As Jeralyn reported earlier this week, the Justice Department dismissed the indictment against Ted Stevens in response to its admitted violation of the prosecution's duty to disclose exculpatory evidence. John Terzano persuasively argues that Eric Holder's decision to dismiss "represents a critical first step in addressing a growing nationwide problem of prosecutors abusing their power in order to secure convictions."

The proper role of a prosecutor is not to simply seek convictions, but to see that justice is done. In pursuing a conviction against Stevens, prosecutors ignored their constitutional and ethical obligations to ensure a fair trial process. Holder rightly recognizes that there can be no justice when the fairness of a criminal proceeding is interrupted by government misconduct.

Whether Holder's "critical first step" will be an effective first step is a different question. [more ...]

Trooper Patrick Sharkey was dispatched to a residence in Caro, Michigan to respond to a complaint of an "unruly child." Melissa Ihrke told Sharkey that her 8-year-old son suffered from attention deficit disorder. According to the Michigan Attorney General's office, Sharkey later told the dispatcher: "Attention Deficit Disorder? One whack with a paddle gets your attention."

When Sharkey instructed Irhke to spank her son with a belt as the solution to his behavioral problems, Irhke objected that she didn't want to commit child abuse. After Sharkey assured her that spanking wasn't child abuse, Irhke administered blows with a belt that were, in Sharkey's judgment, "a couple of love taps." Dissatisfied with Irhke's gentle approach, Sharkey seized the belt. Telling Irhke "you need to do this so he'll feel it" and "I want to hear him scream," Sharkey demonstrated his theory of "tough love" by striking the boy with the belt. Four times.

[more ...]

Robert Powell, the Dallas police officer who detained Ryan Moats for a minor traffic violation outside a hospital where Moats' mother-in-law was dying, has demonstrated poor judgment before, according to former Dallas Cowboy linebacker Zach Thomas. Powell pulled over Zach's wife Maritza last year for making an illegal U-turn.

Thomas was handcuffed, placed in the back of a police cruiser, spent about three hours in the Dallas County Jail and was threatened with the possibility of spending the night behind bars.

In addition to making an illegal U-turn, Powell said Maritza ran a red light, didn't have her current address on her driver's license, didn't have a registration sticker on her windshield, and couldn't show proof of insurance. Maritza asked Powell to let her mother make the 5 minute trip to her home to retrieve the insurance paperwork, but Powell took Maritza to jail instead. (Maritza's mother, who speaks little English and was visiting Dallas for the first time, "was forced to ride with the tow truck driver when the car was impounded." Welcome to Dallas!) [more...]

Here's something you don't see every day:

Saying they were negligent and incompetent when they struck seven blacks from the jury pool in a recent murder trial, Harris County [Texas] District Attorney Pat Lykos castigated two of her prosecutors Thursday, docking their pay and removing them from trial work.

Lykos said the prosecutors were negligent when they removed every black member of the jury panel in the murder prosecution of a black defendant. The prosecutors claim they were "shocked" when they looked at the dozen jurors who made the final cut and saw no black faces. Lykos said the prosecutors were merely incompetent, not racist, in their decision to strike all the black panel members. "If I thought for a moment that there were racial motives, they would have been fired,” she said.

But what are "racial motives"? [more ...]

Apropos of the rhetorical question asked in this post -- "why isn't every squad car in America equipped with a dashboard video camera?" -- here is a possible answer:

Two Peoria police officers have been arrested in connection with the 2008 beating of a man who claims he was pepper sprayed, kicked, punched and shocked with a stun gun following a police chase that was videotaped by a squad car camera. ... Peoria County State's Attorney Kevin Lyons, who decided to pursue the case after seeing the videotape, said the recording shows Bryce Scott stopped running and cooperated before the officers allegedly beat him.

The officers apparently forgot that the squad car video camera was still operating.

Murray Waas has the latest on the probe into the U.S. Attorney firings. It's partly about the nine Bush officials who refused to cooperate.

Karl Rove (as we noted the other day from the interview his lawyer gave to Raw Story) are cooperating now.

Rove will not rely on (1) a White House claim of immunity for senior advisors to the president, (2) executive privilege or (3) his personal privilege against self-incrimination. He will cooperate with the investigation.

[More...]

Three federal prosecutors in the Ted Stevens' trial were held in contempt of court Friday for failing to comply with a federal court order to turn documents over to Stevens' defense team:

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan called it "outrageous" that government lawyers would ignore his deadline for turning over documents.

Last month, Sullivan told the Justice Department to turn over all its internal communications regarding a whistleblower complaint against the FBI agent leading the investigation into the former Alaska senator.

More...

Even Charles Dickens would never have come up with this one:

[Judge] Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

Among the victims: A 17 year old who spoofed her principal on My Space got 3 months in juvenile detention. Total number of victims since the pair began the scheme in 2003: 5,000 juveniles. [More...]

Santa Clara County District Attorney Dolores Carr recognized the "win at all costs" culture of her office when she began her job. What's she done about it?

It was recently revealed that Santa Clara prosecutors hoarded hundreds of videotapes of sexual assault examinations provided by hospital staff but never turned over to the defense. Prosecutors are under investigation (and one has been scolded) by the state bar for withholding evidence (including an expert witness' conclusion) in other cases. Granted, many of the transgressions predated Carr's election to office in 2007, but Carr's claim that she's taking steps to change the office culture is not reassuring.

[more ...]

Raw Story calls attention to an interesting public appearance by Karl Rove:

Rove spoke Tuesday evening at Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit institution in Los Angeles, as part of the school's "First Amendment Week." "One man loudly denounced Rove as a 'traitor' before he was escorted out," the Loyola Daily Breeze noted. "A woman held up a pair of handcuffs and said she would like to see Rove wearing them."

The Raw Story report suggests the existence of a conflict between Rove's insistence on Tuesday that he would not honor the House Judiciary Committee's subpoena (citing executive privilege) and his lawyer's statement that Rove was cooperating with a Special Counsel's investigation into the U.S. Attorney firings and the Siegelman prosecution. There is no conflict. [more ...]

It's easy to understand why Baltimore disbanded its "Special Enforcement Team," a group of "elite" police officers who apparently considered themselves above the law. Their misconduct caused the city prosecutor's office "to dismiss more than 100 Circuit Court cases the officers had investigated in the previous two years." Now a civil rights suit has been filed by a man who "says a band of rogue cops held him at gunpoint in the street, stripped him and searched his rectum in front of about 30 onlookers."

The strip search victim isn't the only person whose civil rights were violated by the "elite" officers. [more...]

On May Day 2007, immigrants across the country exercised their right to free speech and free assembly by participating in protest marches. In Los Angeles, the marchers encountered an aggressive response by LAPD officers who claimed their use of force was precipitated by marchers who "threw plastic bottles and other small objects in the direction of police." The 300 or so people who were beaten with batons or shot with rubber bullets, including a number of journalists, didn't see it that way.

Neither did the LA City Council, which voted unanimously to settle police brutality claims arising out the protest march for $13 million.

The City Council has agreed to pay more than $32 million in the past two weeks to settle lawsuits related to LAPD misconduct and brutality claims.