Frankly, this is the kind of scheme that Detective Jimmy McNulty would have come up with. The Legal Intelligencer reports:

In a case of first impression, the Pennsylvania Superior Court ruled last week that state troopers committed “outrageous government conduct” when investigating alleged prostitution at a massage parlor in the Lehigh Valley by giving money to an undercover informant to have sex four times with two different women at the parlor.

You read that correctly. Pennsylvania state troopers pimped out an undercover informant to have sex with prostitutes:

[T]he police investigation started when a patron of the massage parlor complained to state police that he had been offered “‘manual sexual stimulation’” after being given a massage. The patron did not accept the offer because he could not afford it, the opinion said.

The patron then agreed to become an informant for the police, the opinion said. He wore a wire and was provided money with which he purchased sexual acts with two different women at the massage parlor on four occasions, the opinion said.

Does the work of the undercover informant count as a “shovel ready” stimulus job, or are the two prostitutes counted as jobs the Obama administration has created or saved?

You have to love the informant. Who hits up their local police officer for hooker cash? Real sense of moral integrity by that guy.

Not surprisingly, the court was outraged by the actions of the police officers. Details after the jump.

If you’re going to have a little afternoon delight with a stripper, why not head to the local cemetery? We applaud South Carolina deputy assistant attorney general and former legislator Roland Corning for really getting into the Halloween spirit this week by getting his jollies at the graveyard.

Unfortunately, his Monday lunch treat got tricky when a police officer happened by. From CBS News:

Deputy assistant attorney general Roland Corning said he was on his lunch break when a police officer found him with a stripper, a Viagra pill, and sex toys in his sports utility vehicle, according to Corning’s boss.

Let’s learn a bit more about the stripper, shall we?

Last month, we wrote about the questionable arrest of a gay Washington lawyer — a controversy we dubbed A Gay Gatesgate, referencing the furor over Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates’s arrest by Cambridge police. We expressed the view that the police sometimes abuse their authority in dealing with outspoken citizens (and it seems that many of you agree with us, based on the results of our opinion poll).

Yesterday the gay lawyer who was arrested in D.C., Pepin Tuma — a former associate at Milbank Tweed and Gibson Dunn, so he’s part of the Biglaw tribe — wrote about his arrest in the Washington Post. After describing the conduct that led to his arrest, which should be familiar to readers of our earlier post, Tuma writes:

I am in fact a gay man. And because I have been involved in civil rights work, I know my rights, and I calmly asserted them [to the arresting officer]. I asked why I was being detained. I explained that, as a lawyer, I knew it was not a crime to offer a public opinion about the police. But the troubling police conduct did not end there. Other officers have acted to bolster Culp’s fabricated version of the incident. One of his superiors attempted to induce witnesses to attest that I resisted arrest when I had not. Another superior falsely wrote to Internal Affairs that I confirmed that Culp had advised me to move along before arresting me; he did not. It appears that officers simply lied over and over to cover up an unconstitutional arrest.

Tuma builds his case, after the jump.

Now that Gatesgate is behind us, capped off by a beer summit at the White House yesterday, what can we get riled up about now?

Well, there’s always something going on with the police. From Arthur Delaney of the Huffington Post:

A lawyer who moments earlier had been complaining to friends about police overreaction in the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., got a taste of the Gates treatment himself after loudly chanting “I hate the police” near a traffic stop in Northwest Washington, D.C.

Pepin Tuma, 33, was walking with two friends along Washington’s hip U Street corridor around midnight Saturday, complaining about how Gates had been rousted from his home for not showing a proper amount of deference to a cop….

Then the group noticed five or six police cruisers surrounding two cars in an apparent traffic stop on the other side of the street. It seemed to Tuma that was more cops than necessary.

“That’s why I hate the police,” Tuma said. He told the Huffington Post that in a loud sing-song voice, he then chanted, “I hate the police, I hate the police.”

Uh-oh. Find out what happened next to Tuma — a former associate at Milbank Tweed and Gibson Dunn, by the way — after the jump.

At a press conference today, Lucia Whalen spoke out about her 9-1-1 call and her role in the Gatesgate fiasco.

She said that she supports the Cambridge police and respects Professor Gates. She’s happy that the police released the actual tapes of her call to the police.

She also clarified that she only spoke to Sergeant Crowley briefly at the scene. While she wouldn’t speak about the police report specifically, she indicated that she did not say the “black males … with backpacks” line that was in Crowley’s police report.

