Police give elderly man drug charges after pharmacy issues incorrect prescription

An 83-year-old man and his wife were violently arrested because of a pharmacy screw up.

BURLINGTON, WI — Police were asked to retrieve a bottle of pills that hat been incorrectly issued to an elderly patient. When the 83-year-old man asked that police “sign for” the pills before leaving his home, the officer became violent and threw him to the ground and arrested him on felony charges of drug possession and theft. His 76-year-old-wife also received a knee to the back as she was arrested and charged with obstructing.

* * * * *
Pharmacy Mishap

The ordeal happened on January 8th, 2013, when Robert Cirpinski, 83, sent his wife Beverly to pick up a prescription for medication used to treat a chronic stomach ailment.

Mr. Cirpinski was under a doctor’s care and had been previously prescribed different pharmaceutical drugs to relieve his symptoms, including hydrocodone for pain. However, although Cirpinski’s doctor had issued the hydrocodone prescription, he had called the pharmacy to request that it not be filled at that time, while other treatments were being explored. However, a miscommunication occurred and the pharmacy technicians did not honor the hold on the medication.

When Beverly Cirpinski, 76, was sent to the pharmacy to fill her husband’s prescriptions, she was unaware of the extra bottle that the pharmacists had waiting to be picked up. The Journal Times detailed what happened next:

“The pain clinic called me and said there’s a prescription over there to be picked up in an hour or so,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling so good so I sent my wife over. I said I only had one prescription. The clerk behind the counter said (to his wife) ‘no, you have two.’ ”

The pharmacy clerk told Beverly Cirpinski the new, non-narcotic cost $6 and the other — for hydrocodone — was $45, he said. But that posed a problem.

The pharmacist “said she’d call the company to see if they could reduce (the hydrocodone’s cost) because my wife only had $30. They reduced it to $23,” Robert Cirpinski explained.

And when his wife came home from the Burlington pharmacy with both prescriptions, “I said ‘that’s not right.’ ” But he staunchly maintains he never opened the hydrocodone bottle.

Beverly says that in order to reduce the price of the bottle, the pharmacist removed 6 pills. This point would only add to the confusion once the government was involved, aggressively trying to sort it out.

Served and Protected

When the pharmacy supervisors realized that the Do-Not-Fill request was ignored by pharmacy staff, they knew they had a problem on their hands. The government is rabidly against citizens receiving pain treatment without permission. The clinic immediately phoned the Cirpinskis as well as the police.

Multiple Burlington Police officers were dispatched to the Cirpinski home to retrieve the mistakenly issued bottle. They demanded the elderly couple relinquish the bottle. Mr. Cirpinski felt uncomfortable handing off the bottle without documentation, so he requested that the officer sign a statement that she had received the drugs.

“I said ‘you can have it if you sign for it,’” Mr. Cirpinski recalled, according to the Times. “Not that you’re not trustworthy, but it’s a drug. He (the police sergeant) said, ‘I don’t sign for anything.’”

Mr. Cirpinski stated that the officer then tried to grab him, but he pulled back. The officer then “grabbed me and threw me to the floor, put my arms behind my back.”

Mr. Cirpinski said after he was handcuffed, officers “begin to handle” his wife. She was allegedly thrown down, received a knee to the back, and handcuffed.

Police charged Mr. Cirpinski with felony narcotics possession, theft (of the “missing” pills), and resisting arrest. Beverly was charged with obstructing police.

Justice Served

Mr. and Mrs. Cirpinski, on top of their health problems, both faced months of legal struggles, and the real potential for going to jail. Robert’s felony charge could easily send him to prison. Despite the ridiculousness of the situation, the charges remained in place.

The pharmacy, which seemingly caused this screw-up, refused to comment when requested repeatedly by the Journal Times.

Finally, after about 5 months of stress and legal expense, police finally dropped the charge against Beverly. However, Robert was not pardoned so easily.

Facing the prospect of enduring a trial and potential imprisonment — which would be physically difficult for him given his medical conditions — he accepted a deal. He pleaded ‘no contest’ to 2 misdemeanors, so that the felony charge against him would be dropped. Now the 83-year-old man has a criminal record of theft and resisting police. A judge ordered him to be placed on legal probation until 2015.

“They dropped the felony charge of the prescription (medication). I’m not supposed to harass the police people,” Cirpinski told The Journal Times. “I guess I can’t do anything for a year.”

Although he avoided jail, the situation still angers Mr. Cirpinski a year later.

“I don’t like that people tell lies about me. It really burns me,” he said.

* * * * *

While it is disturbing that police followed through with the arrests, and prosecutors lacked the integrity to immediately drop all charges against Mr. and Mrs. Cirpinski, the root cause of the problem runs deeper than that.

The injustice stems back to the government’s violent aversion to freedom of choice in medicine. The fact that the government dispatches armed officers against people suspected of medicating themselves without government permission is an injustice in and of itself. This common prohibitionist policy presents countless opportunities for government violence against Americans and must be ceased.

Burlington Police Department (Wisconsin)
Phone: (262) 342-1100
Email Police Chief Peter Nimmer: pnimmer@burlington-wi.gov
Email Officer Rachael Seils: rseils@burlington-wi.gov
Facebook: Link

The Republican War on Workers’ Rights

By COREY ROBIN

Midterm elections are like fancy software: Experts love them, end-users couldn’t care less. But if the 2010 elections are any indication, we might not want to doze off as we head into the summer months before November. Midterm elections at the state level can have tremendous consequences, especially for low-wage workers. What you don’t know can hurt you — or them.

In 2010, the Republicans won control of the executive and legislative branches in 11 states (there are now more than 20 such states). Inspired by business groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, they proceeded to rewrite the rules of work, passing legislation designed to enhance the position of employers at the expense of employees.

The University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer, who wrote an eye-opening report on this topic last October for the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, looked at dozens of bills affecting workers. The legislation involved unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, child labor, collective bargaining, sick days, even meal breaks. Despite frequent Republican claims to be defending local customs and individual liberty, Mr. Lafer found a “cookie-cutter” pattern to their legislation. Not only did it consistently favor employers over workers, it also tilted toward big government over local government. And it often abridged the economic rights of individuals.

Take the case of tipped workers and the minimum wage. In most states, tipped workers earn an hourly wage that is less than the federal minimum — the federal subminimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 per hour — because they’re supposed to make up the rest in tips. (They often don’t; the poverty rate among waiters and waitresses is 250 percent higher than it is among the general work force.) But non-serving staff who don’t get tips must be paid the minimum wage.

Republican state legislators have devised a way around that. In 2011, lawmakers in Wyoming introduced a bill that would have allowed restaurants and other employers to force their serving staff to pool their tips; tips would be redistributed among the nonserving staff, who could then be paid the subminimum wage. That same year, Maine legislators passed a bill declaring that “service charges” were not tips at all. Because they aren’t tips, they don’t belong to the serving staff. Employers can pocket them — without informing customers — whether they redistribute them among the staff or keep them.

In both cases, conservative Republicans supported the right of employers to take money that workers had earned. This disregard for the earnings of workers is only an extreme manifestation of a more common phenomenon among Republican legislators: their indifference to the problem of wage theft.

Wage theft refers to the practice among employers of taking money from their employees by illegally paying them less than the minimum wage or not paying them overtime. According to one multicity study, in a single week, nearly two-thirds of low-wage workers had, on average, 15 percent of their pay stolen by their employers.

One of the causes of this epidemic of wage theft — which, according to Mr. Lafer’s E.P.I. report, involves sums “far greater than the combined total stolen in all the bank robberies, gas station robberies, and convenience store robberies in the country” — is lax enforcement of the country’s wage and hour laws. In 1941, there was one federal inspector for every 11,000 workers. As of 2008, there was one for every 141,000 workers. “The average employer has just a 0.001 percent chance of being investigated in a given year,” Mr. Lafer estimates. Because there is so little risk of getting caught, one-third of all employers who have been found guilty of violating wage and hour laws continue to do it.

In 2010, liberal legislators in Miami-Dade County decided to take matters into their own hands. They passed an anti-wage-theft ordinance, resulting in more than 600 prosecutions and $1.7 million recovered in stolen pay in the first year alone. Miami-Dade’s success inspired Broward and Palm Beach Counties to propose similar measures.

In response, Republican legislators in Tallahassee tried to pass a bill that would prohibit any “county, municipality, or political subdivision of the state” from enacting laws, rules, ordinances or regulations “for the purpose of addressing wage theft.” They failed, so they tried again. This time, the bill passed the Florida House, but failed in the Senate.

Where conservatives often style themselves as the champions of local control — Ronald Reagan called for a government with “as much law and decision-making authority as possible kept at the local level” — the Florida example suggests that they have no compunction about sacrificing that principle when it threatens business interests.

Over the last four decades, for example, low-wage workers have been hit hard by the declining value of the federal minimum wage. In the absence of federal action, states, cities and counties have increased the minimum wage or indexed it to inflation (or both) to ensure that it keep pace with rising costs.

