Democratic delegates approved the party's 2024 platform at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago yesterday, including sections lamenting the unfairness of marijuana convictions. However, the platform failed to explicitly call for legalizing or even decriminalizing the drug, a change from its position four years ago.
"No one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana," the final 2024 Democratic Party platform reads. "Sending people to prison for possession has upended too many lives and incarcerated people for conduct that many states no longer prohibit. Those criminal records impose needless barriers to employment, housing, and educational opportunities, disproportionately affecting Black and brown people."
The platform praises President Joe Biden for his moves to reschedule marijuana and his "historic action to end this failed approach by pardoning people convicted federally for using or possessing marijuana." It also promises that Democrats "will take action to expunge federal marijuana-only convictions" and "combat drug trafficking and expand the use of drug courts, interventions, and diversion for people with substance use disorders."
Former Republican President Donald Trump's approach to criminal justice "could not be more different," the platform argues. "His Administration threatened federal prosecution for marijuana cases in states where marijuana was legal."
For opponents of drug prohibition, though, the platform is a step backward from the Democratic Party's 2020 platform, which said it was "past time to end the failed 'War on Drugs' which has imprisoned millions of Americans—disproportionately Black people and Latinos—and hasn't been effective in reducing drug use." That platform also said Democrats supported federal decriminalization and rescheduling of marijuana, and legalization of medical marijuana.
The Democratic Party's official position on marijuana prohibition continues to fall well short of its stated goal of ending the unfairness of the drug war. First, it conflates all recreational drug use with substance abuse and addiction, which is an atypical outcome.
Second, the platform rests on the illogical notion that it shouldn't be a crime to possess and smoke marijuana, but it should remain illegal to sell it to others to smoke. (Notably, Biden's "historic" pardons for marijuana crimes excluded people convicted of growing or distributing the drug.)
Third, while drug courts and involuntary treatment are preferable alternatives to prison, they are still heavy-handed government interventions against adults for their personal choices. Drug courts and diversion programs operate under the threat of incarceration for noncompliance—the metaphorical iron fist in a velvet glove.
Even measures that the Democratic Party no longer explicitly supports in its platform—such as changes to Justice Department policy and decriminalization—would leave the federal prohibition of marijuana dormant but intact for future administrations to revive.
This has already happened. Former President Donald Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, rescinded President Barack Obama-era memos instructing U.S. Attorneys to take a hands-off approach to enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that legalized the drug.
The Democratic Party's position on pot is closer in spirit to creaky old Joe Biden, who could never quite give up his drug warrior ways, than the party's new leading candidates. As Reason's Jacob Sullum recently detailed, Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz both support marijuana legalization, although Harris is a Johnny-come-lately to her position. She was laughing off questions about marijuana legalization in 2014, but by 2018 she had come around and cosponsored a bill in the Senate that would have repealed federal prohibition.
According to a Gallup poll published last November, a record 70 percent of Americans, including 87 percent of Democrats, favor legalization. If the Democratic Party's presidential ticket and nearly 90 percent of its voters think marijuana should be fully legalized, how long will it take the party to catch up?
Two police officers in Watonga, Oklahoma, are under state investigation after body camera footage showed them slamming a father to the ground while he was taking his son for an early morning walk.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) confirmed to local news outlets that it's investigating whether the two Watonga officers used excessive force when they violently detained John Sexton on the morning of July 4.
The incident has led to hundreds of calls from outraged citizens to the police department, local news outlets, and the county sheriff, who has publicly called on the officers to be placed on leave.
Sexton was walking with his 6-year-old son, who has autism, around 6 a.m. when he was stopped by two Watonga police officers.
Watch the video below:
Father body slammed and arrəsted for taking "suspicious" early morning walk with his 6 year old son
OK officers arrəsted the man while walking with his son because he did not provide ID upon demand.
"Found it a little bit suspicious, just the walking around," one of the officers said.
"Walking around is a little bit suspicious?" Sexton replied.
"Technically not really," the officer said, "but, I mean, it is pretty early in the morning. Just wondering what was going on."
The other office then asked Sexton for his ID.
"I don't need to show my ID," he responded.
Sexton is correct. Oklahoma is not a "stop and identify" state, where police can demand the name of pedestrians, and even in those states, officers need a reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in a crime.
Nevertheless, police around the country continue to abuse their authority and arrest people for asserting their rights. In 2022 for example, a pair of Florida sheriff's deputies were demoted for arresting a legally blind man who lawfully refused to give his ID.
The Watonga offices appear similarly ignorant. One threatens to arrest and jail Sexton for failing to identify himself, "because I've identified that you've been walking around here at 5:30 in the morning."
"Yeah, we do that," Sexton replied.
"No, you're not. Give me your ID," the officer demanded.
Sexton said he left his ID at his house and repeated, correctly, that Oklahoma doesn't require him to identify himself.
One of the officers then tried to detain Sexton, who pulled away and attempted to record the incident with his cellphone. The officer then grabbed Sexton and swung him to the ground while Sexton's young son started wailing.
Sexton was briefly detained before being released without being charged. He has since filed a complaint with the Watonga Police Department, and the release of body camera footage of the incident has outraged residents.
