there is a department policy giving officers discretion to determine whether the tapes have evidentiary value and that Jennings did not violate that procedure by determining that the videotape in this case did not.

Finally, Martin argues that bad faith can be inferred from the failure of the department to comply with either the subpoenas that were issued or the letter that Martin wrote requesting preservation of the evidence. Regarding the letter, the district court would not have abused its discretion in crediting Jennings’s testimony that he had not seen it prior to the suppression hearing[...]

Well, I’m glad that we have so much faith in an incompetent, bungling, apparently clairvoyant police department. Because, really, it would be too much to ask of Deputy Fife to just possibly walk the videotape over to the evidence room. Poor guy has his hands full deciding whether something smells like pot or feels like a razor blade when it’s in fact meth. We shouldn’t tax him much more.

Now, of course, that was in Texas and not in Connecticut, which roundly rejected Youngblood‘s “bad faith” rule in State v. Morales. In Connecticut, you can get a jury instruction telling the jury to draw an adverse inference from the police’s failure to preserve potentially useful evidence:

Fairness dictates that when a person’s liberty is at stake, the sole fact of whether the police or another state official acted in good or bad faith in failing to preserve evidence cannot be determinative of whether the criminal defendant has received due process of law. Rather, our constitution imposes certain obligations on the state to ensure that the criminal trial is “a search for truth, not an adversary game.” United States v. Perry, 471 F.2d 1057, 1063 (D.C. Cir. 1972); State v. Wright, 87 Wash. 2d 783, 786, 557 P.2d 1 (1976).

That’s authored by Justice Berdon, with whom I want to have babies.

H/T: Radley “A link is worth a thousand pageviews” Balko.

Here’s an alternate image to the one above:

insert uncomfortable laugh track

If the Federal government were on Twitter or Facebook (or even that shiny new toy Google+), they’d be the confused old grandfather who’s elated that he’s won the Australian lottery even though his clearly smarter – and younger – wife quizzically asks him if he’s every been to Australia.

The Feds continued their misadventures in Terms of Service land with an indictment handed down today against Aaron Swartz, disputed co-founder of Reddit, the less well known bastard child of Digg.

His crime – described by his acts, not the silly US Code that they’re charging him with (PDF) – is essentially downloading staggering amounts of documents from JSTOR, the online repository of the ivory tower’s pontifications and musings on the life of the bourgeoisie. Seriously. Have you ever tried download anything from JSTOR? Apart from being so damn counter-intuitive, that shit is expensive. So expensive that some universities are charged $50,000 a year for access to the hallowed writings scanned and uploaded to JSTOR.

Swartz, someone whom the Feds have had their eye on for a while, basically used spoofed MAC addresses, guest accounts and the like to get behind their paywall and just download all their files. What was he going to do with it? Who the hell knows. But he did it because he hates paywalls and believes in freedom of information and free dissemination of that information. Or something. Watch out, NYT, you’re next.

Imagine, if you will, the olden days. No computers, nothing. Then imagine the most pompous guy in your town. He builds a house, goes around the country collecting all these interesting books and papers. Then he locks them in that building and charges each person one dubloon to look at one paper. That’s JSTOR, sort of. Along comes Swartz, who says, screw this, breaks in and starts photocopying (in this alternate timeline, photocopying is invented a century early) everything. The pompous guy realizes what happened, so he changes the locks. Swartz, undaunted in his singular mission of liberating information, pretends to be the termite inspector, goes back in and start copying everything again. Finally collared, he gives it back. All of it. He doesn’t keep a single piece of paper, doesn’t make a single dime off it.

That’s essentially what happened here:

The grand jury indictment accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading more than four million documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals. The scraping, which took place from September 2010 to January 2011 via MIT’s network, was invasive enough to bring down JSTOR’s servers on several occasions.

…

The indictment alleges that Swartz, at the time a fellow at Harvard University, intended to distribute the documents on peer-to-peer networks. That did not happen, however, and all the documents have been returned to JSTOR.

JSTOR, the alleged victim in the case, did not refer the case to the feds, according to Heidi McGregor, the company’s vice president of Marketing & Communications, who said the company got the documents, a mixture of both copyrighted and public domain works, back from Swartz and was content with that.