Republican politicians in state capitals have tried to check them at every point. Florida, Indiana and Mississippi have banned local governments from increasing the minimum wage. In Nevada, Missouri and Arizona, state legislators tried to overturn constitutional amendments and ballot initiatives. In 2011, New Hampshire’s Republican legislature simply abolished the state’s minimum wage.

State legislators have also overridden local efforts to grant employees a right to paid sick days. Nearly 40 percent of private-sector workers have no such right. So Milwaukee and Orange County in Florida tried to establish one within their jurisdictions (as New York City did recently). In Wisconsin, state legislators overturned Milwaukee’s ordinance. In Florida, they simply prohibited any city or county from passing such an ordinance. Other states, including Louisiana and Mississippi, have done the same.

Perhaps most surprising is the willingness of Republican legislators to expose the individual to the intrusion and interference of the state. In Tennessee, a bill sponsored by ALEC members that was passed in 2012 stipulated a series of deadlines at which an unemployed worker would have to start accepting a lower-paying job or lose her unemployment benefits. After 13 weeks, she would have to accept any job paying at least 75 percent of her previous wage; after 25 weeks, 70 percent; and after 38 weeks, 65 percent. To ensure compliance with these byzantine regulations (the red tape Republicans so often claim to oppose), the bill required anyone receiving unemployment insurance to submit detailed weekly reports showing that she had applied for at least three jobs per week. It also mandated that the State Department of Labor to audit 1,000 recipients per week. This time, Republicans managed to find the personnel.

The overall thrust of this state legislation is to create workers who are docile and employers who are empowered. That may be why Republican legislators in Idaho, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, Minnesota, Utah and Missouri have been so eager to ease restrictions on when and how much children can work. High schoolers should learn workplace virtues, says the conservative commentator Ben Stein, like “not talking back.” Early exposure to employment will teach 12-year-olds, as the spokesman of an Idaho school district put it, that “you have to do what you’re asked, what your supervisor is telling you.”

And if workers don’t learn that lesson in junior high, recent Republican changes to state unemployment codes will ensure that they learn it as adults. In 2011, Florida stipulated that any employee fired for “deliberate violation or disregard of the reasonable standards of behavior which the employer expects” would be ineligible for unemployment benefits. Arkansas passed a similar amendment (“violation of any behavioral policies of the employer”). The following year so did South Carolina (“deliberate violations or disregard of standards of behavior which the employer has the right to expect”) and Tennessee. The upshot of these changes is that any employee breaking the rules of her employer — be they posting comments about work on Facebook, dating a co-worker or an employee from a rival firm, going to the bathroom without permission — can be fired and denied unemployment. Faced with that double penalty, any worker might think twice about crossing her boss.

What might Adam Smith, often claimed as the intellectual godfather of the American right, have said about these legislative efforts? “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,” wrote Smith in “The Wealth of Nations,” “its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.”

Indeed.

Federal court: police can break down door and seize guns without warrant or charges

MILWAUKEE, WI — The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that it is not a violation of constitutional rights if police break down a citizen’s door, search the home, and confiscate firearms, so long that they believe it is in the citizen’s best interest.

A Doctor’s Concern

The lawsuit stems back to an incident that occurred on May 22, 2011. A psychiatrist, Dr. Michelle Bentle, phoned police to report that a patient had expressed a suicidal thought during an outpatient appointment; the woman had received some bad news and privately expressed grief during a difficult appointment.

At approximately noon, Milwaukee Police were dispatched to search for Krysta Sutterfield, age 42 at the time, in order to forcibly detain her and commit her for a mandatory medical evaluation. In Wisconsin, the mere suggestion of suicide is grounds for forcible police detention.

Police had a description of Ms. Sutterfield’s vehicle but could not immediately locate her; police checked her garage and it was empty. Hours passed. At 2:45 p.m., Dr. Bentle notified police that her patient “had called her some minutes earlier stating that she was not in need of assistance and that the doctor should ‘call off’ the police search for her,” according to court documents.

Confrontation At Home

However, police did not call off the search. At 8:30 p.m., Officer Jamie Hewitt found that Sutterfield was at home. Sutterfield answered the door when police knocked, but would not permit them to enter. She told them that she did not need assistance and had requested that the search be called off. However, police would not take ‘no’ for an answer.

“Unable to gain admittance to the house,” the court summary states, officers “concluded that the police would have to enter it forcefully.” Approximately 9 hours had passed since the doctor’s concern had been reported.

The showdown continued for approximately 30 minutes. Police requested backup, and Ms. Sutterfield called 9-1-1 to attempt to call off the pushy officers. As the call was in progress, police breached her door and accosted her.

The recorded 9-1-1 call documented Sutterfield’s voice demanding that police “let go of her and that they leave her home.” Instead, she was shackled and detained against her will.

Despite having no warrant, officers helped themselves to a “proactive sweep” of the woman’s home. During the search, police opened up a locked, opaque case and discovered her pistol. Officers seized the pistol, as well as a BB gun (physically incapable of taking a human life), and her Wisconsin CCW license.

Sutterfield was taken into police custody and to a hospital for a forced medical evaluation at the county’s Mental Health Complex; the state’s forced evaluations can last for as long as 72 hours.

Lawsuit

Following the ordeal, Sutterfield filed a lawsuit against the Milwaukee Police Department for violating several of her civil rights, including her rights under the 2nd Amendment and the 4th Amendment. Sutterfield contended that her home was illegally searched without a warrant and that her firearms were illegally seized.

U.S. District Judge J.P. Stadtmueller in Milwaukee dismissed the case, initially. Sutterfield later appealed. The appeal did not go in her favor.

“Even if the officers did exceed constitutional boundaries, they are protected by qualified immunity.”

“Although the court had found it ‘likely’ that Sutterfield’s Fourth Amendment rights had been violated, the court discerned no basis to hold Milwaukee liable for the violation,” Judge Illana Rovner wrote for the three-judge panel on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She conceded that “the intrusions upon Sutterfield’s privacy were profound,” and noted, “at the core of the privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment is the right to be let alone in one’s home.”

However, since the court believed that the forced entry was done with Sutterfield’s best interests in mind, the circumstances were allowable under the 4th Amendment. Judge Rovner wrote, “There is no suggestion that (police) acted for any reason other than to protect Sutterfield from harm.”

“Even if the officers did exceed constitutional boundaries,” the court document states, “they are protected by qualified immunity.”

In short, Sutterfield’s privacy (which was admittedly encroached upon) was left unprotected by the Bill of Rights because of the “exigent circumstances” in which police executed an emergency detention — with no warrant, no criminal charges, and no input from the judiciary. Similarly, the gun confiscation was also deemed as acceptable due to the so-called “emergency” which police claimed had been taking place for 9 consecutive hours.

The federal ruling affirms a legal loophole which allows targeted home invasions, warrantless searches, and gun confiscations that rest entirely in the hands of the Executive Branch. The emergency aid doctrine enables police to act without a search warrant, even if there is time to get one. When the government wants to check on someone, his or her rights are essentially suspended until the person’s sanity has been forcibly validated.

Source: Sutterfield v. City of Milwaukee, No. 12-2272

Milwaukee Police Department
Phone: 414-933-4444

Nigerian “Vigilantes” Kill Islamic Militants. With Guns!

By Robert Farago

Ever since the Boko Haram hit the net – and before – TTAG recommended a simple solution to the terrorist threat against Nigerian non-believers: arm civilians. Give them guns and let them defend themselves. Needless to say, the mainstream media didn’t even so much as mention the possibility of armed self-defense. Equally, the Nigerian population afflicted by the Boko Haram scourge didn’t need our advice on the matter. According to the late-to-the-self-defense party nydailynews.com, “On Tuesday morning, after learning about an impending attack by militants, locals ambushed two trucks with a gunmen. At least 10 militants were detained, and scores were killed, the official said.” What’s more . . .

Kalabalge trader Ajid Musa said that after residents organized the vigilante group, “it is impossible” for militants to successfully stage attacks there.
“That is why most attacks by the Boko Haram on our village continued (to) fail because they cannot come in here and start shooting and killing people,” he said. Earlier this year in other parts of Borno, some extremists launched more attacks in retaliation over the vigilante groups.

The rest of the Daily News post acts as if no armed self-defense happened; rabbiting on about the international hand-wringing and promises of help that followed Boko Haram’s recent kidnapping of Nigerian school girls. [Click here to read more about the battle.] To which I would add, if you’re not part of the solution (arming the locals), you’re part of the problem.

Oh, did I mention that the Nigerians don’t have a Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms? And yet citizens somehow scared up some guns to defend their lives and property, just like the Mexican “vigilantes.” Who’d a thunk it?

Police attack-dog mauls man during warrantless search of private property

LIVINGSTON, MT — A kitchen manager visiting his place of work after hours was mauled by a police attack dog, which was released into the property with the purpose of seeking out and attacking anyone it found. Police defend the actions of the dog, saying “He did what he was supposed to do.”

Mark Demaline manages the kitchen of Park Place Tavern in Livingston, and on August 22, was visiting the business at 2:00 AM, which he often does, to eat before going home. His routine visits are brief, as he makes a quick salad, grabs his laptop, and leaves. He does not lock the door while in the tavern, reported the Livingston Enterprise.

