Tag: police state

New York Governor Kathy Hochul Announces Plans to Implement Pre-Crime Surveillance, Target Online “Hate”

In a press conference today, New York Governor Kathy Hochul outlined her administration’s aggressive new strategy for combating online “hate” and implementing pre-crime-esque online surveillance.

As part of this approach, New York’s Threat Assessment and Management Teams (TAM teams), which were established in August 2022 in response to the Buffalo mass shooting, will extend their efforts and start targeting speech surrounding the conflict in the Middle East, with a focus on preventing crimes before they occur. TAM teams will be given an additional $3 million investment for their implementation across New York State college campuses.

“We’re creating strategies, first time ever, to help identify hate at the source and prevent crimes before they occur,” Hochul said.

The TAM teams, primarily focused on tracking and stopping violent acts of hate, work in collaboration with mental health professionals. They establish reporting systems for red flags and provide training to identify early warning signs of radicalization. This initiative, while seemingly noble in its intent to protect New Yorkers, raises significant privacy and First Amendment concerns.

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NYPD detective Louis Scarcella dubbed ‘the closer’ is accused of rigging DOZENS of murder cases and costing taxpayers $110 MILLION in settlements to wrongly-convicted prisoners

A retired NYPD detective accused of rigging dozens of murder cases has cost taxpayers $110million in settlements from 14 overturned convictions.

Louis N. Scarcella, known to colleagues as ‘the closer,’ allegedly coerced confessions and made up witness testimony to help secure convictions leading to people spending decades locked up before being exonerated.

The cost to the taxpayer has been colossal. New York City has paid $73.1 million in settlements to people investigated by the former detective, and the state has paid out another $36.9 million, according to The New York Times. 

The city is expected to be on the hook for tens of millions more, as three men cleared last year of burning a subway token clerk alive in 1995 have filed lawsuits. 

A second-generation cop who smoked cigars, ran marathons, worked a side job at a Coney Island amusement park and jokingly put ‘adventurer’ on his business card, Scarcella, now 72, worked in the Brooklyn North homicide squad during the crack epidemic of the eighties and nineties.

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Michigan Takes Step To Punish Salon Owner Who Said She’ll Only Serve Men And Women

Michigan officials have charged a salon owner with discrimination after she said she would not serve people who identify as anything other than a man or woman.

The Michigan Department of Civil Rights on Nov. 15 charged Christine Geiger and her salon, Studio 8 Hair Lab, with discrimination after investigating complaints that were filed over Ms. Geiger’s comments.

“The truth is, based on a thorough investigation, that Studio 8 and its owner Christine Geiger, openly and repeatedly violated the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act,” John Johnson Jr., the department’s executive director, told reporters in a briefing.

The Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of certain characteristics, including religion. Implemented in 1977, it was expanded in 2023 by the state legislature and Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to cover gender identity, enshrining a 2022 Michigan Supreme Court interpretation.

Ms. Geiger posted in July on Facebook: “If a human identifies as anything other than a man/woman please seek services at a local pet groomer. You are not welcome at this salon. Period.”

She also said that salon workers might refer to people as “hey you” if they requested a particular pronoun.

In another post, Ms. Geiger said that “LGB are more than welcome” but transgender people were not.

“This stance was taken to insure that clients have the best experience and I am admitting that since I am not willing to play the pronoun game or cater to requests outside of what I perceive as normal this probably isn’t the best option for that type of client,” she said.

In a third post, Ms. Geiger said there were only two genders and said “anything else is a mental health issue.”

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Raid On Unlicensed Marijuana Business On Tribal Land In Minnesota Raises Complex Legal And Political Questions

About three months ago, Mahnomen County sheriff’s deputies and White Earth tribal police raided Todd Thompson’s tobacco shop, seizing around seven pounds of cannabis, along with $3,000 in cash, his cell phone and surveillance system.

The August 2 raid happened the day after recreational marijuana became legal across the state and was the first major enforcement action under the new law.

But no charges have been filed in the case—and the state may not have the authority to prosecute him or any other tribal member for marijuana crimes on reservations.

