Via FourthAmendment.Com:

Strip frisk policy of inmates was related to a penological purpose and was valid: Davidson v Kyle (2004, WD NY) 2004 US Dist Lexis 8013. Defendant answering door in response to police knock was in public place for arrest on warrant under Santana; he was not under compulsion by answering door: State v Shellenbarger (2004, Ida App) 2004 Ida App Lexis 37.

Comment: One cannot help but wonder what the current allegations of U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq are having, consciously or subconsciously, on the deliberations of the U.S. Supreme Court in Rasul v Bush, the Guantanamo detainees case, considering that the government argues that the detainees at Guantanamo are not subject either to the Geneva Conventions or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, treaties championed by the U.S. when they were adopted. If the Baghdad press conference at 9 am ET CNN today is an indication, we consider the allegations there a violation of the Geneva convention. In addition, a Canadian citizen living in Los Angeles has sued in the U.S. Claims Court claiming he was tortured in Iraq at the beginning of the war, and he saw worse than he received. What happened happened, and we'll know more soon, if the alleged rape and homicide photographs are released. But, the fact that it might happen in the future was the reason the U.S. military gave in early 2001 for not wanting the U.S. to ratify the International Criminal Court treaty because we did not want our soldiers tried as potential war criminals. Makes one wonder what they were planning for Iraq.

by TChris

More images of abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners are coming. As disturbing as they will be to see, as damaging as they will be to the reputation of the United States, they can't be hidden.

Inside the White House, several of Mr. Bush's aides have argued that he has little choice but to make them public. Sooner or later, they say, the images will leak out, prolonging the pain, fueling Iraqi and Arab suspicions of a Pentagon-orchestrated cover-up, and giving new life to calls for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's removal.

Some Pentagon officials argue that releasing the pictures would jeopardize criminal prosecutions by giving defense lawyers the opportunity to argue that the publicity has made it impossible for their clients to have a fair trial. But crime scene pictures are splashed across newspapers and TV screens every day. Scott Peterson, Martha Stewart, O.J. Simpson, et al. demonstrate that pretrial publicity doesn't keep a case from going to trial.

Other military officials argue that the pictures will only make the Arab world, and the Iraqi public, angrier. True, but even if the pictures weren't likely to leak out, they shouldn't be hidden from public view. Suppressing the truth because we know that others won't like it isn't consistent with our core values.

Pretending that the pictures don't exist and hoping that it all blows over was the Rumsfeld strategy. It didn't work then, and it won't work now. The pictures should be made public.

by TChris

The President's web page on corporate responsibility claims that his administration "continues to pursue an aggressive agenda to fight corporate fraud and abuse" for the protection of investors. So the Bush administration must support regulatory proposals that benefit investors, right?

The Securities and Exchange Commission has come under intense pressure from business and some members of the Bush administration to water down proposed rule changes in the way corporate boards are elected, mutual funds are governed and hedge funds are regulated.

The proposals, which flow from scandals in the mutual fund industry and at some of the nation's largest corporations, have split the agency largely along partisan lines. The two Democratic commissioners support them, the two Republicans have expressed skepticism about them, and the swing vote is in the hands of the agency's chairman, William H. Donaldson, a Bush appointee.

Donaldson is being pressured to water down the rules by "an administration eager to court the chief executives during an election year."

The White House web page gives the President credit for leading the S.E.C.'s effort to improve corporate accountability, and it leaves the impression that the administration fully supports proposals for reform. The administration's effort to sway the S.E.C. in favor of corporate executives isn't mentioned.

by TChris

Even before they met John Thompson, the kids in an eighth grade class in Philadelphia understood that it's easy to be falsely accused of a crime.

His message sunk in with students at the school in North Philadelphia's Olney section, who said they had seen neighbors questioned for crimes they did not commit, who themselves have been targeted as thieves just for picking up a jar in a grocery store.

That's what happened to 14-year-old Stacey Scott. The owner of the market threw her out, humiliating her in front of other customers. "I felt like, why would she do that to me? Did I look different?" Scott said. "I didn't really know how to feel."