Blaine County Sheriff Travis Daugherty told local news outlet KOCO News that his office received over 200 calls about the incident. Daugherty also said one of the officers involved was a former deputy in his office but had been demoted and eventually left to join the Watonga Police Department.
"The deputies that were underneath him, they had lost faith in him as their leader. Yeah, and so I demoted him back later," Daugherty said.
Lack of central databases of police disciplinary records and poor background checks lead to problem officers bouncing from department to department, leaving a trail of complaints and lawsuits in their wake.
Daugherty also sent a letter to residents pushing for the officers to be placed on leave until the investigation is complete.
"This is not a matter of me deciding if they are guilty or not; this is for the citizens to know that somebody is listening, and I hope to bring peace of mind and put citizens at ease to know that Watonga is doing everything they can to ensure the safety of the Blaine County Citizens," Daugherty wrote in the letter. "I feel the best course of action now is to remove these officers from the equation until the District Attorney's Office and city leaders decide what the best outcome will be."
In a July 29 press release, the City of Watonga said it was aware of Sexton's complaint and that the chief of police had requested the OSBI to investigate. It declined to comment until the completion of that investigation.
"As part of our commitment to integrity, we take any allegations seriously and are committed to transparency and accountability in our operations," the press release states. "Until the investigation is complete, and while following state law related to personnel matters, we will refrain from providing additional comments to preserve the integrity of the process."
Meanwhile, Sexton told local news outlets that his son was heavily traumatized by the event.
"He's been a cop for Halloween for the last two years," Sexton told KOCO News. "That's what he's been wanting to be when he grows up. That's what he says, and now he's scared of them."
Democrats in Congress have reintroduced a bill that would revive the ability to sue federal law enforcement officers for constitutional violations like excessive force, following a series of Supreme Court decisions that have made it practically impossible to do so.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D–R.I.) and Reps. Hank Johnson (D–Ga.) and Jamie Raskin (D–Md.) reintroduced the Bivens Act in the Senate and House, respectively, this week. The legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1871—a federal statute that allows people to sue the government for civil rights violations—to include federal officials acting under the color of law, as well as state and local officials.
"Public officials at all levels of government, including law enforcement, should have a clear, fair standard of accountability when they break the law," Whitehouse said in a press release. "Our Bivens Act would end the confusing judicial precedent that for too long has prevented victims from holding federal officials accountable and securing compensation for constitutional violations."
In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics that federal agents may be sued when they violate someone's rights. But subsequent Supreme Court rulings over the years have steadily narrowed the scope of so-called Bivens claims to the point where it's a dead letter.
In the most recent case, Egbert v. Boule, the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that a bed-and-breakfast owner could not sue a Border Patrol agent who had allegedly assaulted him and then retaliated after he complained. Reason's Damon Root summarized the case:
At issue were the actions of a border patrol agent who sought to question one of the guests at a Washington state bed-and-breakfast about the guest's immigration status. When owner Robert Boule told the agent, Erik Egbert, to leave his property, Egbert allegedly assaulted Boule. Then, when Boule complained about the alleged assault to the agent's superiors, Egbert allegedly retaliated by asking the IRS to investigate Boule, who was audited.
The Court ruled 6–3 that Boule could not bring a claim against Egbert for excessive force or First Amendment retaliation.
That same term, the Court declined to hear petitions involving cases where a St. Paul police officer invented a fake sex-trafficking ring and jailed a teenage girl for two years on trumped-up charges and where a Department of Homeland Security agent allegedly tried to kill a man because of an argument involving his son.
As Reason's Billy Binion wrote at the time, "A federal badge will now serve as an impenetrable shield against civil liability for violating the same laws agents are charged with upholding."
That's not just the opinion of some whacky libertarians either. Federal Judge Don Willett complained in a 2021 opinion that the Supreme Court has gutted Bivens to the extent that "if you wear a federal badge, you can inflict excessive force on someone with little fear of liability."
The Bivens Act is supported by numerous civil rights and watchdog groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the Project on Government Oversight.
Percival Everett has breathed fierce life into one of American literature's iconic characters in James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave.
James' conceit is that Jim is secretly literate and can speak with perfect diction. Twain's "painstakingly" studied "Missouri negro" dialect is a put-on that Jim and other slaves use to deflect white anger and suspicion. Everett is a sly writer, and he loves to employ this code-switching and the fictions of race for subversive comic effect.
But language is all-powerful in James. Early in Jim's journey, a slave steals a pencil for him—a hangable offense—so that Jim can "write himself into being."
"I can tell you that I am a man who is cognizant of his world," James, as he renames himself, writes, "a man who has a family, who loves a family, who has been torn from his family, a man who can read and write, a man who will not let his story be self-related, but self-written."
James' revolt against a society that defines him as property extends to the metaphysical. In his fever dreams he debates Voltaire and John Locke. He in fact writes himself out of Huckleberry Finn's unserious final act to pursue an ending that better fits his outrage and newfound agency.
