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Appeals Court Denies Immunity To Officers Who Fabricated Evidence To Wrongfully Convict A Man For Murder
from the something-that-happens-far-too-often dept
When cops decide they’ve found the right perp, very little can persuade them to look elsewhere. This tunnel vision has the tendency to take years of freedom away from innocent people. And it would be terrible enough if officers simply refused to consider exonerative evidence. But in this case (like far too many others), the investigators went beyond simply ignoring other evidence to falsifying the “evidence” they had to ensure the person they picked out for the job ended up in jail.
Hillel Aron of Courthouse News Service has the background on this decision [PDF] handed down by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In 1999, Floyd Bledsoe, a 23-year-old farmhand, was living in Jefferson County, Kansas, with his wife Heidi, their two young sons and Heidi’s 14-year-old sister Camille Arfmann. Bledsoe’s 25-year-old brother, Tom, lived close by. Tom was “partially deaf” and had “certain intellectual limitations,” according to the lawsuit Floyd Bledsoe would later file, as well as a “history of troubling sexual behavior that included pursuing young girls.”
On Nov. 5, 1999, Camille went missing. Two days later, according to Bledsoe’s lawsuit, Tom told both his Sunday school teacher and his parents that he had killed her. Tom’s parents hired an attorney, Michael Hayes, who took Tom to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department that same day. Tom told investigators how he killed Camille and where her body could be found. Hayes turned over the murder weapon — a recently purchased 9 mm handgun. Tom was arrested and charged with homicide.
But Tom would soon change his story, recanting his confession and accusing his brother of the murder.
That led investigators to go after Floyd Bledsoe. And once they were focused on Floyd, they forgot all about Tom. Not only did they refuse to consider his recanting might be a lie, they falsified evidence to ensure the charges against Floyd stuck. Here’s how it started:
Shortly before Tom’s staged recantation,” Tom’s defense attorney “Hayes sought [Bledsoe] out and told him that Hayes was taking Tom off the ‘hot seat’ and putting [Bledsoe] on, or words to that effect.” On November 12, a Kansas Bureau of Investigation (“KBI”) officer, Defendant Johnson, administered lie detector tests to both Tom and Bledsoe. During his exam, Tom recanted his confession and incriminated Bledsoe. But Tom “failed the question” of whether he shot Camille, and was so overcome with guilt immediately after the lie detector test that he confessed again to killing Camille. Nonetheless, the KBI officer told Tom that he should continue lying to implicate Bledsoe.
Floyd Bledsoe, however, passed his lie detector test. KBI investigator Johnson stepped in again to interfere with the investigation.
Defendant Johnson falsified the results, however, inaccurately reporting that Tom had been truthful in denying his involvement in the murder, while Bledsoe had been deceptive in denying that he was involved. Based on those false polygraph results, the prosecutor dropped the charges against Tom…
Tom’s story was the “central piece” of the prosecution’s evidence during Floyd Bledsoe’s trial. According to Bledsoe, prosecutors withheld anything tying Tom to the crime, fabricated a statement from Floyd that undercut his alibi, did not disclose inculpatory statements made by Tom to Floyd’s lawyer, and refused to search Tom’s home or collect any other physical evidence that might have linked Tom to the murder.
After sixteen years in prison, DNA testing cleared Floyd and implicated Tom Bledsoe. Tom Bledsoe committed suicide shortly after this evidence was obtained, leaving behind a suicide note apologizing for framing his brother — a note that mentioned the county attorney (Jim Vanderbilt) “made him do it” and told him to “keep his mouth shut.”
Floyd Bledsoe sued the involved officers for violating his rights. The lower court refused to grant immunity to the officers, noting that the allegations raised by Bledsoe discussed police actions clearly established to be unlawful. The Tenth Circuit Appeals Court arrives at the same conclusion.
