The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department has a plan to clean up its act. The plan is designed to make police officers obey the law. You wouldn't think that would be difficult, but this is what's been happening in the absence of meaningful oversight:

Narcotics detectives ripping off drug dealers. A police officer selling a gun to a felon informant. Another officer helping his wife run an illegal escort service.

Misconduct allegations against the officers have caused the dismissal of at least 20 criminal cases that the bad officers tainted. The question is how many other charges over the years have resulted from work done by officers who feel free to ignore the law. When police officers behave lawlessly, there's reason to wonder whether they have any qualms about planting evidence or committing perjury to advance their own careers.

Here's the plan, such as it is: [more ...]

Scott Horton asks a chilling question: Has U.S. Attorney Alice Martin knowingly prosecuted innocent people? Horton points to:

a string of aggressive prosecutions brought by Birmingham U.S. Attorney Alice Martin. Those prosecutions are marked by convictions overturned and innocent men wronged. Two judges have openly questioned whether she knowingly prosecuted innocent people. The American Lawyer has learned that the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility has opened an investigation into allegations of misconduct that were made by Axion against Martin.

Martin is "best known for her crusade against former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, a Democrat." [more ...]

This excellent question was "directed at John Moody, executive vice president, news editorial, at Fox News, who was part of a Fox News political panel that included Rove, Chris Wallace, and Howard Wolfson, newly hired as Democratic 'balance' to Rove."

Q. It's a little unusual to have Mr. Rove here, frankly, when I think Congress would rather be talking to you. Mr. Moody, does it undercut your credibility a little bit on your station when you have somebody with so much political baggage and is under subpoena?

Moody's answer: [more ...]

Rudy Escobedo, a mentally ill resident of Fort Wayne, Indiana, called 911 "asking for help."

He said he was on cocaine and Antabuse – a drug given to some alcoholics – and ready to kill himself. He apparently had hallucinations of police already in his home, according to a transcript of the 911 call.

How did police respond to the call for help? Escobedo called at 4:30 a.m. He apparently made five calls after that to a police cell phone, but the battery was dead. At some point he apparently had some conversations with the police in which he was asked to "surrender." His responses were "erratic," as one might expect from a mentally ill suicidal man. By 8:30 a.m., officers decided to use overwhelming force to break into Escobedo's home.

This happened after police halted communications with him, released 12 times the normal incapacitating dose of tear gas into his apartment and launched a flash-bang grenade into his room that exploded near his head.

[more ...]

Mississippi mayor Frank Melton has been indicted on federal civil rights violations over a crack house raid.

In August 2006, Mr. Melton and his two police bodyguards, Michael Recio and Marcus Wright, ordered the occupants out of the house at gunpoint and directed a group of youths to attack the house with sledgehammers, the indictment said. The mayor, who ran for office on an anti-crime platform, himself broke out the windows with a large stick, the indictment said.

No drugs were found in the raid. [More...]

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has been charged with "taking on some of the weightiest issues in government -- examining the role Justice's lawyers played in formulating administration interrogation policies for suspected terrorists and in endorsing a National Security Agency program of warrantless electronic surveillance." The Los Angeles Times reports that OPR is operating in the stealth mode that characterizes the Bush administration:

[T]he internal unit that polices the lawyers' conduct has been operating under a growing shroud of secrecy, shutting down what were once regular, public disclosures about its activities. ... [O]fficials have declined to say whether even one government lawyer has been found to have engaged in professional misconduct in connection with the war on terrorism -- despite often fierce criticism from civil liberties groups, defense lawyers and judges. ...

After President Bush took office in 2001, the Justice Department reversed a decade-old policy of publicly disclosing detailed summaries of OPR investigations of department lawyers found to have committed professional misconduct.

It would be useful to know the reasoning behind OPR's undisclosed and unexplained decisions in controversial cases like these: [more ...]

Boston police officials are trying to investigate a website, Badgewars.com, dedicated to complaints against and by officers of the Boston police department. Police officials have "launched an internal affairs investigation to find out who is behind the website."

They also want to know whether the bloggers have any evidence to support the allegations they make about Boston officers violating department rules, such as abusing construction details or claiming false injuries to get time off work.

Here's a better idea: investigate the misconduct complaints that appear on the website, not the identities of the website owners.

Speaking of misconduct, albeit in a different city:

Seattle Police Officer Zsolt Dornay made a mistake.

Just after midnight, Dornay was riding through Post Alley when his mirror bumped Lisabeth Dias, a paralegal who was leaving Kells Irish Pub. The officer was in street clothes and had finished his shift. Dias took umbrage with him riding through the crowded alley and straddled the front wheel of his motorcycle.

Mistake 1: Don't mess with paralegals. After arguing with Dias and her boss, Dornay made his second mistake.

Dornay, who said he identified himself as a police officer, drove forward with Dias clinging to the windshield.

Mistake 2: Don't try to drive a motorcycle with a paralegal clinging to the windshield, while her boss and a whole group of people are there to witness your reckless conduct. [more ...]

As TalkLeft noted here and here, Ronnie White's death in a jail cell, within a day of his arrest for running over a police officer, is more than suspicious. Under the circumstances, this editorial in The Washington Post is spot on:

IT IS UNSURPRISING but still infuriating that Prince George's County correctional officers have refused to cooperate with investigators looking into the death of inmate Ronnie L. White. These officers, who swore to serve the cause of justice, are preventing investigators from uncovering the circumstances of the death of Mr. White, who was strangled, according to a preliminary autopsy report.

The questions awaiting an answer are many: [more ...]

Five people are serving life sentences for causing an explosion that killed six Kansas City firefighters in 1988. Questions are surfacing about the conduct (or misconduct) of a federal investigator who may have pressured witnesses to lie in order to develop what was nonetheless a weak case against the five defendants.

Five who testified in the case admit they lied to the federal grand jury that indicted the defendants or later at their trial. The other witnesses said they refused to change their stories.

Rep. Emanual Cleaver and a federal judge called for an investigation.

“I think this is something the Justice Department really ought to look into,” Senior U.S. District Judge Scott O. Wright said recently. Wright did not preside over the 1997 trial of the five defendants. But he excoriated federal authorities when they used his courtroom to try to retaliate against an uncooperative witness.

The U.S. Attorney's office will comply with that request (really, does it have a choice?). [more ...]

This is an outrage. Ronnie White, arrested for running down a police officer in a parking lot, was arrested and put in isolation. Only guards and supervisors had access to him.

Twelve hours later he was found dead in his cell, strangled with two broken bones in his neck. The Medical Examiner has ruled it a homicide.

Vigilante justice is no justice at all.

The Justice Department, FBI and Maryland state authorities are now investigating.

Alan Beaman has always denied killing his "on again, off again girlfriend." A jury nonetheless convicted him in 1995. Last month, the Illinois Supreme Court concluded that the outcome of his trial may have been different if prosecutors hadn't withheld evidence implicating another of the murdered woman's boyfriends.

In an opinion by Justice Thomas Kilbride, the court said evidence against Beaman was “not particularly strong.”

“We cannot have confidence in the verdict finding (Beaman) guilty of this crime given the tenuous nature of the circumstantial evidence against him, along with the nondisclosure of critical evidence that would have countered the state’s argument that all other potential suspects had been eliminated from consideration,” Kilbride wrote.

The prosecution, unwilling to admit that it may have convicted the wrong man, intends to bring Beaman to trial again. A couple of days ago, he was released on bond. After spending 13 years in prison, the things he enjoyed during his first few hours of freedom included: watching the sunrise, chewing gum, and playing with dogs.