Finn's key moment is when Huck declares he'll help Jim even if it means going to hell, but Everett reminds us that Jim is already there. James tells another man he was "born in hell. Sold before my mother could hold me." James is not a gauzy moral fable or boy's adventure, but a man's flight through the inferno of America's racial past that is by turns darkly funny and terrifying.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration is once again trying to carve out broad new exemptions to the state's celebrated government transparency law.
This time, lawyers for DeSantis are arguing that call logs from a high-ranking staffer's phone aren't public record, even though the staffer was conducting government business, because it was a private phone.
The Tampa Bay Timesfirst reported Thursday that lawyers for the DeSantis administration argued in court this week before a Leon County judge that the governor's office shouldn't be compelled to turn over call logs from DeSantis' Chief of Staff James Uthmeier's private cellphone.
The Florida Center for Government Accountability sued the DeSantis administration in 2022 for records concerning the migrant flights to Martha's Vineyard that DeSantis organized that year using state resources. The governor's office has turned over many records so far—and disclosed that Uthmeier and other staff used personal email addresses and phones rather than their state-issued ones—but it is currently defying a court order to release Uthmeier's phone logs.
"Florida is no longer the Sunshine State when it comes to transparency," says Michael Barfield, the Center's director of public access. "The public's right to know is headed into darkness."
Public records laws are commonly interpreted at both the federal and state levels, including in Florida, to cover records created on private devices and accounts if they concern government business. For example, the 2023 edition of the Florida attorney general's Government-in-the-Sunshine Manual states that "the mere fact that an e-mail is sent from a private e-mail account using a personal computer is not the determining factor as to whether it is a public record; it is whether the e-mail was prepared or received in connection with official agency business."
The manual also notes that "a public official or employee's use of a private cell phone to conduct public business via text messaging 'can create an electronic written public record subject to disclosure' if the text message is 'prepared, owned, used, or retained…within the scope of his or her employment or agency.'"
But DeSantis' lawyers are arguing that Uthmeier's call logs are "tertiary data," the Tampa Bay Times reports:
"If you hold that these tertiary data points are somehow public records that also have to be captured by a public records custodian, that is a sweeping — sweeping — interpretation of public records," DeSantis lawyer Christopher Lunny told Leon County Circuit Judge Lee Marsh on Tuesday.
But under that argument, Marsh said, all government business could be shielded from the public.
"We ought to just put out word, 'Let's do all of our business on private, bring-your-own cellphones," Marsh said. "Then we don't need public records laws because there'll be no public records, right?"
As Reason described in a magazine feature last year on Florida's Sunshine Law, the DeSantis administration is not just chipping away at the once-powerful public records law; it's taking a sledgehammer to it. State lawmakers have made the governor's travel records secret, and the DeSantis administration has also tried to invoke executive privilege over other documents, a privilege that is found nowhere in Florida's Sunshine Law and has never been claimed by previous governors.
DeSantis' office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last November, federal prosecutors invited Ilene Wahpeta, an incarcerated woman, to give a victim impact statement at the sentencing of Andrew Jones, a Bureau of Prisons (BOP) employee who was convicted of sexually assaulting three other inmates.
Less than a year later, the U.S. government is fighting a petition Wahpeta filed for early release based on the same allegations that prosecutors previously invited her to speak about, arguing she wasn't a named victim in the criminal case against Jones and that her claims aren't credible.
The Justice Department announced in 2022, amid several damning investigations into sexual assault by staff in federal prisons, that it was working to expand a program for early release to include women who'd been abused behind bars, but Wahpeta's case is one example of what criminal justice advocates say is the Justice Department undercutting that policy. Lawyers representing incarcerated women filing for early release based on their status as sexual assault survivors say federal prosecutors are now routinely fighting to disqualify their clients because of an unreasonably narrow definition.
At the heart of the issue is a new policy passed in April 2023 by the U.S. Sentencing Commission that makes federal inmates who were sexually abused by staff eligible for compassionate release. Compassionate release is a policy that allows federal inmates to petition for early release for "extraordinary and compelling" reasons, such as terminal illness or family emergencies. However, the expansion included a major caveat that was added at the recommendation of the Justice Department. To be eligible, a prisoner's claim of sexual abuse "must be established by a conviction in a criminal case, a finding or admission of liability in a civil case, or a finding in an administrative proceeding."
Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), a criminal justice advocacy group, has been coordinating legal representation for women who were formerly incarcerated at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a federal women's prison in California that was infested with so much corruption, sexual abuse, and whistleblower retaliation that the BOP shut it down earlier this year.
Shanna Rifkin, the deputy general counsel at FAMM, says they have secured releases for 17 women out of the 25 cases they've taken on. But Rifkin says government opposition has increased significantly since the new policy statement took effect.
"Before November 1, 2023, when this policy statement went into effect, in almost every single case the government was agreeing or not opposing the compassionate release motion," Rifkin says. "Since then, there has been a lot more resistance to compassionate release motions based on sexual abuse."
The Justice Department argued that requiring a finding of guilt would set a clear standard for judges. It wrote in a public comment on the Sentencing Commission's proposed changes that "permitting compassionate release hearings only after the completion of other administrative or legal proceedings will help ensure that allegations are more fairly adjudicated, prevent mini-trials on allegations, and reduce interference with pending investigations and prosecutions."