Unbeknownst to Demaline, police had decided to perform a “standard downtown security check,” which involves entering a private business without probable cause or a warrant, snooping around inside and releasing an attack dog to sniff out intruders, without permission from the owner.

Mark had prepared himself a take-home salad and prepared to exit the building, with food and drink in hand. A strange black dog approached him.

Being a dog lover, Demaline greeted the dog, “Hey puppy.” The dog lunged at him and sank its teeth into his leg, gnawing his flesh with repeated bites. Mark dropped everything and began screaming and trying to restrain the attack dog.

Just then two Livingston police officers appeared. The K9 handler, Officer Andrew Emanuel, took control of the dog. Demaline was cuffed and dragged him outside for an interrogation. A phone call confirmed he had permission to be in the building, unlike the police officers and their violent dog.
“There was no mauling or ferocious attack. The dog was just doing as he was trained to do under the circumstances.”

The property owner was quite upset that he was not called first. “I’ve been in the phone book for 40 years,” said Glenn Godward, incensed that his cook was mauled and his business was intruded upon.

The police chief staunchly defended the warrantless search, as well as the use of the dog. He claimed that police can enter any private property if it is unlocked. Nothing that happened was out of line, according to the chief.

“It’s acceptable for the dog to confront anybody in the business at that hour,” Police Chief Darren Raney said.

“The dog, sent in as a search tool, does a better job finding and apprehending a suspect than an officer,” Raney continued. “Anyone caught trespassing or unlawfully in a business after hours will be apprehended or questioned to determine whether they are there lawfully. That is what police do.”



“When the dog finds somebody in the building, he’s going to secure him, and that’s what happened,” he added. “He did what he was supposed to do.”

Chief Raney — who credits “aggressive, proactive patrols” for the city’s low crime rate — flatly denied the severity of the incident: “There was no mauling or ferocious attack. The dog was just doing as he was trained to do under the circumstances.”

Demaline responded by posting a video of the gory wounds that encompassed his upper thigh.

“It’s just way out of line — the excessive force of this dog,” Demaline said.

The police offered no sympathies or apologies to the victim. Demaline said that Officer Emanuel told him that he should have been thanking him for saving him the cost of an ambulance, after driving him to the hospital in his patrol car.

The cook had to miss a week of work, and incurred hospitalization bills and many personal inconveniences.

FOLLOW-UP: After receiving national attention, the department agreed to call proprietors first before barging into private property during their prided “aggressive security checks.” However, the policy change amounts to a removal of a practice that should have never existed in the first place, and does nothing to restore the victim or punish the irresponsible parties.

Months after the attack, Officer Andrew Emanuel and Attack K9 “Bobi” are still in actively service, the official website confirms.

If you would like to give feedback to the Livingston Police Department on their use of warrantless searches, indiscriminate use of force, and their callous treatment of their victim after the attack, please contact them at the number below.

Livingston Police Department
414 E Callender Street
Livingston, Mt 59047

Phone: (406) 823-6026
More contact info: http://www.livingstonmontana.org/

Student Turned Over to Police for a Doodle

PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) - A junior high school suspended a student and turned him over to police because of a "doodle" he drew showing a person being hanged, his father claims in court.

Robert Bernard Keller sued the Beaverton Police Department and Beaverton School District in Federal Court. Beaverton is a suburb of Portland.

Keller, suing for himself and his son, B.R.K., claims that on May 2, 2013, his 13-year-old son "was interviewed at his school, Raleigh Hills, K-8, by officers of the Beaverton Police Department regarding an alleged threat of harm based on a doodle that was drawn during class. B.R.K. was removed from his classroom and placed in the principal's office of Raleigh Hills K-8 to be questioned about offenses that he was alleged to have committed. At no time did the officers or school obtain a warrant, contact the minor child's parents to obtain parental consent, provide a counselor or attorney to the minor child or advise B.R.K. of his right against self-incrimination or provide an advocate who could explain."

Keller claims that the principal had interviewed his son on April 30, and suspended him, for drawing the doodle. He claims that he and his wife met with school staff that day for an IEP (individual education program) meeting, "and were told that B.R.K. was doing fine," though at the end of the meeting they were told that he was suspended, "effective immediately, pending a risk assessment."
He claims that he and his wife told the school that their son "was not to be interviewed alone without a parent present." Nonetheless, he was interviewed alone, by a school psychologist, and then by police, whom the school called in without notifying them, according to the complaint.

"At no time before or during the interview were the parents notified by Raleigh Hills or the Beaverton Police. Only after the fact did the parents learn of the police interrogation. No criminal charge was filed nor was a petition filed with the department of human services. As a direct and foreseeable result of the events that transpired during this incident, B.R.K. has suffered emotional damages," the complaint states.

The family seeks damages of at least $100,000 for violations of the Fourth and 14th Amendments, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, and failure to train and supervise.
They are represented by Michael Vergamini, of Eugene

Apple Helps Cops Hide Police Brutality / Stop Phone Filming

by Jack Blood


Here is the link to the patent which Apple holds for this technology.
The rapid emergence of smart phones with high definition cameras leads to consequences for law-breaking cops.

Recently, law enforcement throughout the country has been trying to pass laws that would make it illegal to film them while they’re on duty.

But Apple is coming out with a new technology that would put all the power in a cop’s hands.

Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem “sensitive”, and “protected from externalities.”

­In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event.

And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says “covert police or government operations may require complete ‘blackout’ conditions.”

“Additionally,” Apple says,” the wireless transmission of sensitive information to a remote source is one example of a threat to security. This sensitive information could be anything from classified government information to questions or answers to an examination administered in an academic setting.”

The statement led many to believe that authorities and police could now use the patented feature during protests or rallies to block the transmission of video footage and photographs from the scene, including those of police brutality, which at times of major events immediately flood news networks and video websites.

Apple patented the means to transmit an encoded signal to all wireless devices, commanding them to disable recording functions.

Those policies would be activated by GPS, and WiFi or mobile base-stations, which would ring-fence (“geofence”) around a building or a “sensitive area” to prevent phone cameras from taking pictures or recording video.

Apple may implement the technology, but it would not be Apple’s decision to activate the “feature” – it would be down governments, businesses and network owners to set such policies, analyzes ZDNet technology website.

Having invented one of the most sophisticated mobile devices, Apple now appears to be looking for ways to restrict its use.

“As wireless devices such as cellular telephones, pagers, personal media devices and smartphones become ubiquitous, more and more people are carrying these devices in various social and professional settings,” it explains in the patent. “The result is that these wireless devices can often annoy, frustrate, and even threaten people in sensitive venues.”

The company’s listed “sensitive” venues so far include mostly meetings, the presentation of movies, religious ceremonies, weddings, funerals, academic lectures, and test-taking environments.

Florida man and his dog shot by SWAT team during pre-dawn no-knock raid

HALLANDALE BEACH, FL — A man is “fighting for his life” after being shot during a pre-dawn SWAT raid on his home because of suspected drug possession. His son was beaten and his dog was shot to death.

At approximately 6:00 a.m., the Hallandale Police Department’s SWAT team broke through the back door of a local residence because they suspected that the owner possessed prohibited substances.

Precisely what took place inside is not fully known, but the May 8th raid resulted in the homeowner being shot, his son being beaten, and his 13-year-old dog being killed.

The man who was shot was local businessman Howard Bowe. His sister, who lives in the other half of the duplex, said he was unarmed.

“They came in the back door,” said Corneesa Bowe, according to the Sun Sentinel. “Why shoot an unarmed person? Now he’s fighting for his life.”

Mr. Bowe owns Power Auto in Davie, Florida. His family says there is no way the police targeted the right person.

“My concern is really for my brother,” said Corneesa to Local-10. “I mean there’s no reason why they should have shot him. He has a business, an established business. He’s not this big drug dealer like they’re assuming.”

Howard’s 16-year-old son was taken into custody and beaten in the process. He was questioned without a parent or a lawyer.

Neighbor Fred Webb told the Sentinel that Bowe “is an honest man who worked every day” at his business. “I can’t understand it. I hope he’s all right.”

SWAT Officer Michael McKenzie, a 14-year veteran of the department, was the one who pulled the trigger. He is on administrative leave.

It is no surprise that another no-knock raid resulted in violence, given the aggressive nature of these surprise home invasions. Police State USA will monitor this case as more details are revealed.

Request the release of relevant case information and an end to the use of no-knock raids.

Hallandale Police Department (Florida)
Phone: (954) 457-1400
Email: police_office@hallandalebeachfl.gov

Bold 14-Year-Old Girl Confronts School Board After Watching Her Dad Get Arrested for Violating Two-Minute Rule: ‘I Don’t Trust You’

Jason Howerton



Marina Baer watched her father get dragged away by a police officer after he violated the two-minute rule at a school board meeting in Gilford, New Hampshire. The dad, William Baer, was speaking out against the sexually graphic content found in a book assigned to his young daughter.

