Around 100 people took to the streets of Brooklyn Monday night to protest the death of 16-year-old Kimani Gray, who was shot dead by the New York City Policy over the weekend. Police maintain that Gray pointed a gun at the officers prior to the shooting, but several witnesses dispute their account.

The demonstration, which started as a vigil, briefly turned violent when some protesters began “throwing bottles and rocks” at a police station. CBS New York reported that a worker at a local Rite Aid was assaulted. But “there were no reports of arrests or injuries.”

New York City Councilman Jumaane D. Williams was on the scene, live-tweeting the protest.

David Ayers, now 56, alleged police conspired to fabricate a confession he never made, and that they coerced a jailhouse informant whose testimony a federal appeals court found was “both inconsistent and unreliable.” After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ordered a new trial, a newly assigned prosecutor opted not to file new charges against him and Ayers was released from jail in 2011. Additional DNA testing, which prosecutors refused to conduct until a court order, linked the DNA evidence to another man, but prosecutors insisted that even the DNA test was not the reason they dropped charges against Ayers.

Ayers was a security guard in the building where victim Dorothy Brown lived, and was found shaking and bawling shortly after the crime occurred, which caused police to question him. He and another woman said they had helped Brown earlier that day after she had fallen down in her apartment, but police suspected him of lying because they misinterpreted building video footage.

In a ruling rejected the police officers’ attempt to claim immunity from the civil suit, U.S. District Judge James S. Gwin described the officers’ apparent attempts to manipulate the evidence, flagging their particularly alarming focus on the sexual orientation of Ayers:

First, [Ayers] says that Cleveland Defendant Detectives Cipo and Kovach coerced Ken Smith to give false testimony. The Defendants interviewed Smith, and Smith then signed a statement saying that Ayers called him and spoke about Brown’s murder before Brown’s body had even been discovered. Actually, police had records showing that Smith called Ayers, and not that Ayers had called Smith. During the trial, Smith said the written statement was false and testified that Cipo and Kovach pressured him to say that Ayers phoned him prior to the discovery of Brown’s body. Witness Smith now gives an affidavit that states:

the detectives showed me a statement they wanted me to sign. I didn’t want to sign it because I was not sure that it was the truth. The detectives told me that the statement was what I said yesterday, and that if I changed what I said I could be charged with a crime, I think it was perjury. . . . I was afraid to say anything else because they had threatened to charge me with a crime.

Ayers’s alleged confession also raises questions. In her deposition, Detective Kovach testified that on March 14, 2000, Ayers said something to the effect of, “if I say I hit her, can I go home?” Inexplicably, neither Detective Cipo nor Kovach made mention of Ayer’s incriminating question in their contemporaneous report. Then neither Cipo or [sic] Kovach mentioned anything about the confession to a prosecutor until shortly before Ayers’s trial was set to begin. Then, two days after the confession, Defendants Cipo and Kovach again interviewed Ayers yet their notes and reports show no mention of the previous confession, and the interrogation notes suggest that Ayers maintained his innocence. And perhaps most concerning: Defendant Cipo did not mention the confession in his March 17, 2000, affidavit for a search warrant. The inference that the confession was concocted grows even stronger after considering what did make its way into the police reports.

Defendants consistently made notes about Ayers’s sexual orientation, his friends’ sexual orientations, and whether people they questioned appeared “gay like.” They noted that certain witnesses “sat like a gay male.” Whatever the police officers meant to imply by sitting “like a gay male,” it surely is less material than an extremely inculpatory statement that Cipo and Kovach say was made by the investigation’s primary suspect during an early interrogation.

This case exemplifies several of the most alarming problems that lead to wrongful convictions. First, prosecutors resisted DNA testing that would have provided objective scientific evidence. Only after lawyers from the Ohio Innocence Project litigated the issue for more than a year were they able to obtain a judge’s order to perform the test. Even those few defendants who have access to the Innocence Project’s excellent legal assistance and are involved in cases where DNA evidence is even available do not always gain access to DNA testing. And a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision held that even a man seeking to test his own evidence entirely with his own funds did not have a right to do so.

Second, the case exemplifies the manner in which so-called “confessions” can be manipulated, and while most confessions are not even recorded, even those that are can be far less reliable than most assume.