However, Rifkin says this undercuts one of the major reforms in the FIRST STEP Act of 2018. That act changed compassionate release to allow inmates to directly petition federal judges, significantly reducing the BOP's power to stonewall and delay petitions.
"It effectively puts the Department of Justice back in the driver's seat," Rifkin says of the new policy statement, "because who drives a criminal case? The Department of Justice. Victims of abuse have no say over when a case against their abuser will be brought, if it will be brought, and who will be charged as the victims in the case."
And while a finding of guilt may sound like a reasonable standard, it is a surprisingly difficult one to meet in cases of sexual assault perpetrated by government employees.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 2016 to 2018, perpetrators of staff sexual misconduct were only convicted, sentenced, fined, or pleaded guilty in 6 percent of substantiated incidents in federal and state prisons.
Reason detailed last year how a cadre of corrupt guards at a federal minimum security camp in Florida was allowed to prey on women for years without oversight. Those guards eventually admitted under oath to internal affairs investigators that they had assaulted incarcerated women, yet most were allowed to retire and none was ever prosecuted.
Over the past year, the Justice Department has ramped up scrutiny of prisons and prosecutions of corrupt BOP employees, but even with more vigilant oversight, criminal cases do not move quickly through the court system, especially if the defendant goes to trial. Rifkin cited one pending case against a former FCI Dublin correctional officer who has been charged with assaulting three women. He was indicted in May 2023, but his trial isn't scheduled until 2025.
"So women who are survivors of his abuse ostensibly have to wait until the government has concluded their case in order to have a cognizable claim under this policy statement," Rifkin explains.
As for civil suits against government employees, they routinely take years to resolve, and settlements often stipulate that they do not constitute admissions of guilt by the defendants.
The difference between how petitions have been handled before and after the new standard was enacted is stark. Take the case of Aimee Chavira, a former inmate at FCI Dublin who says she was abused by five correctional officers and continued to suffer retaliation after she was transferred out of the prison.
When Chavira filed her compassionate release petition, only one of those officers had been indicted, and another committed suicide while under investigation. Nevertheless, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California filed a motion of nonopposition in response to her petition. Chavira was released in May of last year.
Contrast that with Wahpeta's case, where prosecutors have not only tried to apply the adjudication requirement but also attacked her credibility.
In a court filing opposing Wahpeta's petition, prosecutors note that Wahpeta never gave her victim impact statement because of objections from Jones' attorney and concerns that her story was insufficiently corroborated. The government also puts significance on the facts that she initially refused to cooperate with FBI investigators and denied being abused; that she didn't mention being abused in letters to her family she wrote while in solitary confinement; that she contemplated getting a lawyer; and that her descriptions of abuse were remarkably similar to the narratives of the named victims in the criminal case against Jones.
"Even when writing to her parents, her main concern was getting out of confinement early, not reporting what she had seen," federal prosecutors argue. "Also, defendant never mentions being a victim of abuse, but rather that she witnessed the abuse."
But this behavior is all too common in cases of sexual abuse in prison. Incarcerated victims of sexual assault often initially refuse to cooperate with investigators out of fear of retaliation from correctional officers, who remain in total control of their lives. Indeed, Wahpeta was put in solitary confinement while Jones was under investigation, and she remained there for more than two months before Jones was removed from the prison. Besides embarrassment or any other number of personal reasons, survivors are also often vague in communications with family because correctional officers can read their letters and emails.
Bay Area news outlet KTVU has interviewed dozens of women over the past two years about sexual abuse and retaliation inside FCI Dublin, and a lawsuit on behalf of multiple incarcerated FCI Dublin women described the repression inside the prison in detail: "Survivors who report sexual abuse are verbally threatened, physically assaulted, sent to solitary confinement, given false disciplinary tickets, have their cells tossed and property destroyed, have their mail (including legal mail) interfered with, strip searched, and transferred to other BOP institutions away from their families—and are even targeted for further sexual abuse."
In a sentencing memorandum filed in Jones' case, prosecutors were keenly aware of how retaliation works inside federal prisons. "To enforce the silence that was so critical to the perpetuation of his predation, Jones created an environment of intimidation, fear, and reprisal," prosecutors wrote. "It wasn't just words. Jones also enforced silence and obedience through violence and threats of violence."
Yet, now federal prosecutors take Wahpeta's silence as a mark against her.
"DOJ has already decided whether Ms. Wahpeta is lying. And it decided she isn't," Wahpeta's attorney wrote in a response. "It decided she isn't when the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California invited her to read a victim impact statement at Officer Andrew Jones's sentencing hearing. If the government believed that Ms. Wahpeta was lying, it would have had a duty to tell the Court. It did not do so. In fact, until its response here, at no point during the duration of Ms. Wahpeta's cooperation with the government has the government questioned what happened to Ms. Wahpeta to either her or her counsel. Nor could it. Because it's true."
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A man has filed a lawsuit against the town of Sturgeon, Missouri, a little more than a week after a police officer shot and killed his small, blind, and deaf dog.
In a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, Nicholas Hunter alleges that Officer Myron Woodson and the city of Sturgeon violated his Fourth Amendment rights when Woodson killed Teddy, his 13-pound blind and deaf Shih Tzu, shortly after finding the dog wandering in a neighbor's yard on May 19.