As I said Monday, I feel bad for this woman. Her voice was shaking and she’s clearly been traumatized by the scrutiny of her actions. I totally apologize for jumping to conclusions about this woman based on the police report.

I just hope that Crowley feels bad for her too.

911 caller in Gates case speaks publicly [MSNBC.com]
Gatesgate: Let’s Go To The Audio Tape [True/Slant]

Earlier: Gatesgate: Caller Disputes the Police Report

We all know gunners who spit hot fire at professors. But we rarely see gunners who spit at the police. According to the Charlottesville police, one UVA law student can roll both ways.

From Newsplex:

A Charlottesville woman is facing felony assault charges after an altercation with a police officer on Thursday.

Elisabeth Epps, 29, is accused of spitting on a police officer early Thursday morning in the Market Street parking garage.

It appears that initially she was trying to keep her saliva safe within the confines of her car, but the police were having none of it:

Charlottesville Police say friends of Epps were trying to get her out of a locked, parked car after a night of drinking. When Epps would not respond to continued police instructions, officers broke the back window to get her.

After police removed Epps from the car, she continued kicking and screaming and then spit in an officer’s face.

Epps is actually a little bit famous in UVA circles. More details after the jump.

Elie here. On Wednesday, I took a closer look at the woman who called the Cambridge police on Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. I wondered if she could be held liable under a good Samaritan statute, and asked if we should hold good Samaritans to a higher standard.

Most readers felt that the woman was beyond reproach. She saw “two black males with backpacks” attempting to enter a house, and most people — including Professor Gates and President Obama — felt she acted appropriately when she called the police.

Legal Blog Watch has published a great analysis suggesting that Gates’s arrest was unwarranted. Even if you take the police officer’s word about what happened inside the house, it was unlikely that a prosecution against Gates for disorderly conduct could have survived (at least based on the evidence we have now; there are rumors of tapes).

I understand that I am hanging far out on a thin limb, but I remain far from convinced that the woman acted appropriately. I do think, hypothetically, that there is a cognizable legal claim Professor Gates could have against the woman who turned him in. Here is the applicable Massachusetts “good Samaritan” statute:

Chapter 258C: Section 13. “Good Samaritans”; liability

Section 13. No person who, in good faith, provides or obtains, or attempts to provide or obtain, assistance for a victim of a crime as defined in section one, shall be liable in a civil suit for damages as a result of any acts or omissions in providing or obtaining, or attempting to provide or obtain, such assistance unless such acts or omissions constitute willful, wanton or reckless conduct.

On Wednesday, I suggested that the standard for liability was reasonableness, as opposed to “willful, wanton or reckless conduct.” Obviously, a recklessness standard is much more difficult to prove.

But after the jump, I make my case. And then Mr. David Lat slaps me upside the head makes his case … that I need to be Rule 11-ed right back to Tolerance 101.

This morning, we mentioned that Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. talked to the Washington Post about his arrest (the charges have already been dropped). But there is a lot of chatter around the web about this instance of racial profiling — or honest mistake, depending on your point of view.

Writing for the Daily Beast, Professor Gates’s daughter, Elizabeth Gates, conducted an interview with her father.

Meanwhile, Touré — who you might recognize from the wall-to-wall Michael Jackson coverage — channels Malcolm X when he asks, “What do you call a black man with a Ph.D.?”

Of course, I have my own take. But instead of focusing on the arresting police officers, I’m interested in the white lady who called the cops in the first place, and whether she’d be found liable under various theories of good Samaritan laws. I don’t think she met the “reasonable person” standard, but I’m also the guy who thought the person who took Madlyn Primoff’s children to an ice cream shop in the Kaye Scholer Mommy of the Day case was an idiot. At least I’m consistent.

Should we hold so-called “good Samaritans” to a higher standard?

Gatesgate: Racism 101 [True/Slant]
My Daddy, the Jailbird [Daily Beast]
Skip’s Racist Wakeup Call [Daily Beast]
Scholar Says Arrest Will Lead Him To Explore Race in Criminal Justice [Washington Post]

Earlier: Mommy of the Day Madlyn Primoff Gets Conditional Discharge

Last week, prominent African-American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested for disorderly conduct after police confronted him for trying to break into his own home. There are accusations of racial profiling. Harvard Law School professor Charles Olgetree is representing Gates. The media are all over the story; even TMZ is covering it (and picking up on “yo’ mama” jokes from the police report). We’ve dubbed it Gatesgate,.and we gave you a full write-up of the incident this morning.