Thompson talked to the kids about his 18 years on death row for a crime he didn't commit. His message: "I never gave up." Thompson's lawyer, Michael Banks, also had a lesson for the kids.

"You can make a difference in someone's life if you put your mind to it," he told the students. "Despite John's near-execution, our system has the potential to work if all of us work with it."

by TChris

Until recently, the White House did a masterful job of maintaining control of its message. The message wasn't usually accurate, but at least the main players stayed on the same page as they parroted the administration's line.

Those days are gone, says Time.

Top Bush officials griped about what one called Rumsfeld's "destructive arrogance." Says the adviser: "You have no idea what it's like to deal with the United States of Rumsfeld." Colin Powell's closest aides, like chief of staff Larry Wilkerson, were quoted in GQ magazine, saying that Powell was weary of fighting ideological "utopians" in the Administration and being forced to do "damage control" and "apologizing around the world." Powell's foes, perhaps in retaliation, blamed him for being slow to decide to travel to the Middle East to help quell the furor over the abuse scandal. Says a senior Bush official of the open warfare: "It is not very conducive to a healthy working environment."

The White House will surely try to regroup, but Bush and those who surround him are natural finger-pointers. Keeping on message will grow increasingly difficult as the administration struggles to find a positive message to spread.

by TChris

As TalkLeft reported yesterday, there's some uncertainty as to whether a fingerprint found in the van used by the persons responsible for train explosions in Madrid belongs to Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer who was arrested last week. The government arrested Mayfield before checking to see if he'd been to Spain (his family says he hasn't). It's now clear that Mayfield's activities as a lawyer contributed to his arrest.

Mayfield represented Jeffrey Battle in a child custody dispute. Battle was convicted of conspiring to help the Taliban fight against the United States. The government acknowledges that it views Mayfield's choice of clients with suspicion. An official says it would be different if the print matched "some little old lady in Peoria."

Mayfield's brother thinks Brandon is being "profiled" by the government. At the very least, Brandon Mayfield is being judged by the company he keeps -- a frightening prospect when the association is a professional one.

by TChris

Nobody should need to hear a legal opinion in order to understand that it's wrong to degrade and humiliate prisoners, but some are asking whether Pentagon officials blew it by rejecting a plan to send Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN) to help supervise the unit responsible for prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. Buyer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, volunteered for the assignment.

In a telephone interview Friday with The Associated Press, Buyer said military officials all the way up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff had approved his assignment to the 800th Military Police Brigade, which has handled Iraqi prisoners of war since the beginning of the conflict.

Buyer had experience, having served as a lawyer at a POW camp during the first Gulf War. Nonetheless, the Army decided that Buyer's "high-profile status could bring danger to the troops around him." In retrospect, the decision not to take advantage of Buyer's experience brought danger to prisoners who were at the mercy of poorly supervised troops.

We're on the road today. The TL kid is in New York, studying for law school finals, so we'll be spending much of Mother's Day with Markos of Daily Kos, his wife Elisa and baby Ari in Berkeley, who are just back from a trip to El Salvador. Monday we're giving a lecture to habeas (death penaltyappeals) lawyers in San Francisco on how to challenge eyewitness identification evidence, and then we'll be back. TChris will be around some while we're gone, as his schedule permits, and we'll post a bit from the road, just not at our usual pace.

We hope all you readers (including the TL kid) will remember to call your mothers today....and we wish all the mothers reading this a happy and relaxing day Mother's Day.

P.S. Check out this picture of Ari in Wired News, part of an article Elisa wrote about the environmental dilemma of diapers.

Update: What a great day. We're now Tia Jeralyn. The cutest baby we've seen in 20 years.

by TChris

Last month, TalkLeft reported that former Wisconsin district attorney (and unsuccessful Republican candidate for state attorney general) Joseph Paulus is being prosecuted for accepting bribes in drunk driving cases from a former prosecutor turned defense attorney. New information reveals that Paulus was the kind of prosecutor who, blinded by his own ambition and sense of righteousness, would do anything to secure a conviction, even if it meant sending the innocent to prison.