"Woodson's warrantless seizure of Teddy was unnecessary, callous, and egregious as it was unwarranted by law and violative of Plaintiff Hunter's most fundamental and guaranteed of constitutional rights," Hunter's lawsuit says. "At no time during the encounter between Teddy and Defendant Woodson did Teddy show any aggression towards Defendant Woodson. Teddy never barked, growled, or even moved towards Defendant Woodson. Instead, the small, blind and deaf dog simply kept trying to walk away, oblivious to the danger that Defendant Woodson posed to him."
The shooting has outraged the town's residents, especially after body camera footage obtained by a local news outlet contradicted the officer and city officials' narrative of events. The mayor of Sturgeon resigned last Saturday evening after defending the shooting for several days, and Woodson has been placed on leave.
The shooting, though, is only an egregious example of a phenomenon that is so common that it has its own tag on Reason's website: "puppycide." No one knows exactly how many dogs police shoot around the country, but every year there are more cases of wanton killings that, besides terrorizing owners, generate huge lawsuits, viral outrage, and in rare instances result in officers being fired, such as the case of an Arkansas officer who casually killed a nine-pound dog.
The incident in Sturgeon started when Teddy dug under Hunter's backyard fence while Hunter was out at dinner and escaped, leaving its collar behind in the process. A neighbor called a county dispatch center to report that the dog had wandered into their yard and to get help finding its owner. According to Hunter's lawsuit, the caller responded, "No, not at all," when asked if the dog was aggressive.
The town of Sturgeon's official Facebook page actually posted an alert on May 19 about the missing dog, along with photos of Teddy: "Do you know this doggie? Joint communications has been notified. The doggie seems in need of medical attention."
Medical attention was not what the doggie received. Woodson arrived on the scene, and a few minutes later he shot Teddy twice.
In the meantime, Hunter had been called and told about the Facebook post. He was on his way to pick up Teddy, but arrived too late.
A day later, the city of Sturgeon posted on Facebook about the incident, defending Woodson's decision: "Based on the behavior exhibited by the dog, believing the dog to be severely injured or infected with rabies, and as the officer feared being bitten and being infected with rabies, the SPD officer felt that his only option was to put the animal down," Sturgeon wrote. "It was later learned that the animal's behavior was because the animal was blind. Unfortunately, the animal's lack of a collar or tags influenced the SPD Officer's decision to put the animal down due to his belief that the animal was injured, sick and abandoned."
Both Hunter and the neighbor filed complaints with the city. "I cannot stress enough that this animal was in no way a threat to others," the neighbor, whose complaint was obtained by local news outlet ABC 17, wrote. "Woodson discharged his firearm multiple times in a residential area without a threat presenting itself, without warning."
ABC 17 also obtained Woodson's body camera footage, which showed that Teddy was never aggressive and didn't bark or growl. Woodson tried to lasso Teddy with a catch pole—a common tool used in animal control—but the dog simply shook its head free of the rope and trotted away. After fumbling the catch pole several times, Woodson drew his gun and killed Teddy. ABC 17 reported that Woodson's entire encounter with Teddy, from exiting his car to putting two bullets in the animal, lasted three minutes and six seconds.
After body camera footage was released, Sturgeon doubled down.
"The City believes that the officer acted within his authority based on the information available to him at the time to protect against possible injury to citizens from what appeared to be an injured, sick, and abandoned dog," Sturgeon posted in a follow-up Facebook post.
Of course, it would have been embarrassing to admit the real reason that the officer resorted to using his gun: He was unable to snare a blind, deaf dog and was too poorly trained to come up with a solution besides shooting a harmless animal.
But police habitually lie about the behavior of dogs that they shoot. Dogs are almost always described in incident reports as snarling, aggressive, or lunging, and because department policies typically allow police to shoot dogs when they feel afraid for their safety, these shootings are almost always deemed justified.
For example, last year in Missouri a police officer shot a family's dog and dumped it in a ditch. Similar to Hunter's case, the dog had gotten loose during a storm, and a neighbor called to report it missing. In another case last year, Detroit cops killed a woman's dog and dumped its body in a trash can. An Arkansas woman also filed a lawsuit after a cop accidentally shot her while trying to kill her Pomeranian—a toy breed that resembles a Koosh ball with legs.
This is the sort of behavior that's flagged as sociopathic when committed by anyone who's not represented by a police union.
And it's the sort of behavior that can cost a small town like Sturgeon quite a lot of money, as city officials are surely fretting now. After Sturgeon's mayor resigned last Friday, the acting mayor posted on Sturgeon's Facebook account: "Like you we were just as appalled by what we saw. The actions of the Officer involved are not the values and beliefs of the residents of Sturgeon or the board of Alderman. Currently I have made calls to the Boone County Sheriff to meet and discuss an investigation."