Lastly, the case shows how investigators and prosecutors who hone in on a certain suspect – often because of biases about irrelevant factors such as sexual orientation – are incentivized to continue pursuing that suspect, even when the evidence is extremely lacking. They may even feel pressure to coerce an informant so that they can claim to have solved and closed a case that might otherwise be more difficult to “solve.”

A New York state judge halted NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s ban on sales of large sugary drinks. According to the judge, Bloomberg’s rule “fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences. . . . The simple reading of the rule leads to the earlier acknowledged uneven enforcement even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole . . . .the loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the state purpose of the rule.”

Former U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) ended his presidential campaign in January 2008, after a weak showing in the Iowa caucuses. More than five years later, the largely-paralyzed Federal Election Commission (FEC) has fined his long-defunct campaign $42,000 for failure to properly report campaign contributions.

Because Dodd’s campaign was one of eight 2008 presidential committees to take public matching funds, it agreed to an automatic audit of campaign fundraising. That routine investigation — completed in April 2012 — found that Dodd’s campaign failed to report $764,966 in gross receipts. The matter was then referred for possible enforcement action. Nearly a year later, the Dodd 2008 campaign and the FEC signed a conciliation agreement in January. The commission accepted the agreement and make it public on Friday — more than two years after Dodd retired from public life.

Meredith McGehee, policy director at the non-partisan Campaign Legal Center, told ThinkProgress that the delayed and weak action by the FEC “shows what a joke they’ve become… They’re picking on a campaign that was incredibly unsuccessful. The candidate is no longer in office. It’s kind of like going after the mosquitoes when the room is full of lions and tigers and bears. Mosquitoes are bad, you want to get rid of them, but what does it matter if you’re being eaten by the lion, the tiger, or the bear?”

The five-year lag time, she noted, is a result of under-funding by Congress. “They just don’t have enough resources to do this is what most people would consider an effective way.” That lack of effective enforcement sends a signal to other political committees that they have little to fear if they fail to accurately report their own finances. “A lot of the effective enforcement is done when people see that there is enforcement, they self-enforce. When they don’t see enforcement, they don’t self-enforce, say ‘let’s roll the dice.’ When you win your election, the fine is just the cost of doing business.”

Audits from the 2000 campaign were mostly completed within two years. But a number of new FEC policies, instituted since, have further slowed the process. With the sequestration likely to force spending cuts at the FEC, it remains to be seen whether the three 2012 campaigns that accepted matching funds will have their audits completed by 2017.

Chris Dodd for President’s end of 2012 report showed the committee with about $18,000 in the bank. There is little forcing it to actually pay the fine and raising money for failed campaigns after the fact can be incredibly difficult — former Sen. John Glenn (D-OH) spent 23 years paying of the campaign debt from his 1984 campaign.

In addition to paying a $42,000 fine, the conciliation agreement stipulates that Dodd 2008 will “cease and desist” from violating disclosure laws going forward.

Shortly after President Obama signed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) reauthorization into law, Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) released a glowing press release claiming that a “Cornyn bill” to “eliminate nationwide rape kit backlog” was signed into law. The so-called “Cornyn bill” is the SAFER Act, which was incorporated into the VAWA renewal, and which “provide[s] funding for state and local governments to conduct audits of untested DNA evidence and create[s] a national reporting system to help track and prioritize untested rape kits,” according to Cornyn. By all appearances, it seems like a wonderful law. There’s only one problem.

Cornyn voted against it.

Cornyn was one of 22 Senate Republican men who voted against the VAWA renewal. He opposed the bill because he objected to a provision enabling tribal courts to prosecute non-Native Americans who commit rape or other violent crimes against women on Indian reservations. This provision is intended to combat the virtual lawlessness that faces Native American women on these reservations without the VAWA renewal. A 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office found that federal prosecutors “declined to prosecute 46 percent of assault matters and 67 percent of sexual abuse and related matters” on reservations.

(HT: Steve Benen)

Given enough time, law enforcement can break through the password that blocks access to a laptop. They can also access password-encrypted files and potentially even read the files a user deleted from their computer. As a recent opinion from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit puts it, “[i]t is as if a search of a person’s suitcase could reveal not only what the bag contained on the current trip, but everything it had ever carried.”