The prosecutor who replaced Paulus has asked the state's Department of Justice to review twenty cases in which Paulus withheld evidence from the defense. In one case, Paulus withheld DNA evidence that proved a rape suspect hadn't committed the crime. In a murder case, he withheld evidence that the victim's death may have been accidental. When his employees questioned his integrity, he fired them; when they tried to reveal his wrongdoing, he publicly attacked them.

Paulus apparently made records disappear that would reveal his wrongdoing.

[The new prosecutor] said his office also has asked the state to look into why numerous court, police and prosecutors' records in questionable cases are now missing. Among the lost records: Sheriff's department reports from the early 1990s in which Paulus was accused by his former wife of stalking her.

Questions about Paulus' integrity had surfaced repeatedly over the years, but nothing happened until he was caught accepting bribes. Yet the bribery caused far less harm than the pattern of disregarding rules and rights in order to secure convictions. The larger implications of this story shouldn't be ignored.

The allegations surrounding Paulus should prompt state policymakers to "seize the moment" to determine what additional checks and balances need to be placed on district attorneys in Wisconsin, said Walter Dickey, a UW-Madison law professor and former state corrections secretary. "The fact of the matter is," Dickey said, "we have too much power in the hands of the prosecutor."

One reform is obvious: prosecutors shouldn't be allowed to keep any scrap of information secret. Everything should be turned over to the defense, in every case.

Major General Geoffrey Miller is back as the new head of prisons in Iraq. Saturday, he defended his recommendation (made last summer during a visit to Abu Ghraib) that Iraqi prison guards be "actively engaged" in extracting information from Iraqi detainees. See also the transcript of his May 4 briefing conference here. Miller was sent to Iraq to replace Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski Miller who was relieved of her duty in March. Before then, Miller had been the Commander at Guantanamo:

Although the spotlight Friday was on Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s testimony before Congress, the focus of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal has started to shift onto Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Miller left Guantanamo and was put in charge of Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, after Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was quietly sacked at the end of March. Gen. Janis Karpinski has not been charged in connection with the investigation.

She has subtly implied that Miller encouraged questionable practices by introducing his "Gitmo" (Guantanamo) prison practices into Iraq. She is reported to have said that Miller "Gitmo-ized" the Iraq system....Miller’s recommendations for speeding up the interrogation process at Abu Ghraib were presented to the top commander in Iraq, Brigadier General Ricardo S. Sanchez. In part they stated, " … it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees." The phrase, "setting conditions for interrogations" is a euphemism.

Miller denies using torture. We're skeptical of his claim, to say the least.

Anthony Lewis has a terrific column in the new Mother Jones, One Liberty At a Time, in which he argues:

From the cages at Gunatanamo to a jail cell in Brooklyn, the administration isn't just threatening the rights of a few detainees—it's undermining the very foundation of democracy.

It is not just for Guantanamo that the alarm bells of American liberty should be sounding. Civil liberties are more broadly in a perilous state.... In the name of fighting terrorism, President Bush and his administration have abruptly overridden rights protected by the Constitution and international law. Ideas foreign to American principles—detention without trial, denial of access to lawyers, years of interrogation in isolation—are now American practices.

The danger of what is happening is more profound than the denial of justice to some individuals. The Bush administration is really attacking a basic premise of the American system: that we have a government under law.

by TChris

After the government rested its case against former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, U.S. District Judge Martin Jenkins dismissed 23 of 42 charges against him. Lazarenko "is accused of defrauding and extorting hundreds of millions of dollars from his homeland and laundering more than $100 million through U.S. banks."

Jenkins ruled earlier in the trial that prosecutors would have to prove that the schemes Lazarenko was accused of using to defraud his former government were prohibited under Ukranian law and that the money he purportedly stole did not belong to him when it was transported out of the country.

On Friday, the judge said that prosecutors had failed to make their case on most of those points. "That Lazarenko's conduct may have violated some common law fiduciary duty in the United States would be insufficient to prove that he failed to provide honest services to the citizens of Ukraine," the judge wrote in an order issued on Friday.

Lazarenko still faces charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiring to steal money from a Ukrainian government-owned dairy business.