Earlier this week, 14-year-old Marina confronted the school board over the incident, telling members: “I honestly don’t feel safe around you people.”

“I just watched my father get arrested because he broke the two minute rule, at a board of education meeting,” she said. “This just shows that you resort to force at the first turn of conflict and I am appalled. So I don’t trust you.”

As BizPac Review notes, the controversial book that her dad was objecting to, “19 Minutes,” includes “graphic sexual content that culminates with: ‘Semen, sticky and hot, pooled on the carpet beneath her.’”

In a recent interview with TheBlaze, William Baer said he wasn’t “looking for a fight” but the school board left him “hurt and humiliated” after they allowed him to be arrested for going over the time limit. Baer was charged with disorderly conduct and held for a couple hours before being released on $700 bail.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it,” he told TheBlaze. “I think it was outrageous that I was charged for something like that — not adhering to the two-minute rule.”

The Gilford School Board later apologized for the “discomfort” the controversial book assignment caused and vowed to allow parents to “accept” material rather than “opt out.”

Ohio man records police, gets tased and arrested for not surrendering phone

Should police be able to seize whatever they want and claim it is 'evidence'?

LIMA, OH — A man calmly stood on a street and exercised his right to record police as they performed a traffic stop. Even though he was simply a bystander and not involved in any wrongdoing, he became the subject of police scrutiny when officers wanted to confiscate his phone as “evidence.” When he politely refused, he was arrested on a charge of obstructing law enforcement — put not before being tased and hospitalized by police.

The incident occurred on April 26th, as Michael S. Davis noticed a traffic stop outside the home he was visiting. He went outside to witness what was going on. Davis, 35, pulled out his cell phone to record a video of the encounter, as he often does in the name of keeping police officers accountable. This activism work had apparently made Mr. Davis known to some of the Lima Police officers from past recordings.

On that particular occurrence, the Lima News reported, Davis recorded officers as they searched a vehicle for drugs. When the search was complete, officers approached Mr. Davis and demanded his cell phone. They claimed that it contained evidence that could help them imprison a citizen for possessing substances without government permission.

Davis declined. The phone, and its contents, were his rightful property. Officers presented no warrant, and Davis had no intention of voluntarily helping them fill another cage with another non-violent offender.

Davis attempted to walk away, and police reacted by accosting him by grabbing his arm. Officers would not take ‘no’ for an answer, and did not intend to let him walk away with his property rights intact.

Police claimed that Davis resisted them and claimed that they believed he was reaching for a gun, so they fired a taser into his body.

Mr. Davis says that he never resisted and that he loudly repeated that he was not resisting so that other bystanders could hear him. He alleged that when he warned officers that he had a heart condition, and that being tased could threaten his life, police tased him anyway and brutalized him. The confrontation ended with Mr. Davis being hospitalized and arrested on multiple charges.

The department claims that they can seize whatever they deem as ‘evidence’ without the owner’s consent — even something like a a miniature computer with a trove of personal information stored inside of it — and arrest anyone who gets in their way. Police intended to eventually seek a warrant to examine the contents, but that process can easily take weeks — weeks of invaded privacy and inconvenience.

Davis was charged with obstructing official business and resisting arrest; both misdemeanors. He pleaded not guilty and awaits pretrial hearings in June.

Davis argued that it’s not his job to do the work of police, and the video is his property. The case raises interesting legal aspects regarding the contentious issue of filming police; the ability to film unmolested; the ability to protect footage from malicious police officers; the right to maintain control over one’s own property outside of due process. If officers can unscrupulously steal cameras from journalists and watchdogs, that doesn’t leave us with a very robust sense of privacy, free speech, or property rights.

Lima Police Department (Ohio)
Phone: (419) 221-5264
Facebook: Link

The Cost of Regulations

by Craig Eyermann

How much does the average American household spend to cover the cost of government regulations?

Answering that question can be difficult, because Americans pay that cost every time they make any kind of transaction. Because it’s a cost of doing business, it gets directly passed along to every consumer and is incorporated into the cost of everything you might buy.

But it’s not an impossible question to answer. Mark Tapscott describes how one economist calculated the cost of regulations on American household consumers:

Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute provides a definitive answer to that question today with publication of the latest edition of his annual compilation, “10,000 Commandments: An annual snapshot of the federal regulatory state.”

Crews estimates the annual cost of compliance with the record number of new federal rules and regulations issued under President Obama at $1.863 trillion.

That works out to a $14,974 “hidden tax” every year for the average U.S. household. That’s 23 percent of the $65,596 annual average household income in America.

Most regulations are developed to achieve one goal: to make it too costly for potential competitors to today’s dominant business interests to compete with them, which allows those dominant business interests to keep their prices higher than they otherwise could and maintain their dominant position. Politicians in both parties go along with the scheme because their corporate cronies take some of that extra money to support their political and personal interests.

That’s how “public servants” get rich.

'Cybersecurity' begins with integrity, not surveillance

If you've been following the surveillance debate, you may have noticed that it is actually two debates: first, it is a debate about whether mass surveillance works; and second, it is a debate about whether mass surveillance is a good idea, whether or not it works.

I've made arguments in both of these debates. On the question of whether it works, I'm among those who point out that the spies who have spent billions putting whole populations under surveillance can't point to any dividends from that massive investment. Since the debate over mass spying began in 2006 (with the whistleblower Mark Klein's disclosure that the NSA had gotten access to AT&T's main fibre-optic trunks), American spies have made a lot of grandiose claims about the plots they've foiled through mass surveillance. But when pressed, even their top officials admit that the entire mass-spying regime has caught exactly one "bad guy" – and that was an American who was thinking of wiring some money to al-Shabaab in Somalia.

So the argument that mass spying isn't worth it because it just doesn't work very well is an attractive one. When the official National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States tabled its report on the 9/11 attacks, it was clear on the relationship of surveillance to the 9/11 attacks. Specifically, the 9/11 commission concluded that the problem wasn't a shortage of intelligence, but rather a lack of coherence and coordination among spy agencies, so that the warning signs were missed. In other words, the comparatively minuscule surveillance regime pre-9/11 was more than sufficient to catch the 9/11 plotters, and the drops of useful intel were lost in the the pre-9/11 trickle. What hope do we have of finding the next drops, now that the trickle is a neverending flood?

Even if surveillance worked…

But the more I think about this, the more I realise it's not the argument I want to make. The longer the surveillance debate goes on, the more I realise that even if mass, total, continuous surveillance worked to catch terrorists, I would still oppose it.

The Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman and I presented an introductory session at SXSW before Edward Snowden's appearance, and he made a thought-provoking comparison between surveillance and torture. Some of the opponents of torture argue against it on the ground that torture produces low-quality intelligence. If you torture someone long enough, you can probably get him to admit to anything, but that's exactly why evidence from torture isn't useful.

But Gellman pointed out that there are circumstances in which torture almost certainly would work. If you have a locked safe – or a locked phone – and you want to get the combination out of someone, all you need is some wire-cutters, a branding iron, some pliers, and a howling void where your conscience should be.

The "instrumental" argument against torture – that it doesn't work – invites the conclusion that on those occasions where torture would work, there's nothing wrong with using it. But the primary reason not to torture isn't its efficacy or lack thereof: it's that torture is barbaric. It is immoral. It is wrong. It rots societies from the inside out.

And so it is with mass surveillance. As the exiled WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum said to me this week in Berlin, "Surveillance makes you say 'yes' when your conscience says 'no.'"

The space to think things through

That is, when you are continuously surveilled, when your every word – even your private conversations, even your personal journals – are subject to continuous monitoring, you never have the space in which to think things through. If you doubt a piece of popular wisdom and want to hash it out, your ability to carry on that discussion is limited the knowledge that your testing of the day's received ideas is on the record forever and may be held against you.

One thing that parenting has taught me is that surveillance and experimentation are hard to reconcile. My daughter is learning, and learning often consists of making mistakes constructively. There are times when she is working right at the limits of her abilities – drawing or dancing or writing or singing or building – and she catches me watching her and gets this look of mingled embarrassment and exasperation, and then she changes back to some task where she has more mastery. No one – not even a small child – likes to look foolish in front of other people.

Putting whole populations – the whole human species – under continuous, total surveillance is a profoundly immoral act, no matter whether it works or not. There no longer is a meaningful distinction between the digital world and the physical world. Your public transit rides, your love notes, your working notes and your letters home from your journeys are now part of the global mesh of electronic communications. The inability to live and love, to experiment and err, without oversight, is wrong because it's wrong, not because it doesn't catch bad guys.

Everyone from Orwell to Trotsky recognised that control over information means control over society. On the eve of the November Revolution, Trotsky ordered the Red Guard to seize control over the post and telegraph offices. I mentioned this to Jacob Appelbaum, who also works on many spy-resistant information security tools, like Tor (The Onion Router, a privacy and anonymity tool for browsing the web), and he said, "A revolutionary act today is making sure that no one can ever seize control over the network."

If the NSA and GCHQ want to effect "cybersecurity", then let them help us with the project of building a network that allows us to maintain the integrity of our private lives. Cybersecurity should be about securing the people of the United Kingdom, not making the state secure from us.