As for whether JSTOR supports the prosecution, McGregor simply said that the company was not commenting on the matter. She noted, however, that JSTOR has a program for academics who want to do big research on the corpus, but usually faculty members ask permission or contact the company after being booted off the network for too much downloading.

“This makes no sense,” said Demand Progress Executive Director David Segalin a statement provided by Swartz to Wired.com before the arrest. “It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”

Well, not quite checking too many books out of the library. Because it seems that JSTOR and MIT made it clear to Swartz that he wasn’t supposed to be doing what he was doing and could he please knock it off already? But the Feds think otherwise. Since all the other crimes in the US have stopped occurring, the Feds have decided to turn their sights on that most insidious of the new-age felonies: violating terms of service. You know what? I think I’m violating 3 TOS right now: the aforementioned social media networks. Hang on, there’s a knock on the door. Is it the Feds:

But the feds clearly think they have a substantial hacking case on their hands, even though Swartz used guest accounts to access the network and is not accused of finding a security hole to slip through or using stolen credentials, as hacking is typically defined.

In essence, Swartz is accused of felony hacking for violating MIT and JSTOR’s terms of service. That legal theory has had mixed success — a federal court judge dismissed that argument in the Lori Drew cyberbullying case, but it was later reused with more success in a case brought against ticket scalpers who used automated means to buy tickets faster from Ticketmaster’s computer system.

Ah, Lori Drew. Remember her? She was charged with some trumpeted nonsense because she set up a fake account on My[____] (yes, that’s what it’s called now) and some girl tragically killed herself because of the bullying she was subjected to from that account. While the event was tragic, a crime it was not.

And here we have essentially the same dilemma. Just how do the Feds have jurisdiction? Swartz was in the JSTOR building while he was “hacking”. It’s like me stealing from your house and being indicted for wire fraud because I took this nice vase that your Aunt Maude sent you from her old person’s home in Peoria.

That – at least to me, for now – seems to be the tenuous connection that gives the Federal government the authority to indict Swartz. But I’m not expert and I’m often wrong, so don’t quote me on it.

So what’s really going on here? It seems that they may just have a thing for Swartz:

Swartz is no stranger to the feds being interested in his skills at prodigious downloads. In 2008, the federal court system decided to try out allowing free public access to its court record search system PACER at 17 libraries across the country. Swartz went to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago and installed a small PERL script he had written. The code cycled sequentially through case numbers, requesting a new document from PACER every three seconds. In this manner, Swartz got nearly 20 million pages of court documents, which his script uploaded to Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service.

While the documents are in the public record and free to share, PACER normally charges eight cents a page.

The courts reported him to the FBI, which investigated whether the public records were “exfiltrated.” After in-depth background searches, a luckless stakeout and futile attempts to get Swartz to talk, the FBI dropped the case.

Ohhh. He’s that guy! This should be a fun ride. Strap in…or should I say…log on!

Okay, video time:

• In what is reminiscent of the plot of an O’Henry short story or an article on snopes.com, a man robs a bank, asking for only $1, so he can be arrested and spend a few years in jail. His logic?

That’s right. James Verone says he has no medical insurance. He has a growth of some sort on his chest, two ruptured disks and a problem with his left foot. He is 59 years old and with no job and a depleted bank account. He thought jail was the best place he could go for medical care and a roof over his head. Verone is hoping for a three-year sentence.

• Connecticut judges agreed to allow cameras in all Judicial District criminal courtrooms starting in January:

Beginning in January, cameras and recording devices will be allowed at criminal court hearings in the state’s 13 judicial districts. Whether a proceeding may be televised or recorded will be up to the discretion of the judge in the courtroom. Cameras will be prohibited from courtrooms in which the proceedings involve a sexual assault or a juvenile defendant.

Connecticut’s Commission on Child Protection – deep in the red – folds and its responsibilities will now be shouldered by the Public Defender’s Office:

The state agency that pays private lawyers to represent poor parents and children in child-protection cases has run up such a gaping deficit and owes the lawyers so much money that the agency has been abolished; its work will be folded into the public defenders’ office starting July 1.

Nearly 200 private lawyers are owed as much as $2.4 million by the Commission on Child Protection – which had overspent its budget by $3.8 million at one point late last year. That was the largest deficit, by percent of budget, of any agency of state government.

Most of the lawyers devote at least 80 percent of their practice to this work, which includes defending parents who face losing custody of their children in neglect cases brought by the Department of Children and Families. The lawyers, who also represent children in court, haven’t been paid since October or November in many cases.