In light of the sweeping and unpredictable nature of laptop and similar searches, the court’s opinion places an important new restriction on government searches of electronic devices as the border. As a general rule, “the long-standing right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country” justifies nearly any search of a person crossing into the United States from another country. So if you are secreting contraband away in your luggage, you are out of luck. As the Ninth Circuit’s opinion explains, however, searches of electronic devices are far greater intrusions into a traveler’s privacy, and thus must be justified by a greater degree of suspicion before they can occur:

The amount of private information carried by international travelers was traditionally circumscribed by the size of the traveler’s luggage or automobile. That is no longer the case. Electronic devices are capable of storing warehouses full of information. The average 400-gigabyte laptop hard drive can store over 200 million pages—the equivalent of five floors of a typical academic library. Even a car full of packed suitcases with sensitive documents cannot hold a candle to the sheer, and ever-increasing, capacity of digital storage.

The nature of the contents of electronic devices differs from that of luggage as well. Laptop computers, iPads and the like are simultaneously offices and personal diaries. They contain the most intimate details of our lives: financial records, confidential business documents, medical records and private emails. This type of material implicates the Fourth Amendment’s specific guarantee of the people’s right to be secure in their “papers.” The express listing of papers “reflects the Founders’ deep concern with safeguarding the privacy of thoughts and ideas—what we might call freedom of conscience—from invasion by the government.” These records are expected to be kept private and this expectation is “one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’”

The upshot of this opinion is that border agents cannot randomly select a person and comb through their laptop for incriminating data, nor can they conduct a comprehensive search of every iPad that enters the United States. Rather, before conducting a complete search of an electronic device, they must have “reasonable suspicion” that the search will uncover evidence of a crime.

Since the Louisiana school system began, last year, a voucher program that allows students to go to private schools on the public’s dime, reports have trickled out over questionable schools that qualified for the system.

With a lack of oversight, it seemed, children were being taught creationism and other debunked or wholly wrong ideas. Mother Jones uncovered that children were learning that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together, that the KKK did helpful community organizing, and that dragons were real.

But the latest example takes on perhaps the most overtly political stance. In a textbook obtained by Americablog, children are taught about hippies:

They went to Canada or European countries to escape being drafted into military service.

Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles’ these youths became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.

The book also includes this helpful picture of “the hippies”:

In December of 2012, a Louisiana state court declared the voucher program unconstitutional because it used public money to fund private enterprises. That decision is in the process of appeal by the state.

On Saturday night, two undercover police officers shot and killed 16-year-old Kimani Gray. According to the police account, the officers approached Gray when he “adjusted his waistband in what the police describe as a suspicious manner.” When the police asked him to “show his hands,” they claim Gray turned around and pointed a gun at the officers, who fired 11 rounds. The weapon police say belonged to Gray was not fired.

Although there is no confirmed evidence of wrongdoing by the officers, whose names have not be released, several witnesses cast doubts on the official version of the incident:

1. Eyewitness says Gray was “running for his life” when he was shot dead. “‘He was running for his life, telling the cops, ‘Stop,’ said witness Camille Johnson. ‘They really are, seriously, walking around, shooting little kids.’” [Pix11, 3/10/13]

2. Eyewitness says Gray was adjusting his belt, not shooting his gun, when the shooting began. “Mr. Gray’s sister, Mahnefah Gray, 19, said that a witness to the shooting told her that her brother had been fixing his belt when he was shot.” [New York Times, 3/10/13]

3. Eyewitness says, after he was shot, Gray said “please don’t let me die.” One of the officers responded “Stay down or, we’ll shoot you again.” [New York Times, 3/10/13]

4. Friends says “Kimani had just returned from a baby shower, and was shot only minutes after he was dropped off on East 52nd Street.” [NY1, 3/10/13]

5. Gray’s sister and others say he did not own a gun. “Mr. Gray’s sister, Mahnefah Gray, 19, said that a witness to the shooting told her that her brother had been fixing his belt when he was shot. She, among others who knew Mr. Gray, said they had never known him to have a gun.” Gray’s cousin, Malik Vernon, also “insisted he didn’t own a gun.” [New York Times, 3/10/13; New York Post, 3/11/13]

NY1 does quote an anonymous source saying Gray was “holding the gun for a friend.” The police were quick to note that Gray had “four prior arrests.”