The city of Sturgeon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Justice Department formally, finally, proposed to stop lying about marijuana today after decades of insisting the drug is comparable to heroin and ecstasy—and more dangerous than cocaine and methamphetamine.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), in a proposed rule sent to the Federal Register, moved to change marijuana's status from a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act—considered by the government to be highly abuse-prone drugs with no medical value—to a Schedule III drug. Recreational marijuana possession and use would remain illegal under federal law, and any new cannabis-based medications would still require approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
President Joe Biden directed the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2022 to review marijuana's status as a Schedule I drug. In 2023, HHS recommended that marijuana be moved to Schedule III, which includes drugs with a medium risk of abuse and accepted medical use.
On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to "decriminalize the use of cannabis," but despite lamenting the injustices of marijuana convictions and the barriers they create, and despite the continuing collapse of public support for marijuana prohibition, Biden still opposes full-scale legalization. Instead, his administration has focused on mass pardons and other measures that largely leave those injustices in place.
As Reason's Jacob Sullum wrote earlier this month, after news of the impending proposal first broke, rescheduling marijuana may allow for more medical research and be a good election-year talking point for Biden, but it won't end the continuing federal prohibition of cannabis:
Rescheduling marijuana will not resolve the conflict between the CSA and the laws of the 38 states that recognize cannabis as a medicine, 24 of which also allow recreational use. State-licensed marijuana businesses will remain criminal enterprises under federal law, exposing them to the risk of prosecution and forfeiture. While an annually renewed spending rider protects medical marijuana suppliers from those risks, prosecutorial discretion is the only thing that protects businesses serving the recreational market.
Even if they have state licenses, marijuana suppliers will be in the same legal position as anyone who sells a Schedule III drug without federal permission. Unauthorized distribution is punishable by up to 10 years in prison for a first offense and up to 20 years for subsequent offenses. That is less severe than the current federal penalties for growing or distributing marijuana, which include five-year, 10-year, and 20-year mandatory minimum sentences, depending on the number of plants or amount of marijuana. But distributing cannabis, with or without state permission, will remain a felony.
But even getting the DEA to acknowledge that marijuana is not a drug on par with LSD and heroin is a victory of sorts.
In 2012, Barack Obama's head of the DEA, Michele Leonhart, refused to say whether drugs like crack cocaine and heroin were worse than marijuana, only offering the weak response that "all illegal drugs are bad."
Chuck Rosenberg, who followed Leonhart as head of the DEA, also equivocated when asked the same question in 2015: "If you want me to say that marijuana's not dangerous, I'm not going to say that because I think it is," Rosenberg said on a conference call with reporters. "Do I think it's as dangerous as heroin? Probably not. I'm not an expert."
Rosenberg clarified his statements a week later, saying, "Heroin is clearly more dangerous than marijuana."
Still, the federal government decided to keep embarrassing itself for nearly another decade before moving to drop marijuana from Schedule I.
The DEA's rescheduling proposal will now go through a public comment period.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the due process rights of two Alabama women were not violated when they both had to wait over a year for a court hearing to challenge the police seizure of their cars.
In a 6–3 decision, the Court's conservative majority held in the case Culley v. Marshall, Attorney General of Alabama that property owners in civil asset forfeiture proceedings have no due process right to a preliminary court hearing to determine if police had probable cause to seize their property.
"When police seize and then seek civil forfeiture of a car that was used to commit a drug offense, the Constitution requires a timely forfeiture hearing," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. "The question here is whether the Constitution also requires a separate preliminary hearing to determine whether the police may retain the car pending the forfeiture hearing. This Court's precedents establish that the answer is no: The Constitution requires a timely forfeiture hearing; the Constitution does not also require a separate preliminary hearing."
Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity, even if the owner is never charged or convicted of a crime. Law enforcement groups say it is a vital tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime.
Civil liberties groups across the political spectrum argue that the process creates perverse profit incentives for police and is unfairly tilted against property owners, who bear the burden of challenging the seizures in court.
Those criticisms have been echoed in the past by not just the Supreme Court's liberal justices but also Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, giving forfeiture critics hope that a skeptical majority on the Court would clamp down on civil forfeiture.
However, despite writing in a concurrence that "this case leaves many larger questions unresolved about whether, and to what extent, contemporary civil forfeiture practices can be squared with the Constitution's promise of due process," Gorsuch, joined by Thomas, both agreed with the majority opinion.
Today's ruling is a disappointment, then, for groups such as the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public-interest law firm that filed an amicus brief on behalf of the petitioners. Kirby Thomas West, an Institute for Justice attorney, calls the ruling "a big loss for private property rights."
"Today's decision will mean many more property owners will never get their day in court when it could do them some good—shortly after the seizure of their vehicle or other property," says West. "Instead, civil forfeiture cases will languish for months or years before they are resolved. Meanwhile owners of seized vehicles will scramble to find a way to get to work, take their kids to school, run errands, and complete other essential life tasks."
The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case—two consolidated cases both involving Alabama women whose cars were seized by police for offenses they were not involved or charged with—last year.
In the first case, Halima Culley's son was pulled over by police in Satsuma, Alabama, while driving Culley's car. He was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. The City of Satsuma also seized Culley's car. It took 20 months, during all of which Culley was bereft of her vehicle, before a state court ruled that she was entitled to the return of her car under Alabama's innocent-owner defense.