Pols to Ad Networks: Pretend We Passed SOPA, and Never Mind About Violating Antitrust Law

By Mitch Stoltz

A group of United States Senators and Representatives is asking Internet advertising networks to create a blacklist of alleged "piracy sites" and refuse to serve ads to those sites. If this idea sounds familiar, that's probably because it was an integral part of the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, legislation that was stopped in its tracks two years ago after a massive protest by Internet users.

It's disturbing that members of Congress are pressuring ad networks to follow a law that Congress didn’t pass, and probably never will. But it's downright shocking for them to ask ad networks that compete with one another to agree amongst themselves that they won’t do business with certain websites. That sounds a lot like a “concerted refusal to deal” - a classic violation of antitrust law.

The letters came from Representatives Bob Goodlatte and Adam Schiff, and Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Orrin Hatch. They praise the ad networks for issuing several best practices statements, which called for "commercially reasonable" methods to avoid placing ads on "rogue sites." Those best practice statements were part of a larger push by big entertainment companies, their friends in Congress, and the White House "IP Czar" to coax the Internet's gatekeepers into "voluntary agreements" for making sites disappear from the Internet when Big Content wanted them gone.

The best practices statements by the ad networks and payment companies only promised to use their best individual efforts, but it seems those commitments weren't enough to satisfy the four members of Congress. Their letter claims that "best practices are useful, but greater specificity is needed around preventative measures." The legislators want "a commitment to use actionable and freely updated data, from reliable sources, concerning piracy sites." They want the networks to "prevent the appearance of ads on online piracy sites" based on that data - in other words, to create a blacklist of sites that won't be able to earn revenue by displaying advertising.

Letting commercial companies with their own competitive motivations decide which sites are "rogue" or "pirate" sites is a recipe for abuse. It means that site owners who comply with copyright law could still have their sources of revenue cut off when a company who might be a competitor asks for it. The legislators' letter doesn't define "online piracy sites," but most of the definitions we've seen lately focus on the number of takedown requests a site has received from copyright holders, or the number of requests sent to search engines about the site. Since just a few companies send out a large portion of the takedown requests, those companies would effectively have the power to control who gets deemed a "piracy site."

As a federal law, this scheme would have created serious First Amendment and due process problems. As a private agreement among competing ad networks, it could raise other legal problems. Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, companies that compete with each other aren't allowed to make a pact amongst themselves about who they will refuse to do business with, especially if the purpose of the pact is to squelch competition or punish a rival. It's called a "group boycott" or "concerted refusal to deal," and it can lead to big-money lawsuits and years of trouble. In some cases, groups of competitors sharing a list of companies that they deem to be bad actors, with a wink-wink understanding that no one in the group should do business with those companies, was deemed a violation of the Sherman Act1.

Claiming that an industry-wide refusal to deal is justified by "fighting piracy" doesn't necessarily avoid an antitrust jam. In 2003, the Motion Picture Association of America decided that its members, major movie studios who compete with one another, would no longer send pre-release "screener" copies of films to members of awards committees like the Motion Picture Academy. According to the MPAA, the group boycott of awards committees was needed to stop infringement of pre-release movies. But the group ban put smaller studios at a huge disadvantage in getting award nominations and votes. In just two months, a court decided that the MPAA's screener ban was likely illegal, and that loss may have precipitated MPAA head Jack Valenti's retirement a few months later.

Certainly, there are ways that the Internet advertising networks can cut off ad revenue to truly bad actors without running afoul of the antitrust laws. But the legislators' helpful suggestion that networks "work to bring the industry together to meet this common . . . goal" will raise bright, flashing danger signals in the mind of any corporate legal advisor. Representative Goodlatte et al are inviting the ad networks to take a stroll through a minefield.

• 1. For example, Eastern States Retail Lumber Dealers' Association v. United States, 234 U.S. 600 (1914).

NEVER Let Your Kids Talk to the Police

William Norman Grigg

“When they put the handcuffs on I thought, `Wait a minute, this has got to be a joke,’” recalled Latoya Harris, describing the arrest of her 9-year-old daughter last May. “The look on my daughter’s face went from humiliation and fear, to a look of sheer panic.”

At the time, the girl was wearing a bathing suit and a towel, still damp from running through a neighborhood sprinkler. She was taken away in handcuffs by officers David McCarthy and Matthew Huspek, fingerprinted, photographed, but never charged with a crime. She was held at police headquarters for an hour before her frantic mother — who didn’t have a car — could retrieve the girl from her captors.

The stated purpose of the visit was to investigate a playground fight that had taken place a few days earlier. The actual purpose of the arrest was probably to serve some depraved impulse on the part of the officers to assert their supposed authority over an intimidated but uncooperative child.

According to the Oregonian newspaper, Officer McCarthy — who, like others in his disreputable profession, fancies himself a mentalist of sorts — believed that the child wasn’t telling the truth in her account of the scuffle. His report characterized her statements as “vague,” and recalled that he observed her “breathing speed up,” an entirely appropriate response to the unwelcome presence of an armed and bellicose stranger.

“They repeatedly asked her, `Why don’t you tell me what really happened?” recalls the mother. The officers hauled her away on suspicion of fourth-degree assault. They refused to allow the mother to accompany the daughter in the back of the police car.

“In my opinion, they were trying to scare and humiliate her,” Harris said in testimony before the independent Citizens Review Committee. “All they had to do was give her a talking to. We’re talking about two grown men in uniform with guns.”

This act of gratuitous official sadism was — let’s recite it together — done in accordance with policy, according to department spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson. Handcuffing a nine-year-old is “justified” as a “safeguard,” Simpson asserted.

The Portland PD, which is under scrutiny by the Justice Department (for whatever good that would do), is notable for the tender solicitude its officers display toward vulnerable children. During a presidential visit by George W. Bush in 2002, police assigned to keep protesters caged in “free speech zones” unleashed a pepper spray fusillade against demonstrators who wandered beyond their pens. Among the victims was Don Joughin, who had brought his wife and three children to the event.

After the Jackboots had subjected the protesters to a caustic shower, Joughin turned to a Portland PD officer obstructing an exit and asked how he and his family could leave.

“He pointed and said to exit to the [northeast], into the spraying police opposite him,” Joughin recalled. Trapped between a panicked crowd and pepper spray-wielding assailants, Joughin pleaded with the officer to allow his family to pass.

“He looked at me, and drew out his can from his hip and sprayed directly at me,” testifies Joughin. His three-year-old son caught most of the blast. The Berserker then turned on Joughin’s wife and newborn son “and doused both of their heads entirely from a distance of less than three feet,” he recounts.

Reeling from the fumes and frantic to get help for his screaming child, Joughin tried to leave — only to find his family’s escape blocked at every turn by armored bullies who closed ranks and cut them off. The victims weren’t allowed to leave until someone in “authority” issued an order.

As Joughin and his family fled, one of the cops hurled a “Collateral Murder”-style taunt at their back: “That’s why you shouldn’t bring kids to protests.”

Actually, that episode, like the vicious abduction of Latoya Harris’s daughter, demonstrates why parents should cultivate within their children an incurable distrust of the state’s Punitive Priesthood — and must never, under any circumstances, allow such people to have access to their children.

How DRM Makes Us All Less Safe

May 6th is the official Day Against DRM. I'm a bit late writing anything about it, but I wanted to highlight this great post by Parker Higgins about an aspect of DRM that is rarely discussed: how DRM makes us less safe. We've talked a lot lately about how the NSA and its surveillance efforts have made us all less safe, but that's also true for DRM.

DRM on its own is bad, but DRM backed by the force of law is even worse. Legitimate, useful, and otherwise lawful speech falls by the wayside in the name of enforcing DRM—and one area hit the hardest is security research.
Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the U.S. law that prohibits circumventing "technical measures," even if the purpose of that circumvention is otherwise lawful. The law contains exceptions for encryption research and security testing, but the exceptions are narrow and don’t help researchers and testers in most real-world circumstances. It's risky and expensive to find the limits of those safe harbors.
As a result, we've seen chilling effects on research about media and devices that contain DRM. Over the years, we've collected dozens of examples of the DMCA chilling free expression and scientific research. That makes the community less likely to identify and fix threats to our infrastructure and devices before they can be exploited.

That post also reminds us of Cory Doctorow's powerful speech about how DRM is the first battle in the war on general computing. The point there is that, effectively, DRM is based on the faulty belief that we can take a key aspect of computing out of computing, and that, inherently weakens security as well. Part of this is the nature of DRM, in that it's a form of weak security -- in that it's intended purpose is to stop you from doing something you might want to do. But that only serves to open up vulnerabilities (sometimes lots of them), by forcing your computer to (1) do something in secret (otherwise it wouldn't be able to stop you) and (2) to try to stop a computer from doing basic computing. And that combination makes it quite dangerous -- as we've seen a few times in the past.

DRM serves a business purpose for the companies who insist on it, but it does nothing valuable for the end user and, worse, it makes their computers less safe.