Charles Ogletree has prepared a statement about the incident and released it to The Root, a website co-founded by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Not surprisingly, his account sounds a bit different from the police report. Here’s an excerpt:

As Professor Gates followed the officer to his own front door, he was astonished to see several police officers gathered on his front porch. Professor Gates asked the officer’s colleagues for his name and badge number. As Professor Gates stepped onto his front porch, the officer who had been inside and who had examined his identification, said to him, “Thank you for accommodating my earlier request,” and then placed Professor Gates under arrest. He was handcuffed on his own front porch.

Professor Gates was taken to the Cambridge Police Station where he remained for approximately 4 hours before being released that evening.

No overt aggression, but apparently plenty of passive aggression from the officer.

Read in full at The Root.

UPDATE (12:30 p.m.): The AP reports that the disorderly conduct charge against Gates has been dropped:

The city of Cambridge issued a statement saying the arrest “was regrettable and unfortunate” and police and Gates agreed that dropping the charge was a just resolution.

“This incident should not be viewed as one that demeans the character and reputation of professor Gates or the character of the Cambridge Police Department,” the statement said.

Too late for that.

Lawyer’s Statement on the Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. [The Root]
Charges dropped against black Harvard scholar [Associated Press]
WORD OF THE DAY: Gatesgate [Transracial]

Earlier: The Gatesgate Arrest Scandal: Harvard Law Prof Charles Ogletree to Represent

We mentioned Gatesgate yesterday in Non-Sequiturs. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a prominent African-American studies scholar, was arrested on Thursday after a neighbor called police to report that Gates was trying to break into his own home.

The New York Times says Gates was returning from a trip to China, and that his door was jammed. He forced the door open with the help of a cab driver.

According to the police report [pdf], this led a woman passing by to call the police because she saw “two black males with backpacks… trying to force entry” into Gates’s home. At least the woman was a vigilant neighbor, even if she can’t recognize Henry Louis Gates.

When a police officer arrived, said he was investigating a break-in, and asked Gates to step outside, Gates was understandably offended. From the NYT:

Gates accused the investigating officer of being a racist and told him he had “no idea who he was messing with,” the report said.

Gates told the officer that he was being targeted because “I’m a black man in America.”

Frustrated, Gates initially refused to hand over his ID, but eventually relented, providing his Massachusetts driver’s license and his Harvard identification card. Gates had a few choice comments for the officers, including a yo’ mama joke.

As was widely reported in yesterday’s coverage of Hurricane Gustav, quick thinking and brute manpower relieved the pressure on a private levee in Plaquemines Parish. The levee protected a subdivision of a couple of hundred homes.

Nearly 400 people participated in saving the levee. Their ranks included residents, first responders, the Army Corps of Engineers… and an unconfirmed number of prison inmates who were pressed into service.

Most of the prisoners from New Orleans and surrounding areas were evacuated well ahead of Gustav’s landfall. In Orleans Parish, about 300 municipal prisoners were simply delivered out of bondage. Only violent municipal offenders were kept in custody and moved with the 2500 inmates held on more serious charges.

Yet there were still enough prisoners on hand to help out when the Plaquemines Parish levee weakened.

We spoke with Pam Laborde, a spokeswomen for the Louisiana Department of Corrections. She could not tell us which parish’s prisoners were involved in the levee saving efforts. However she was not surprised that there was extra muscle on hand.

It’s not unusual in those types of emergencies to hold a few people on a work crew back so that they are able to help perform certain functions keeping the city government working. Whether they run the kitchen or as a work crew for cleaning the roads or that type of thing.

It’s one thing to scrub a latrine, but prisoners who helped to save a levee that protected homes — and potentially saved lives — should merit a “get out of jail free” card.

Laborde did not know the specifics involving efforts of these particular inmates (or their crimes), but she said that generally no such special consideration is given for state prisoners who stay behind and in harm’s way. She did say that if they were municipal prisoners, any time off would be given at the discretion of the individual Sheriffs’ departments.

Not surprisingly, Plaquemines Parish Sheriff “Jiff” Hingle could not be reached for comment.

Lawlessness can be a common occurrence during natural disasters, but apparently not all of it is bad.

Concerns about New Orleans-area levee ease [CNN]

Here’s a fact pattern: teen steals liquor, teen gets hammered, adult is called to help, adult drives teen home, teen dies, adult gets charged with… negligent homicide?