• Yet another story – this time from CA – that reiterates the inordinate cost of the death penalty:

Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since it was reinstated in 1978, or about $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since then, according to a comprehensive analysis of the death penalty’s costs.

The study’s authors, U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur L. Alarcon and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell, also forecast that the tab for maintaining the death penalty will climb to $9 billion by 2030, when San Quentin’s death row will have swollen to well over 1,000.

Among their findings to be published next weekin the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review:

The state’s 714 death row prisoners cost $184 million more per year than those sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A death penalty prosecution costs up to 20 times as much as a life-without-parole case.

The least expensive death penalty trial costs $1.1 million more than the most expensive life-without-parole case.

Jury selection in a capital case runs three to four weeks longer and costs $200,000 more than in life-without-parole cases.

The state pays up to $300,000 for attorneys to represent each capital inmate on appeal.

• Police corruption has “forced” prosecutors in the Bay Area to dismiss over 800 criminal prosecutions in the last year:

Bay Area prosecutors have been forced to dismiss more than 800 criminal cases in the past year because of allegations of police corruption that include selling drug evidence, conducting unlawful searches and conspiring to get men drunk and then arrest them on drunk-driving charges.

In some cases, defense lawyers found that security-camera videos in residential hotels—showing police making drug arrests—apparently contradicted the officers’ sworn statements.

In one case, a suspect was seen in a video of his arrest wearing a different jacket from the one the officers entered into evidence.

Last year, the San Francisco district attorney dismissed about 700 criminal cases after a drug crime-lab worker was accused of stealing evidence. This year, since March, the district attorney has dismissed about 125 cases, mainly felony drug prosecutions.

• An interesting opinion from SCOTUS today, in Turner v. Rogers [pdf], holding that while the Constitution does not guarantee the provision of counsel in civil contempt cases where incarceration is a possibility, the Due Process clause mandates certain procedural safeguards before a person may be imprisoned after being held in contempt.

And you say I don’t post anymore.

You can thank me later.

A state trooper’s arrest warrant application that charges a Bantam Superior Court judge with coercion and hindering an investigation has been rejected, but the allegations it raises have been forwarded to the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office for review. … On Friday, state police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance declined to say why the application was denied or by whom. Vance said the document, stamped in bold with the words “arrest warrant application” at the top, is not considered an application for arrest unless and until it is signed by the investigating trooper and a supervisor.

BUT then we turn to the Register-Citizen, which has a different story. According to the R-C, no warrant was ever submitted by any police agency to any prosecuting authority:

“No arrest warrant was ever submitted from any police agency to any prosecutorial agency,” said State’s Attorney David Shepack. Mark Dupuis, a spokesman for the Division of Criminal Justice, which includes the State’s Attorney’s Office and Chief State’s Attorney’s Office, also indicated that there is no warrant or warrant application for the arrest of any superior court judge. “What’s been reported up there is inaccurate,” Dupuis said regarding the news coverage in Litchfield County. “No valid warrant application was submitted. There may have been other documents, but it is not an arrest warrant application and we can’t act on it,” Dupuis said.

Note that the two may not be inconsistent. It’s entirely possible that Lauretano filled out an application and submitted it to his supervisor, who sat him down and had a nice long talk. Lauretano may then have forwarded the application to the Chief State’s Attorney’s Office anyway. Notice that Dupuis uses the word valid and references “other documents”, and finally this quote:

“The document people are referring to had no signatures,” Dupuis said. “Nothing was ever submitted to us to act on.”

Curiously, it seems that Judge Klatt did end up signing an arrest warrant for the individual who was the subject of the original warrant:

Later on Tuesday, attorney Ira Scott Mayo of Torrington said Klatt had signed a warrant for the arrest of Dylan Hickey following its submission from the Western District Major Crime Squad. … Klatt wanted more information regarding the altercation or to see an arrest warrant filed for everyone involved in the fight, according to Mayo, Hickey’s attorney.