Supreme Court Turns Blind Eye to Exclusionary Prayers at Government Meetings

By Heather L. Weaver

This morning, the Supreme Court issued a disappointing and troubling decision upholding a town board's practice of opening its meetings with Christian prayers.

For more than a decade, the town board of Greece, New York, has started meetings with prayers delivered by local clergy, all of whom, with a few brief exceptions, have been Christian. The court's decision today allows the town to continue these official prayers despite the fact that they exclude local citizens of minority faiths and divide the community along religious lines.

The news is not all bad, however. While the outcome in this case was disheartening, the court did make clear that there are limits on legislative prayers. They may not "denigrate non-believers or religious minorities, threaten damnation, or preach conversion," and they must remain consistent with the purported purpose of such invocations — to solemnize and lend gravity to the occasion.

Still, as Justice Kagan points out in her powerful dissent, today's ruling reflects "two kinds of blindness."

First, the court's opinion focuses heavily on prayers delivered in Congress and state legislatures, but it fails to recognize that an intimate meeting of a town board or county council is much different. Ordinary citizens regularly attend these meetings for a variety of reasons — e.g., to keep abreast of local affairs, to seek zoning permits, and to receive awards. In the town of Greece, they were confronted directly and repeatedly with official, Christian prayers and called on to join in those prayers.

Second, the Court dismisses the content of the prayers as "ceremonial" in nature, notes Kagan, disregarding the fact that Greece's predominantly Christian invocations profess "profound belief and deep meaning, subscribed to by many, denied by some." When the government forces such prayer on its people in this manner, she explained, it violates the "norm of religious equality" and the right of every citizen to "[p]articipate in the business of government not as Christians, Jews, Muslims (and more), but only as Americans."

And today's decision reflects a third kind of blindness that Justice Kagan did not identify: Historical practice should never be used to justify violating core constitutional principles like the separation of church and state, which reserves religious practice and worship for the individual and faith communities, not the government.

Italy's First Attempt To Block Websites With No Judicial Review Reveals How Dangerous The System Is

Late last year, we wrote about how Italy was about to change some of its copyright enforcement setup to give enforcement powers to regulators instead of the courts. That is, regulator AGCOM could now simply declare -- with no judicial review or due process -- that certain sites were infringing and then order ISPs to block access to those sites. While other Italian prosecutors have sought to do the same thing, AGCOM now has the official power to delete websites off the Italian internet if they so much claim they're somehow infringing.

Recently, AGCOM decided to exercise its new power, issuing its first administrative blocking injunction against a site called Cineblog01 -- meaning that ISPs in Italy need to block users from accessing the site. Now, it does appear that the site was linking and/or embedding certain films that may have been infringing. But there are still serious problems with the injunction. IPKat, who wrote about this, details three fairly serious problems with the way that AGCOM handled this.

1. AGCOM declared the site guilty of "massive infringement" based on having just eleven movies. That seems like a ridiculously low threshold. Under such a threshold nearly any user-generated content site might be declared as engaging in "massive infringement."
2. Much is made of the claim that AGCOM tried to reach the operator of the site. They are required to try to communicate with the "website manager." Since the operators of the site used a privacy guard feature from their Panamanian registrar for their Whois entry, AGCOM basically just reached out to that Panamanian registrar, and when there was no response, concluded that the site's operators were ignoring the requests. While we can argue over whether or not the site should have provided a better means to communicate, it still seems fairly weak to argue that sending an email to a third party like that constitutes true notification of the complaint.
3. Third, and most importantly, IPKat checked out the site and the eleven movies in question... and found that they all had been removed already. In other words, it seems fairly clear the site was perfectly amenable to a standard notice-and-takedown type of system, but AGCOM went all in and ordered the entire site blocked.

It's entirely possible that the site had bad actors who were violating the law, but it certainly doesn't look like AGCOM is being all that careful to make sure that's the case, and that's almost certainly going to lead to problematic results.

Unarmed father beaten to death outside movie theater while trying to settle family dispute

 MOORE, OK — A family’s night at the movies on Valentine’s Day turned into a horror show when a husband and father was beaten to death outside a cinema by police officers.

Things had not gone smoothly for the Rodriguez family — who reside in Norman, OK — due to a dispute which took place between Mrs. Nair Rodriguez and her 19-year-old daughter, Luinahi. Mrs. Rodriguez says her daughter had been lying to her so she slapped her during the argument, which took place outside the Warren Theater during the early hours of February 15th.

A bystander reported the incident and got the government involved. A bad situation would soon turn horribly worse.

Mrs. Rodriguez had stormed away from her daughter, upset at what had happened. Luis went after her to calm her down. That’s when several Moore Police officers approached.

Luinahi and Nair both witnessed what happened next. They say Luis, age 44, tried to bypass the officers as they were attempting to ask him for identification. Luis didn’t want his wife to drive away while she was angry, so he continued towards her.

That’s when Mr. Rodriguez was taken down, and beaten to death by five officers. His family witnessed him getting pummeled with fists, knees, and pepper spray until he was bloody and lifeless.

“Five guys got on top of him, beating him ruthlessly. On the head– just pow, pow, pow. Even with knees,” Luinahi tearfully explained.

An officer intercepts Mrs. Rodriguez as she tries to record and communicate with her dying husband. (Source: Cell phone video)

Mrs. Rodriguez pulled out a cell phone to record the incident. “I’m recording because this is too much,” she says.

Her video began after the brutal beating was over, and only captured the moments when Luis was already on the ground, being pressed into the cement by five men, and then loaded onto a stretcher.

Even though the man is on the ground, motionless, officers tell him to “calm down,” as he suffers under the weight of several police officers. They handcuff him with ease and slowly roll him over, revealing his battered appearance. He cannot sit up under his own strength.

“Papa? Are you OK?” asks his wife of 22 years. Then a stretcher rolls out and the gravity of the situation sets in. “Is he OK?! He doesn’t move! You killed him! You killed my husband!”

“When they flipped him over you could see all the blood on his face, it was, he was disfigured, you couldn’t recognize him,” his daughter Luinahi later described.

An officer assured Mrs. Rodriguez her that the government was taking good care of her husband and kept insisting she produce her ID. The cop then deftly told her that he would hold her cell phone as she searched for her identification. The officer then quickly shut off the camera and confiscated the device.

The family says they waited at the hospital, hoping that he would pull through. They say they were kept from him for hours and were lied to when he was moved. Moments they could have spent saying goodbye were denied.

The department refused to return the cell phone or show the video to the media upon request. For a week and a half, the silence grated on those expecting answers. “They are trying to hide what they did — viciously,” Mrs. Rodriguez said.

After pressure from the public and the media, the department relented and turned over the seized cell phone. Police confirmed that the Warren Theater has a surveillance video of the parking lot, but they have not released it.

Michael Brooks-Jimenez, the Rodriguez family’s attorney, made the following statement upon making the video public: “He was not involved in the disturbance. However, when police came, they focused their attention on Luis. Taking him face down onto the pavement, pepper-spraying his mouth, nose and eyes and putting the weight of five grown men on top of him, and then handcuffing him as he was unconscious or already dead.”

“We’re obligated to detain and investigate,” said Jerry Stillings, Moore Police Chief. “If someone does not cooperate with that investigation, we have to do what we have to do to get that information.”

The chief claimed that Mr. Rodriguez was “uncooperative” and tried to leave. According to the chief: “one of the officers tried to detain Mr. Rodriguez, at which time, Mr. Rodriguez tossed the officer off of his arm.” The chief alleges that Rodriguez “took an aggressive stance,” leaving the officers “feeling threatened.” Police neutralized the threat.

“Its always important to cooperate,” the chief said.

Friends describe Luis Rodriguez as a “sweet spirit” and a peaceful, Christian man who was nicknamed “Pastor” by those to whom he ministered.

Three of the officers have been put on paid administrative leave, according to NewsOn6.

Cop Walks up to a Couple’s Tied Up Dog and Shoots it in the Head for No Reason

On Monday April 28, 2014 while traveler Brandon Carpenter and a friend were traveling through Sulphur La on their way to Lake Charles, his dog was shot dead by a Sulphur Police officer.

Carpenter told KATC that he and his 21-year-old friend Logan Laliberte were traveling by train to visit friends in Lake Charles and were sitting about 7 a.m. in the parking lot of the Southwest Daily News. Carpenter said that an officer had been called to the parking lot as the two friends had taken refuge in a parked truck as rain fell around them. Arzy, Carpenter dog, was tied to a nearby fence.

Carpenter said he is extremely grateful to the paper’s circulation manager, who told station KPLC that he takes issue with the story of the Sulphur policeman, who reportedly suggested that the dog bit him prior to shooting the dog. KPLC also reports that the eyewitness from the newspaper said he observed the officer playing with Arzi. According to KPLC, “the dog never growled or bared its teeth” and “never bit the officer.”

Carpenter said that, in addition to watching his dog die, both he and Laliberte were arrested for trespassing and later released.

Carpenter also expressed outrage with the officer and vowed to take his story to national media “so everyone knows what this officer did.”

One of the known warning signs of certain psychopathologies, including antisocial personality disorder, also known as psychopathic personality disorder, is a history of torturing pets and small animals, a behavior known as zoosadism.