That’s the reality facing Candice Collard. The 24-year-old woman is being charged with homicide in Utah for failing to help Jess “Micade” Horrocks, 14, who died of alcohol poisoning this past April.

The charge seems especially harsh given that Utah has a criminal statute for failure to render aid. Uintah County Deputy Attorney Greg Lamb said that the homicide charge was warranted because Collard “failed miserably in several areas that could have prevented [Horrocks’s] death.” Lamb admits that his office is taking a “novel” approach to this case, which should make Collard feel swell.

Collard drove the teen 13 miles to Collard’s home instead of 2 miles to the hospital. Horrocks did not receive medical attention until the next day

In retrospect, obviously, Collard’s choice was unwise. But Collard neither procured the alcohol nor sat there and poured it down Horrocks’s throat.

This charge puts the perverse in legal incentives. When ineffective help puts you in danger of a homicide conviction, wouldn’t you rather roll the dice with a failure-to-render-aid charge?

The “go screw yourself, kid” attitude is something we’d expect out of the Bronx, but Utah?

Woman charged in boy’s alcohol-poisoning death [Salt Lake Tribune via Fark]

Authorities are investigating whether men threatened to kill Senator Barack Obama, or if they were just trying to get a date with Jodie Foster. Either way, U.S. Attorney Troy Eid is certain that the potentially meth-addled gunmen posed no credible threat to Obama or the Democratic National Convention.

We have explored the colossal idiocy of making threats against the President before. However, in a news flash to, you know, Germans, Obama is not the president yet. He is not even the nominee of a major party.

What he is, is a “major candidate” and 18 U.S.C. § 3056, authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury to grant him Secret Service protection and all the other trappings of “dude, not to be messed with.”

Obama has received protection for well over a year, earlier than any other presidential candidate in history.

So, here’s an important safety tip: don’t threaten to harm Obama or McCain or Bob Barr or whomever. Register your displeasure in the traditional way, anonymous comments on various blogs that showcase your cutting wit and deep respect for democracy. The Secret Service doesn’t have a sense of humor.

U.S. attorney ‘confident’ Obama not threatened [Rocky Mountain News]

[Ed. note: This post is by FROLIC & DETOUR, one of the finalists in ATL Idol, the “reality blogging” competition that will determine ATL’s next editor. It is marked with Frolic & Detour’s avatar (at right).]




A man claiming to be a police detective entered a Longmont, Colo. adult store and demanded to see the X-rated videos for free.

The ponytailed man claimed he was an officer in the “age verification unit,” and he had to ensure that the performers in the porn videos weren’t underage.

“It was inventive on his part, I’ll give him that,” said the real police officer investigating the case.

Somehow, the video clerks weren’t convinced by the man’s business card, which had no name on it. Since the scheme didn’t work the first time, the man tried it a second and then a third time…at the same store. Unfortunately, Randal wasn’t there that day, and the clerks called the cops.

The man may drive a red Dodge neon, which explains why he isn’t getting laid.

A teenage girl has filed a lawsuit against Harrison, N.Y. police officers for violating her civil rights. According to the complaint, the police came to arrest the girl’s boyfriend for marijuana possession. While conducting a search of the house, they got overly friendly with the girl during her patdown, seized her sex tape, and played with her anal beads.

The Smoking Gun has the filed complaint along with the story. We’ve added some line breaks for your reading pleasure:

The girl claims that police watched the video in her presence “while laughing,” and that they put a camcorder in her face and “mockingly” asked her questions about the explicit video as it played. She also alleges that a Harrison detective told her, “I should beat your ass for this. I hope your parents beat your ass.”

The teenager claims that the investigator also retrieved anal beads from a bedroom, put them in her face, and asked, “What do you do with these — put them in your mouth?”

The girl charges that cops subsequently played the video “sufficiently close to the cell in which the boyfriend was incarcerated so that he could hear the audio component of the video,” and that they laughed about the video and made “repeated references by name to his girlfriend as she was depicted on the video.”

She also contends that the Harrison officers “thereafter played the video for other members of the department to watch for their amusement, sexual gratification, and to further degrade Plaintiff.”

Yet another reason not to make a sex tape.

We might have left the little anecdote about the anal beads out of the complaint. That’s just plain embarrassing.