Curiouser and curiouser. Whether the CSAO are actually looking into possible misconduct by one or more parties remains to be seen, as does any action they may pursue. In the end, I’d be extremely surprised if the Judge were accused of any wrongdoing, but I’ve been wrong so many times that it’s embarrassing for me to even think about. The original issue raised by the decision of the judge not to sign the warrant, from a legal geekery perspective, was the protection of the “victim” in cases of domestic violence and violations of protective order. Anyone who’s either been subject to a protective order or represented someone subject to it, knows how easy it is for the “victim” to get the defendant in trouble. All it takes is one phone call and some plaintive bleating about how the defendant “tried to contact me” or sent me a letter and bam! you’re in jail. Even in cases where the communication between the two is perfectly consensual – as it often is – there are no consequences for the purported “victim” for enticing the defendant to violate this protective order. So she [look, I know. It just gets really tiring to keep typing "the victim" and it reads awkwardly.] can call and say “I love you and fuck the protective order and I want you to come over” all she wants and then laugh mercilessly when he shows up with a six-pack and every available police officer in the State is waiting for him. And now the legislature wants to codify this nonsense. I present HB 6629 (you have to scroll way, way down to Section 12), which states in relevant part:

(a) A person is guilty of criminal violation of a protective order when an order issued pursuant to subsection (e) of section 46b-38c, as amended by this act, or section 54-1k or 54-82r has been issued against such person, and such person violates such order. (b) No person who is listed as a protected person in such protective order may be criminally liable for (1) soliciting, requesting, commanding, importuning or intentionally aiding in the violation of the protective order pursuant to subsection (a) of section 53a-8, or (2) conspiracy to violate such protective order pursuant to section 53a-48.

The amendment is to CGS 53a-223, 223a and 223b. Subsection (b) above is a new entry here. “Aiding” or “conspiring to induce a person to violate a protective order” is not a crime anyway, so I’m not entirely sure why this subsection was added, but there you have it.

Unless the victim was also arrested. You can’t make this shit up. And if it were April 1st today, I might laugh it off as a clever joke. But it’s not and apparently neither is this.

Here’s the lowdown, from the two meager paywall inhibited articles that I could find. State Trooper from Salisbury, CT (where watching paint dry is exciting) Mark Lauretano apparently submitted an arrest warrant for a man who got into a bar fight with someone else. The “victim” of the fight (meaning the guy who got beaten up worse), was obviously not arrested, as these things go. Judge Klatt, upon reviewing the information in the warrant declined to sign it, apparently until the “victim” was also arrested.

Judge Klatt, a former prosecutor from Death Valley Waterbury, CT, should have known better. You simply do not refuse the State Police what they want. So instead of, I don’t know, reviewing the information again to see if maybe the Judge had a point, Lauretano does the logical thing and is now seeking an arrest warrant for the Judge herself*.

Because, you know – no, actually I don’t know. He claims that:

The fact that Judge Klatt is currently holding onto a valid arrest warrant for the accused and refusing to sign it until and unless she receives an arrest warrant for the victim is coercion and a violation of criminal law.

Actually, I prefer to call it “not engaging in selective prosecution”.

Assuming, of course, that the reason the judge didn’t sign the arrest warrant was because she personally knows the defendant-elect, this highlights a problem that we in the defense field have long observed: that arrests in these and domestic violence and violation of protective order cases are always one-sided. Man and girlfriend get into fight and it’s always only the man who’s arrested. There’s a running joke that the way to “win” a fight is to get injured just slightly more than the other guy. They’ll never arrest you if you come out looking like the worse of the two. You see it in self-defense cases, too.

But that’s neither hither nor thither. Let’s take a look at what the good Trooper accuses the judge of doing: coercion and “hindering a police investigation”.

Coercion, CGS 53a-192, states:

(a) A person is guilty of coercion when he compels or induces another person to engage in conduct which such other person has a legal right to abstain from engaging in, or to abstain from engaging in conduct in which such other person has a legal right to engage, by means of instilling in such other person a fear that, if the demand is not complied with, the actor or another will: (1) Commit any criminal offense; or (2) accuse any person of a criminal offense; or (3) expose any secret tending to subject any person to hatred, contempt or ridicule, or to impair any person’s credit or business repute; or (4) take or withhold action as an official, or cause an official to take or withhold action.

(b) It shall be an affirmative defense to prosecution based on subdivision (2), (3) or (4) of subsection (a) of this section that the actor believed the accusation or secret to be true or the proposed official action justified and that his purpose was limited to compelling the other person to behave in a way reasonably related to the circumstances which were the subject of the accusation, exposure or proposed official action, as by desisting from further misbehavior or making good a wrong done.