According to the New York Times, “the FBI has found that a history of cruelty to animals is one of the traits that regularly appears in its computer records of serial rapists and murderers, and the standard diagnostic and treatment manual for psychiatric and emotional disorders lists cruelty to animals a diagnostic criterion for conduct disorders.

“A survey of psychiatric patients who had repeatedly tortured dogs and cats found all of them had high levels of aggression toward people as well, including one patient who had murdered a young boy.”

Is it any wonder why so many cops shoot so many dogs?

A facebook page is setup for Arzi, here.  Also if you’d like to contribute to his campaign to hold the Sulphur Police Officer, Brian Thierbach, accountable for his actions you can do so here.

Connecticut Accused of Lying Over Transgender Teen Held in Solitary Confinement

By Mary O’Hara

A transgender teen with a horrific history as a victim of rape, abuse, and trafficking is being held in solitary confinement at an adult prison in Connecticut, yet has still not been formally charged. Still, the state not only failed to protect her, but may have even lied about its mistakes.

VICE News has obtained court documents that show Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) Commissioner Joette Katz may have intentionally mislead the public last month.

In November, the 16-year-old transgender girl known as Jane Doe was deemed a delinquent because of her history of violently fighting with other girls and staff at the facilities where she’d been housed since being taken into DCF custody at the age of 12. In April, after an alleged assault on a staff member, she was transferred at the request of DCF to York Correctional Institution, the adult women’s prison in Niantic.

Now, everyone from the ACLU to transgender advocacy groups are saying that the agency screwed up. Protests were held last week in New York City and Hartford.

Children are often sent to adult prisons. According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), kids as young as eight have been prosecuted as adults and over 3,000 children have even been sentenced to life without parole at adult facilities. EJI estimates that, on any given day, around 10,000 children are housed in adult prisons in the US.

In this case, however, the teen’s attorney, Aaron Romano, has filed a lawsuit against the Connecticut Department of Corrections (DOC) and DCF, as well as the commissioners of both agencies. The suit alleges that it’s illegal to transfer custody of the teen to DOC because she has neither been charged with a crime, nor tried as an adult. Doe also filed for a temporary restraining order against both agencies.

Romano told VICE News the case defies the federal Juvenile Justice Delinquency Act, a protective measure that the Center for Children’s Law and Policy says is under attack.

DCF commissioner Katz published an opinion piece in the Hartford Courant called “Teen’s Violent History Left State No Option,” on April 21 to try and quell the outcry.

“Another misperception is that the Department of Children and Families sought to place the transgender youth in the adult facility for males,” Katz said. “Although the pertinent statute governing the transfer suggests that anatomy controls, we worked intensively with the Department of Correction to have her placed at the women's facility.”

Actually, that’s not the case. According to an April 8 judicial memorandum in the Fairfield superior court, Katz herself filed a motion to have Doe transferred to Manson, an all-male, high security prison for inmates up to age 21.

Senior Judge Burton Kaplan wrote in the memorandum that “the original motion is confusing and contradictory since a female can not be transferred to Manson. The motion was never amended nor was there ever an objection.” Then he recommended Doe be transferred to the women’s prison instead.

VICE News spoke with a communications officer for Katz, who would not comment on discrepancies between Katz’s statements and the document.

The memorandum also states that Doe is to be held in isolation for no more than 72 hours once transferred to York Correctional, the women’s prison. So much for that.

On April 24, Doe sent her own version of events to the Courant through her attorney, as the press is not allowed to see her at the prison. The teen said that she was being held in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day, and that DCF lied about what got her there. She wrote: “I'm in my room 22 hours a day with a guard staring at me — even when I shower and go to the bathroom. It's humiliating.”

In her Courant article, Katz also misleadingly wrote that Doe “entered the care of the DCF in 2009, at the age of 12 (not at 5 as advocates claim).” According to Doe’s attorney, her own statements in court, as well as her newspaper article, although Doe wasn’t taken into physical custody until turning 12, she was supervised by DCF starting at age 5. That means DCF caseworkers were assigned to make sure Doe’s home was a safe environment. According to pretty much everyone, it was not.

Court documents obtained by VICE News show that Doe was severely physically, emotionally, and sexually abused, and repeatedly raped from age eight onward. According to the girl’s affidavit, some of those sexual abuse incidents took place at the hands of staff members at Eagleton School in Massachusetts and the DCF facility Connecticut Children’s Place, where Doe lived at the respective ages of 12 and 13.

A spokesman for DCF sent a statement to VICE News saying the department is investigating the allegations and is taking “appropriate steps to ensure the safety of our residents.” Repeated efforts to contact directors at Eagleton School for comment were unsuccessful.

DCF, through comments to the media and Katz’s article, has painted a picture of Doe as a violent and uncontrollable offender they can no longer handle. Katz wrote of “the incident that forced me to this decision” and detailed the staff member’s injuries, including concussion, an eye wound, bites, and bruises.

But Romano told VICE News a very different story from Doe’s perspective: “She got into an incident where she was restrained illegally. You’re talking about someone who’s been physically abused from a very young age and she’s hardwired to defend herself, and this person came up from behind and grabbed her in a bear hug — so she defended herself.”

“First of all, that type of restraint is prohibited by law,” Romano said, “And they should have been more sensitive.”

Beth Hamilton, Director of Prevention and Programs at Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services, told VICE News that: “The experience of being incarcerated, and being held in isolation, as many trans youth find themselves, has also been linked to triggering past trauma and heightening PTSD."

“In a recent study, one our of every two trans people reported having experienced sexual violence in their lifetime,” Hamilton said, “The same study also cites that trans people are less likely to have access to resources and are more likely to be discriminated against or experience violence by systems, such as the police, health care professionals, and educators.”

According to Doe herself, she’s been through hell. But, somehow, despite a family life and childhood filled with non-stop trauma, the teen still seems to look toward the future.

“I want people to understand who I am, what my life has been like and how I ended up here,” the teen wrote in her article. “What I have survived would have destroyed most people. I'm not going to let it destroy me. I can't change what has happened, but I can build a future just like every other 16-year-old.”

DOJ's 'Operation Choke Point' May Be Root of Porn Star Bank Account Closings

Elizabeth Nolan Brown

Despite being in good financial standing, adult film performers and others in the porn industry have had bank accounts abruptly terminated—and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) may have had something to do with it.

Under "Operation Choke Point," the DOJ and its allies are going after legal but subjectively undesirable business ventures by pressuring banks to terminate their bank accounts or refuse their business. The very premise is clearly chilling—the DOJ is coercing private businesses in an attempt to centrally engineer the American marketplace based on it's own politically biased moral judgements. Targeted business categories so far have included payday lenders, ammunition sales, dating services, purveyors of drug paraphernalia, and online gambling sites.

"Operation Chokepoint is flooding payments companies that provide processing service to those industries with subpoenas, civil investigative demands, and other burdensome and costly legal demands," wrote Jason Oxman, CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association, at The Hill.

The theory behind this enforcement program has superficial logic: increase the legal and compliance costs of serving certain disfavored merchant categories, and payments companies will simply stop providing service to such merchants. And it’s working—payments companies across the country are cutting off service to categories of merchants that—although providing a legal service—are creating the potential for significant financial and reputational harm as law enforcement publicizes its activities.

Thus far, payday lenders have been the most frequent target. ... And if payday lenders are today’s target–what category will be next and who makes that decision?

I'm not sure who made the decision, but it seems the next big targeted category is the adult film industry. Last week, adult film actress Teagan Presley and an unknown number of others in the porn industry received notices that their Chase Bank accounts were being abruptly terminated.
 

"When Presley went to the bank in person to ask why, she was told it’s because she’s considered 'high risk,'" according to VICE News. VICE's Mary O'Hara was the first to note a likely link between the porn bank account closings and Operation Choke Point. The DOJ did not respond to VICE News’ request for comment.

For years, various government initiatives have been aimed at reaching the "unbanked" and "underbanked." Federal officials claim to want to help these individuals avoid high fees and other downsides of nontraditional financial services, but it's hard not to suspect these efforts have at least as much to do with wanting a record of everyone's financial goings-on. If the unbanked were such a real concern, why would federal agencies be simultaneously encouraging banks to drop more customers?

Targeting porn performers or not, Operation Choke Point represents an incredible abuse of regulatory power. In a recent American Banker op-ed, former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman William M. Isaac called it "a direct assault on the democratic system and free-market economy."

In a March 2013 hearing before a Senate Banking subcommittee, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) pointed out the obvious: that DOJ has "no statutory authority" to be doing this. But why bother with statutory authority when you can just secretly strong-arm highly regulated businesses into doing what you want? I've never been much of a cryptocurrency evangelist myself, but I'm beginning to come around...

Christianity’s faith-based freakout: Why atheism makes believers so uncomfortable

Rather than respecting the right of atheists to disbelieve, christians are constantly forcing them to fake it

Greta Christina

Why do so many religious believers want atheists to lie about our atheism?