Thompson, a member of the White Earth Nation, didn’t have a state permit to sell cannabis nor did he have the consent of the tribal council, which voted days earlier to allow adult-use cannabis and sell marijuana cultivated in its tribal-run facility.

For his part, Thompson doesn’t believe he needs the permission of the state or the tribal council to sell marijuana on the reservation under the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe’s constitution or U.S. treaties with the Ojibwe. That’s why Thompson said he and four other tribal members decided to sell cannabis out in the open from Asema Tobacco and Pipe, the store he’s run for five years in Mahnomen.

“We were pushing our rights,” Thompson said in an interview. “We’re just sick of being held down. And every economic opportunity, we’re held back from.”

They made it hard for law enforcement to ignore, advertising marijuana for sale with Facebook photos and videos showing large jars of green marijuana buds and invited people to come in.

The next day, tribal police and Mahnomen County sheriff’s deputies came to Thompson’s store with a search warrant. In the search warrant application filed in Minnesota district court, a White Earth narcotics investigator said they had seen a Facebook Live video of Thompson promoting the sale, and an undercover agent then purchased cannabis there.

Thompson said police handcuffed him and workers at his store and held them for more than an hour while they searched the premises.

He said they also went to his house, where they broke into his safe and “desecrated” sacred items—he found his eagle feather on the floor and the ashes from his sage bowl dumped onto his white sheets.

“They’re just some rotten, dirty bastards,” Thompson said.

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Prosecutors of 6-Year-Old Shooter’s Mother Claim Gun-Owning Pot Users Are ‘Inherently Dangerous’

On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced Deja Taylor, a 26-year-old Virginia woman whose 6-year-old son used her pistol to shoot a teacher last January, to 21 months in prison for owning a gun while using marijuana. In June, Taylor pleaded guilty to violating 18 USC 922(g)(3), which makes it a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, for an “unlawful user” of a “controlled substance” to possess a firearm. She also admitted that she falsely denied drug use on the form she filled out when she bought the pistol, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

“This case is not a marijuana case,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Lisa McKeel wrote in the government’s sentencing memorandum. “It is a case that underscores the inherently dangerous nature [of] and [the] circumstances that arise from the caustic cocktail of mixing consistent and prolonged controlled substance use with a lethal firearm.”

McKeel is partly right: Strictly speaking, this is a firearm case, not a marijuana case. Yet there would be no firearm case without federal marijuana prohibition. And while the evidence indicates that Taylor was neither a model gun owner nor a model cannabis consumer, her federal firearm offenses do not hinge on the details of her behavior. Survey data suggest that millions of Americans are gun-owning cannabis consumers, meaning they are guilty of the same felony that earned Taylor a prison sentence, even if they pose no danger to anyone. As a federal appeals court recently noted, that situation is hard to reconcile with “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, over 60 million Americans used illegal drugs (mainly marijuana) in 2021. Based on surveys indicating that roughly one-third of American adults own guns, we can surmise that something like 20 million people violated Section 922(g)(3) that year. Yet on average, federal prosecutors file just 120 charges under that provision each year. In other words, only a minuscule percentage of the potential defendants will ever become actual defendants.

It is no mystery why Taylor ended up being part of that tiny minority. First, her marijuana use attracted official attention as a result of the investigation that followed her son’s January 6 assault on Abigail Zwerner, a teacher at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News, who underwent five surgeries to repair the damage that the bullet he fired did to her hand and lung. Second, that investigation also revealed a pattern of irresponsible conduct, which was not legally necessary to prosecute Taylor’s firearm offenses but surely played a role in the decision to pursue a federal case.

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Backpage: The Monumental Free Speech Case the Media Ignored

After a dozen years of legal tussles, seven years in the crosshairs of ambitious prosecutors, and five-and-a-half years fighting a federal case that saw his business forcibly shuttered, his assets seized, and his longtime partner dead by suicide, alt-weekly newspaper impresario Michael Lacey was found guilty Thursday on just one of the 86 criminal charges levied against him in connection with the online advertising platform Backpage. But the government’s fanatical pursuit of Lacey and his four other Backpage co-defendants is far from over. 