In the second case, a friend of Lena Sutton took her car to run an errand in 2019. He was pulled over by police in Leesburg, Alabama, who found methamphetamine in the car and seized it. Sutton also eventually was granted summary judgment on an innocent-owner defense, but not until more than a year after the initial seizure of her car.
Culley and Sutton both filed lawsuits claiming that the towns violated their Eighth and 14th Amendment rights by depriving them of their cars for months when a pretrial hearing to establish probable cause for the seizures could have quickly determined that they were innocent owners.
Those long waits are not unusual. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that Detroit's asset forfeiture scheme violated residents' constitutional rights by making them wait months for court hearings to challenge the validity of seizures. One of the plaintiffs in that lawsuit waited two years for a hearing.
However, the 11th Circuit rejected Culley's claims, finding the state's civil forfeiture process satisfied the requirements for a timely hearing under the speedy trial test, a balancing test created to resolve allegations of Sixth Amendment violations. However, every other circuit that has weighed in on the issue used a different balancing test established in the 1976 Supreme Court case Mathews v. Eldridge to determine due process violations.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority sidestepped the question of which test to use altogether, ruling that the existing requirement for a timely court hearing in forfeiture cases satisfied constitutional requirements.
"A timely forfeiture hearing protects the interests of both the claimant and the government," Kavanaugh wrote. "And an additional preliminary hearing of the kind sought by petitioners would interfere with the government's important law-enforcement activities in the period after the seizure and before the forfeiture hearing."
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the majority opinion's reasoning was "deeply flawed" and, rather than resolve the question of which test lower courts should apply, creates a universal rule that "hamstrings federal courts from conducting a context-specific analysis in civil forfeiture schemes that are less generous than the one here."
Police and sheriff's departments across Florida spent thousands of dollars sending officers to training conferences that have been banned in nine other states after being accused of promoting unconstitutional tactics and glorifying violence.
Reason obtained invoices through public records requests showing that a dozen of Florida's largest law enforcement agencies spent $31,377 on training seminars hosted by Street Cop Training, a New Jersey-based company, between 2020 and 2023.
The company has been under intense scrutiny since the New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller issued a scathing report in December detailing a 2021 Street Cop Training conference in Atlantic City where instructors made discriminatory and unprofessional remarks. At the conference, one instructor flashed a picture of a monkey when talking about an elderly black man, and the founder of the company said that refusing to consent to a police search was justification for prolonging an investigation. Since then, New Jersey has ordered retraining for all officers who attended Street Cop conferences, and the company has declared bankruptcy.
The Florida invoices shed light on Street Cop's foothold in one of the most populous states. Despite the turbulent times for the company, it is soldiering on in the Sunshine State. As Florida Today's John Torres noted in a recent op-ed,Orlando is hosting the 2024 Street Cop Conference this week.
Not only that, but Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey is a speaker at the conference.
Torres noted with disdain that taxpayers were footing the bill to send officers to these conferences.
"Locally, at least one Melbourne officer is attending the training with the department paying for it," Torres wrote. "Palm Bay and Cocoa have none and the Brevard County Sheriff's Department did not respond to my inquiry about how many deputies were attending. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement could not tell me how many officers were attending."
It would probably not surprise Torres to learn that the Brevard County Sheriff's Office spent the most out of any agency that has so far responded to Reason's records requests. Street Cop invoices to the agency total $7,825 between 2020 and 2023.
The next biggest spender was the Osceola County Sheriff's Office with $7,085, followed by the Seminole County Sheriff's Department at $6,604.
Six Florida Highway Patrol officers attended Street Cop training seminars during that time period, according to records.
To compile this report, Reason filed 28 public records requests to the largest police departments and sheriff's offices in Florida. Nine agencies said they had no responsive records. Seven requests are still pending, including from populous jurisdictions such as Broward and Orange County.
Street Cop Training was founded in 2012 by Dennis Benigno, a former New Jersey police officer. It runs training conferences for thousands of police officers around the country, but flew under the radar until New Jersey Comptroller Kevin Walsh's December report. The report documented dozens upon dozens of lewd and discriminatory remarks by instructors and comments glorifying violence.
More concerning than the constant middle-school jokes about penis size, though, were the substance of the presentations. For example, Benigno and other instructors at the Atlantic City conference insisted that refusing to consent to a search of one's vehicle—a constitutional right under the Fourth Amendment—was suspicious and should be used as justification for prolonging a search or detention.
The comptroller investigation found that there was "an entire section of Benigno's training during the Conference dedicated to an 'I Do Not Consent Game,' during which Benigno shows a montage of people refusing consent in an attempt to illustrate that a motorist's refusal to consent is a suspicious factor that justifies further prolonging an investigative detention."
The comptroller's office found that multiple instructors told officers to use a "reasonable suspicion" checklist to decide whether to find a reason to pull someone over or extend a traffic stop. The checklist included a long list of vague and contradictory behavior, including the driver not looking at a police car when passing, looking too long at a police car when passing, wearing a hat, removing a hat when an officer approaches, looking back at their vehicle, leaning against their vehicle, smoking, stretching or yawning, and licking their lips.
"Because none of these factors are more consistent with guilt than innocence, a stop based on a combination of those factors alone—without some additional factor that suggests criminality—would be unconstitutional," the New Jersey Comptroller's Office concluded.