It seems backward. Believers are always telling atheists that we need religion for morality; that we have to believe because without religion, people would have no reason not to murder and steal and lie. And yet, all too often, they ask us to lie. When atheists come out of the closet and tell the people in our lives that we don’t believe in God, all too often the reaction is to try to shove us back in.

In some cases, they simply want us to keep our mouths shut: when the topic of religion comes up, they want us to tell the lie of omission. But much of the time, they actually ask us to lie outright. They ask us to lie to other family members. They ask us to attend church or other religious services. They sometimes even ask us to perform important religious rituals, like funerals or confirmations, where we’re not just lying to the people around us, but to the god they supposedly believe in.

Why would they do this?

When I was doing research for my new guidebook, “ Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why,” I was shocked at how often this happens. I read over 400 “coming out atheist” stories to write this book, and in the stories I read, this theme came up again and again and again.

You see it a lot with parents and children. When kids and teenagers tell their parents that they’re atheists, parents often respond by insisting that their kids keep up a religious charade. Alexander came out as atheist to his family in fourth grade, and was met with hostility and confusion — and quickly went back into the closet. “True to form,” he says on his Scribbles and Rants blog, “my parents dropped the matter as long as I went through the motions and didn’t bring it up myself.”

Parents don’t just pressure their atheist kids to keep up the facade, either. They often force them into it. On the Coming Out Godless Project website, Emmanuel Donate says when he was a teenager and came out as atheist to his family, a Latino family who took their Catholicism seriously, they forced him to go to church with them. And Lexie tells of the enormous fight she had with her mother over whether she would go to church. “I did go to church that next morning,” she says, “albeit yelling, screaming and basically being dragged out of the door (picture a teenager and mother behaving basically like a young mum and tantruming toddler).”

This doesn’t just mean making kids sit through church, either. Stories of kids and teenagers being forced to go through confirmations and other important religious rituals are ridiculously common. Helena says she was pressured to be confirmed into her Lutheran church — even though she knew she was an atheist and had tried to make that as clear as she could. And she isn’t alone. Lauren, who came out as atheist to her Lutheran family and church at age 12, told both her mother and her pastor that she didn’t want to be confirmed. When she told her pastor, “I can’t get up there and say stuff I don’t believe,” he replied, “Please stop disrupting class with your questions. This is a special time in everyone’s life — don’t ruin it.”

The upshot was that she was forced to go through with the ceremony, and to lie, in public, about her atheism. Now, here’s the thing: Confirmation is one of the most serious rituals in religion. It’s the ritual in which children accept adult responsibility for their purported soul, and declare their adult commitment to their religion. The whole point is that they’re finally making a free choice about participating in religion, instead of just going along with their family. Yet parents and clergy still pressure kids into this ritual, or even force them into it. Even when they know it’s a lie.

But this isn’t just a parent/kid dynamic. It happens with adults as well. It happens between spouses; in the workplace; in adult families and communities; between parents and adult children. When Rosie and her husband first started dating, she made sure he was aware of her atheism — and yet, she says, “When our first child was baptized, I felt suckered into participating.” When Judy Komorita’s mother died, her Christian evangelical boss “gathered me up with the bookkeeper into a prayer circle. I knew it was stupid (and wrong), and I was shaking with grief. But with his and her arms around me, he said something like ‘Lord, even though Judy doesn’t believe in you, I know you will take care of her and help her.”

When LD’s father died, “[the] priest requested we all do readings and I was open to it, if I could read something poetic from Psalms, maybe.” Instead, she says, “I was handed John 3:16. ['For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.']” This happened even though her family and friends knew about her atheism. And in her famous performance piece Letting Go of God, actor and comedian Julia Sweeney says that her mom’s response to her atheism was, “This doesn’t mean that you’ve stopped going to church, does it?”

And pressure to pray in the U.S. military abounds. Including official orders to pray. On the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers website, you’ll see these stories again and again. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Francy Legault says, “In boot camp, we were learning commands — right face, march, all that and one command is ‘let us pray’ and we were told it didn’t matter what we believed, when we heard that command, we had to bow our heads. So prayer is a command.”

Army Sergeant John Gill says, “My first glimpse of Army belief pushing came when I was standing on a parade field as a brand new private, refusing to bow my head for the chaplain’s prayer. My platoon sergeant told me afterward that even if I didn’t believe in God, I should bow my head out of respect for those around me.”

Air Force Staff Sergeant Johnathan Napier says, “I also remember going through basic training and being given the option of ‘going to church’ or ‘cleaning.’ That’s not a real option.” And Army Master Sergeant Michael Hammond says, “Being ‘strongly encouraged’ as a leader to attend yet another prayer breakfast has pushed me past the point of tolerance.” In fact, it’s common for atheists in the U.S. Military to be pressured to not list “atheist” on their dog tags — or even have their explicit requests about this refused.

If believers were sincerely concerned about atheists’ immortal souls, I’d understand why they might argue with us, show us their concerns and fears, even try with all their might to convince us that we’re wrong. But why would they ask us to lie? Why would they ask us to pretend to be religious? And why would they ask us to lie, not only in small ways to our friends and families and communities, but in important rituals to the god they believe in?

I’ve been thinking about these stories for a long time. Ever since I started working on my guide, this phenomenon has troubled me. It’s troubled me morally — it’s such a messed-up thing to do. And it’s troubled me intellectually. It’s such backward, self-contradictory behavior. Why would people do it?

I think a few factors play into this. As I wrote in the book: “For many families, being religious is less about spiritual beliefs, and more about family identity. More than anything else, going to religious services is a family togetherness activity, or even a family duty. As Sally M. says, who was brought up Catholic but has been an atheist since childhood, says, “The whole family has always treated church like a chore, so they probably assumed I was claiming atheism to get out of wasting my Sunday. If my mother had to drag herself and the rest of my siblings out of bed, there was no way I was getting out of it.” And some believers may think that participating in religious rituals will somehow draw atheists back into belief.

But I think there’s something else going on here, something more powerful than either of these.

They don’t want to hear that the emperor has no clothes.

And if too many people start saying that the emperor has no clothes, they’ll have a harder time convincing themselves that he does.

Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. It’s a bad idea, and can’t stand up on its own. But it can, and does, perpetuate itself through social consent. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that asking questions about religion is sinful, and that trusting religion without evidence is virtuous. It perpetuates itself through dogma saying that joy and meaning and morality can only be found in religion, and that leaving religion will automatically result in a desperate, amoral, pointless life. It perpetuates itself through religious communities and support systems that make believing in religion — or pretending to believe in religion — a necessity to function and indeed survive. It perpetuates itself through parents and other authority figures teaching it to children, whose brains are hard-wired to believe what they’re told.

Religion relies on social consent to perpetuate itself. But the simple act of coming out as an atheist denies it this consent. Even if atheists never debate believers or try to persuade them out of their beliefs; even if all we ever do is say out loud, “Actually, I’m an atheist,” we’re still denying our consent. And that throws a monkey wrench into religion’s engine.

There’s a reason that rates of atheism have been going up as use of the Internet goes up. (According to the MIT Technology Review, the dramatic drop in religious affiliation in the U.S. since 1990 is closely mirrored by the increase in Internet use — and while correlation certainly doesn’t prove causation, this analysis factors out pretty much every other possible causation.) The Internet has created a massive worldwide forum for atheists to argue about religion, to give evidence against religion, to ask for evidence and arguments supporting religion and point out how ridiculously weak they are. But the Internet has also created a massive, worldwide forum for atheists to simply, you know, exist.

In my research for “Coming Out Atheist,” I read numerous stories of atheists who had stayed religious for years — simply because everyone around them was religious, and they never considered the possibility that someone could be non-religious. But this is becoming less and less common. It’s getting harder and harder to keep atheism a secret. If you’re a teenager in a tiny town in the Bible Belt, you can now find out about atheists. You can talk with atheists. You can argue with atheists. You can learn what atheists think and why they think it. And you can simply learn that atheists exist, and are basically good people who love life and find great meaning in it. And that, just by itself, just by denying consent to your religion, stands a good chance of putting a serious dent in it.

What’s more, this denial of consent has a snowball effect. As more atheists come out of the closet, more people will question religion and eventually leave it. And as they leave religion and come out about their atheism, another wave of people will question and abandon religion … and so on, and so on, and so on.

It’s easy to ignore one person saying that the emperor has no clothes. It’s a lot harder to ignore 10 people saying it — and it’s harder still to ignore a hundred, or a thousand.

So if you want to ignore the emperor’s nakedness, it’s not enough to just ignore it. You have to get other people to shut up about it. If you want religion to keep perpetuating itself, you have to get people to go along with it. You have to get people to fake it.

You have to get people to lie.

And that’s what explains this weird phenomenon, this phenomenon of religious believers telling atheists, openly and explicitly, to lie about our atheism. This phenomenon is Exhibit A in just how essential social consent is to keeping religion propped up. It shows just how shaky the foundations of religion are — when people openly state that they would rather have us pretend to believe than be honest. It shows just how shaky believers’ hold on religion is, when they tell us that we need religion to be moral, but then ask us, openly and explicitly and without any apparent shame, to lie.