Lacey, an award-winning investigative journalist, was found guilty of international concealment money laundering, which could land him in prison for up to 20 years, and not guilty of international promotional money laundering. But after a week of contentious deliberations, the jury could not come to agreement on the other 84 charges, prompting U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa to declare a second mistrial in this case. That means Lacey could face a third federal trial essentially for the crime of running a classified ads site that knowingly enabled and profited from illegal, if consensual, transactions involving sex.

Thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, the speech and conduct of website consumers is considered to be the legal responsibility of the speakers themselves, not the owners of the platform. This has been a thorn in the side of politicians and other would-be censors ever since. In 2013, Kamala Harris and 46 other state attorneys general sent a joint letter to Congress urging a rollback of Section 230; the letter started like this: “Every day, children in the United States are sold for sex. In instance after instance, state and local authorities discover that the vehicles for advertising the victims of the child sex trade to the world are online classified ad services, such as Backpage.com.”

Seven weeks before her election to the U.S. Senate, Harris, along with her Texas counterpart Ken Paxton, brought the first criminal case against Lacey, his partner Jim Larkin, and other executives at Backpage, who were paraded in a Sacramento courtroom cage wearing orange jumpsuits. That case was tossed out by a judge who pointed out: “Congress did not wish to hold liable online publishers for the action of publishing third party speech….It is for Congress, not this court, to revisit.” 

But just three days before leaving the A.G.’s office for the Senate, Harris filed yet another Backpage case, which was yet again thrown out (partially) because of Section 230. Once in Congress, Harris helped push through the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which does peel back Section 230 to make websites liable for the “facilitation” or “promotion” of prostitution by their users, even though prostitution itself is not a federal crime. 

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Florida’s Bloated Prison System Will Cost Billions To Maintain

Florida’s crumbling prison system and aging prison population will cost the state billions to maintain, according to a newly released report commissioned by the state.

A report presented to Florida state lawmakers on Wednesday by the firm KPMG says that Florida will have to pay somewhere between $6 billion and $12 billion over the next 20 years to keep its troubled Department of Corrections (DOC) afloat.

KPMG presented lawmakers with three different options, from most-expensive to least-expensive, to “modernize,” “manage,” or “mitigate” its prison system. According to the report, the Florida prison population is projected to swell from nearly 89,000 people to at least 107,000 by 2042. As it stands, KPMG found that 25 DOC facilities were in “poor” condition, and 16 were in “critical” condition.

Regardless of which option legislators choose, the price tag includes over $580 million for new air conditioning systems (75 percent of Florida state prisons do not have air conditioning), $2.2 billion for immediate repairs, and $200 million to $700 million a year to increase staffing. All three of the proposals include building at least one new prison and two new prison hospitals.

“The findings in the report confirm what lawmakers in both parties and Department of Corrections leadership have been saying for years, which is that the state prison system is in crisis and unsustainable,” says Greg Newburn, the director of criminal justice at the Niskanen Center, says.

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LEXISNEXIS SOLD POWERFUL SPY TOOLS TO U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION

THE POPULAR DATA broker LexisNexis began selling face recognition services and personal location data to U.S. Customs and Border Protection late last year, according to contract documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to the documents, obtained by the advocacy group Just Futures Law and shared with The Intercept, LexisNexis Risk Solutions began selling surveillance tools to the border enforcement agency in December 2022. The $15.9 million contract includes a broad menu of powerful tools for locating individuals throughout the United States using a vast array of personal data, much of it obtained and used without judicial oversight.

Through LexisNexis, CBP investigators gained a convenient place to centralize, analyze, and search various databases containing enormous volumes of intimate personal information, both public and proprietary.

“This contract is mass surveillance in hyperdrive,” Julie Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, told The Intercept. “It’s frightening that a rogue agency such as CBP has access to so many powerful technologies at the click of the button. Unfortunately, this is what LexisNexis appears now to be selling to thousands of police forces across the country. It’s now become a one-stop shop for accessing a range of invasive surveillance tools.”

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