(c) Coercion is a class A misdemeanor except, if the threat is to commit a felony, coercion is a class D felony.

Ugh. Best I can tell, Lauretano feels like Judge Klatt is compelling him, or inducing him, to abstain from engaging in conduct that he has a legal right to engage in (arresting the defendant-elect). But there also has to be a showing that he’s afraid that if he does not arrest the “victim”, he will himself be the victim of a crime, be accused of a crime, his secrets will be exposed or the judge will “take or withhold action as an official”, whatever the hell that means.

[Update: As astutely pointed out by Gamso in the comments below, the irony is that Lauretano's actions more closely fit the definition of coercion than the judge's. Compelling the judge? Check. Conduct that the judge has a legal right to abstain from engaging? Check. Instilling in the judge the fear that if the demand is not complied with he will accuse her of committing a crime? Check. Subsection (b) might apply to him, but as we all know, an affirmative defense is not a bar to prosecution. Methinks the trooper may not want to play this game much longer.]

So if not coercion, then what else? “Hindering a police investigation” isn’t a crime. There’s no such thing in CT. There’s “Hindering prosecution” and “interfering with the police”. I’m going to assume it’s the latter. CGS 53a-167a states:

(a) A person is guilty of interfering with an officer when such person obstructs, resists, hinders or endangers any peace officer, special policeman appointed under section 29-18b, Department of Motor Vehicles inspector appointed under section 14-8 and certified pursuant to section 7-294d, or firefighter in the performance of such peace officer’s, special policeman’s or firefighter’s duties.

(b) Interfering with an officer is a class A misdemeanor.

Interfering with an officer can – and does – mean many things in Connecticut. A Judge acting in furtherance of her duties cannot be one of them. If that were to be the case, then any and all warrants must be signed by judges, otherwise they’d all be interfering with officers.

I’m glad that Salisbury has nothing else going on that a State Trooper wastes his time applying for an arrest warrant for a judge for 2 misdemeanors and also makes a statement to the press.

I wonder what’ll happen if another superior court judge refuses to sign this warrant for Judge Klatt’s arrest.  Ad Infinitum.

[*Obviously, this is all based on the limited information we have so far. If it turns out that the judge refused to sign the warrant for reasons that are less than kosher, then we have a different story on our hands.]

Quinnipiac student arrested after filming another student’s arrest from The Quinnipiac Chronicle on Vimeo.

If only someone had the technical know-how to turn that first 16 seconds into a repeating GIF and set it to music, it’d surely become the latest meme.

But all dancing cop jokes aside, this is yet another example of the burgeoning battle between officers and the public’s right to videotape their interactions with law enforcement. A recent example that I blogged about is now no longer facing criminal charges. In CT, it still is legal to videotape interactions between the police and citizens in public (but still illegal to record conversations between private individuals without consent).

In this case, it seems the videotaping escalated the incident from a ticket to an arrest:

According to multiple witnesses, within minutes of Hartford beginning to film a Quinnipiac student being arrested outside of Toad’s Place in New Haven, an officer tackled and handcuffed him. Hartford was charged with Disorderly Conduct and Interfering with a Police Investigation. He went on to spend the night in jail at 24 Union Avenue.

Was he truly interfering and being a douche, or just an aware citizen trying to catch the ordeal on camera is up to you to decide. What’s clear is that officers were uncomfortable from the get-go with the presence of the camera (look at the officer on the right and how he looks so awkward, just standing there).

“As soon as I took out the camera they were uncomfortable because they knew what they were doing was wrong,” Hartford [the student, not the city] said.

Quinnipiac senior Kevin Hillier saw the whole incident, and thought that the officers’ response was unwarranted.

“They claimed [Hartford] taking the video of the arrest was interfering with their interrogation when they arrested him, but the only reason him filming was an issue was because they made a big deal out of it,” Hillier said. “If the police didn’t start dancing in front of the camera and yelling at him, there would be no interference.”

The video taken by Hartford appears to show that the officers only arrested the original student because Hartford began filming. One officer, who began dancing when the camera was turned on, looked into the camera and said, “Watch this.” He then asked the student who they were questioning whether he was with Hartford. When the student replied yes, the officer turned to another officer and said, “Cuff him up.”

Okay, fine, I lied. Someone chop up this clip and send it to ytmnd.com ASAP.