Girl Sues Cops Over Sex Tape “Screening” [Smoking Gun via Drudge]

Dan Slater at the WSJ Law Blog posted on an interesting First Amendment case about a state trooper’s involvement with the KKK. The trooper was subsequently fired, and now he’s arguing for his job back:

In 2004, Robert Henderson, then a state trooper in Nebraska, joined an organization called the Knights Party after his wife left him for a hispanic man. The Knights Party is an affiliate of the Ku Klux Klan. In 2006, following a state patrol disciplinary hearing in which Henderson told the investigator he joined the Knights Party to vent his frustration, he was fired from the force. An arbitrator then overturned Henderson’s firing, saying that it violated his First Amednment rights. Nebraska’s Attorney General, John Bruning, then appealed that decision and won in a lower Nebraska State Court. Yesterday, Henderson and his lawyer, Vincent Valentino, appealed to Nebraska’s Supreme Court to have Henderson reinstated.

At the link, Slater delivers a great summary of the relevant law, courtesy of Stanford con law Professor Derek Shaffer.

State Trooper, Fired for Associating with KKK, Argues for Job Back [WSJ Law Blog]

* New accounting rules for M&A. [DealBook]

* Lilly contemplates $1 billion payment to settle civil and criminal investigations relating to its marketing of Zyprexa. [New York Times]

* NYPD officer accused of pimping child. [MSNBC]

* Ex-priest jailed for murder via exorcism. [CNN]

* Indiana man arrested for making his own crosswalk. [The Indy Channel]

* Nader takes steps toward another run for the presidency in 2008. [Bloomberg]

Obesity isn’t just a problem for Biglaw lawyers who don’t get to the gym enough. From the New York Post:

He weighs more than 500 pounds, but that wasn’t enough to tip the scales of justice for ex-cop Paul Soto.

The rotund retiree lost his legal argument that it was a line-of-duty fall outside a doctor’s office that cost him his NYPD career. A judge says it was actually his “morbid obesity.”

“There’s no dispute that [Soto] is physically incapable of performing his duties as a police officer. He is morbidly obese, suffers from narcolepsy and is hypertensive,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Judith Gische wrote in her decision made public yesterday.

Apparently the physical vigor of being a cop doesn’t always keep off the pounds:

When Soto joined the force in 1993, Gische found, he weighed approximately 250 pounds. He is now 40, 5-foot-7 and over 500 pounds.

A former colleague at the 6th Precinct said Soto’s gun belt was an incredible 6 feet long, and his bosses would order him to take walks around the stationhouse for his own good. They would also have other officers shadow him to make sure he didn’t pick up food along the way, he said.

It’s a good thing Soto doesn’t work at a law firm, where office-wide emails about extra sandwiches left in conference rooms make the rounds daily.

He’s Biiig Blue [New York Post via Drudge]

The headlines say it all, over at the Drudge Report:

We previously wrote about the incident here. The report exonerating the officers is not flattering to the tased bro, Andrew Meyer:

In the 17-page summary of the report, FDLE said it spoke with several witnesses who said that days before the event Meyer vowed to put on ”a show” at the Kerry event.

According to the report, during a Sept. 11 Gators for Rudy [Giuliani] rally, Meyer got into an argument with another student and told a friend that “if he liked what he had seen that he should go to the Kerry speech and he would really see a show.”

In addition, the report said that after his arrest, when Meyer was out of view of the cameras, he told officers that they did not do anything wrong and then asked “if cameras will be at the jail.”

UF police cleared in ‘Don’t Tase me, Bro’ case [Miami Herald]
President Machen comments on FDLE review of student arrest [University of Florida]
Andrew Meyer [official website]

Earlier: Sadly, John Kerry Wasn’t Tasered (But He Could Have Used the Electricity)

It seems that the family of this woman may have a stronger cause of action than Andrew Meyer:

A Clay County woman’s family said it’s seeking justice after their loved one died shortly after being shocked 10 times with Taser guns during a confrontation with police.

The family of 56-year-old Emily Delafield said it would take the Green Cove Springs Police Department to court, according to a WJXT-TV report….

Family attorney Rick Alexander said Delafield’s death could have been prevented and that there are four things that jump out at him about the case.

“One, she’s in a wheelchair. Two, she’s schizophrenic. Three, they’re using a Taser on a person that’s in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes,” Alexander said.

That may have been a bit much.

Wheelchair-Bound Woman Dies After Being Shocked With Taser 10 Times [Local6.com via Drudge]

Earlier: Sadly, John Kerry Wasn’t Tasered (But He Could Have Used the Electricity)