Benigno also mocked people who record the police during traffic stops, saying that person was about to "get pepper sprayed, fucking tased, windows broken out, motherfucker." Recording the police is a First Amendment right.
One Street Cop instructor in Louisiana livestreamed himself shooting at a fleeing vehicle and later bragged about it at the Atlantic City conference. "Run from me, somewhere along the chase becomes, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow," he said. The deputy has since been charged with illegal discharge of a firearm and obstruction of justice.
The report found that at least New Jersey spent at least $75,000 in public funds sending officers to the Atlantic City conference.
Benigno said in the wake of the report that he was tightening professional standards for the conferences and making other changes, but he denied that the company promoted unconstitutional tactics.
In a lengthy statement to Florida news outlet WESH last week, Benigno said in part: "The context of the Fourth Amendment training at the October conference and the implications that the training was unconstitutional is completely baseless. Officers in attendance have already completed police academy and understand the context in which the training is provided."
Not all of the public records identify which seminars officers attended, but at least some of them involved traffic stops and interdiction. One officer from the Tallahassee Police Department attended a 2021 Street Cop Training class titled "identifying criminal vehicles and occupants," and a Duval County Sheriff's deputy attended "interdiction mastermind."
The Volusia Sheriff's Office paid for five deputies to attend seminars that included "unmasking facial expressions" and "body language for law enforcement."
The ability to reliably detect lies or guilt by reading facial expressions and body language has never been replicated in controlled studies. It's pseudo-science, but it has nevertheless remained popular among law enforcement because it gives officers a wide-ranging and often contradictory list of cues to confirm their suspicions. (Walsh's report also notes that "some other controversial factors [on the checklist] are observing 'micro-expressions' as taught through free online videos and assessing 'blink rate.'")
The controversy over Street Cop Training has led some Florida sheriff's offices to distance themselves from the company.
A spokesperson for the Seminole County Sheriff's Office says none of its members will be presenting or attending this year. The Volusia County Sheriff also told local media that he wouldn't be sending deputies to the conference.
Meanwhile, Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey remains a staunch defender of the company.
"This is all a bunch of crap," Ivey said of Walsh's report.
Ivey was a paid consultant at a Street Cop conference last year in Nashville.
Federal judges will be limited from enhancing defendants' sentences based on conduct a jury acquitted them of, a practice that has drawn condemnation from a wide range of civil liberties groups, lawmakers, and jurists.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission, a bipartisan panel that creates guidelines for the federal judiciary, voted unanimously Wednesday to adopt an amendment prohibiting judges from using acquitted conduct when calculating a defendant's sentencing range under those guidelines. The only exception is if the conduct "also establishes, in whole or in part, the instant offense of conviction."
"Not guilty means not guilty," U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves, the chair of the Sentencing Commission, said in a press release. "By enshrining this basic fact within the federal sentencing guidelines, the Commission is taking an important step to protect the credibility of our courts and criminal justice system."
Although it sounds antithetical to what everyone is taught about the American justice system, at the sentencing phase of a trial, federal judges could enhance defendants' sentences for conduct they were acquitted of if the judge decided it was more likely than not—a lower standard of evidence than "beyond a reasonable doubt"—that the defendant committed those offenses. This raised defendants' scores under the federal sentencing guidelines, leading to significantly longer prison sentences.
For example, Reason's Billy Binion reported on the case of Dayonta McClinton, who was charged with robbing a CVS pharmacy in Indiana at gunpoint and killing one of his accomplices during a dispute after the robbery. A jury convicted McClinton of robbing the pharmacy but acquitted him of killing his accomplice. A federal judge nevertheless used the accomplice's death to enhance McClinton's sentence from the 57–71 months recommended under the guidelines to 228 months.
McClinton filed a petition to the Supreme Court challenging the use of acquitted conduct at his sentencing, but despite several Supreme Court justices previously expressing doubt about the constitutionality of the practice—including Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas—the Court declined to take up the case last June. Reuters reported that four of the justices signaled they would defer to the Sentencing Commission.
The Justice Department opposed a previous proposal by the Sentencing Commission to limit the use of acquitted conduct.
"Curtailing courts' discretion to consider conduct related to acquitted counts would be a significant departure from long-standing sentencing practice, Supreme Court precedent and the principles of our guidelines," Jessica Aber, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, testified before the Commission last February.
The Justice Department declined to comment on the new policy.
The practice also outraged members of Congress. For the past several years, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) have introduced legislation to ban the use of acquitted conduct at sentencing in federal trials, but so far none have passed.
In a statement today, Durbin continued to call for the passage of his and Grassley's Prohibiting Punishment of Acquitted Conduct Act, saying "this unjust practice must be prohibited under federal law."
"Under our Constitution, defendants can only be convicted of a crime if a jury of their peers finds they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt," Durbin said. "However, federal law inexplicably allows judges to override a jury verdict of 'not guilty' by sentencing defendants based on acquitted conduct. This practice is inconsistent with the Constitution's guarantees of due process and the right to a jury trial. That's why I applaud the Sentencing Commission's important step to limit the use of acquitted conduct."
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