The officers raised several arguments for being allowed to walk away from this wrongful conviction. The court doesn’t like any of them, including this attempt to portray the railroading of an innocent man as nothing more than the good faith efforts of law enforcement officers just trying to do their job.
Appellants assert that Bledsoe’s claims are facially implausible because there is an equally possible innocent explanation for their charging Bledsoe—that they honestly, but mistakenly, believed he had killed Camille and that, at most, they were negligent in investigating the crime, which is not actionable under § 1983. […] Similarly, Appellants assert that they are entitled to qualified immunity because, at most, they were mistaken in believing Bledsoe was guilty of Camille’s rape and murder, and their investigation was at most negligent.
Wrong, says the Tenth Circuit. What Bledsoe alleges far exceeds the innocent actions of cops mistakenly going after the wrong perp.
Those arguments mischaracterize Bledsoe’s allegations. Bledsoe alleges that Defendants fabricated false evidence against him, knowingly suppressed exculpatory evidence that would have proven his innocence, and facilitated his arrest, pretrial detention and trial without probable cause to believe he was guilty. None of those alleged actions, by definition, can be done mistakenly or “innocently.”
It’s pretty tough to “innocently” ignore a suspect’s multiple confessions, failed lie detector test, and previous interactions with the murder victim. In fact, the court says, there’s enough in Bledsoe’s allegations to suggest the opposite of innocence: a conspiracy to violate his rights, one participated in by officers, investigators, and prosecutors.
Bledsoe can move forward with his lawsuit. All but one claim survives the multiple defendants’ appeal of the lower court ruling.
For the foregoing reasons, then, we conclude that Bledsoe adequately alleged that each Appellant participated in depriving him of his constitutional rights and that, except for the failure-to-intervene theory, the alleged constitutional violations were clearly established by 1999. Said another way, except for the failure-to-intervene claim, each Appellant was on notice in 1999 that their conduct, as Bledsoe has alleged it—suppressing exculpatory evidence that would have shown Bledsoe’s innocence, fabricating evidence to use against him, and using that evidence to arrest, detain and prosecute him for a crime he did not commit—was unconstitutional. The district court, thus, correctly denied each Appellant qualified immunity on Bledsoe’s substantive constitutional claims, and on his conspiracy and personal participation theories of liability.
This puts Bledsoe closer to obtaining some form of justice for the injustice he spent 16 years subjected to. And this overwhelming denial of qualified immunity to multiple law enforcement defendants on multiple counts will perhaps result in a settlement being offered before this goes much further in court — something that may force the involved entities to hand over evidence showing how much they screwed this innocent man. And that evidence may show this sort of behavior was routine. There’s no reason to believe it isn’t. Everyone sued here seemed pretty comfortable railroading an innocent man, which suggests violating rights was just considered part of the job.
Filed Under: 10th circuit, evidence, fabricated evidence, floyd bedsoe, kansas, kbi, qualified immunity, tom bledsoe
✓ 14 Comments
The Czech Republic’s Proposed Version Of Upload Filters Has A Bad Idea That Could Become A Great One
from the puzzling-through-upload-filters dept
A clear demonstration that the EU Copyright Directive is a badly-drafted law is the fact that it has still not been implemented in national legislation by all the EU Member States three years after it was passed, and over a year after the nominal deadline for doing so. That’s largely because of the upload filters of Article 17. The requirement to block copyrighted material without authorization while fully preserving users’ rights is probably impossible to put in place in any straightforward way. As a result, national legislators have had to come up with various kinds of approximations when drawing up their local laws.
Over on the Communia blog, Paul Keller has a good exploration of how the Czech Republic is tackling the issue. The current Czech proposal is particularly interesting because it is one of the first to be available after the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), brought a little clarity on the safeguards that need to be included in national implementations of Article 17. Notably, the language of the latest version of the Czech law:
…inserts one of the core findings of the CJEU ruling — that platforms can only be required to detect and block content on the basis of the information provided by rightholders and cannot be required to block content which, in order to be found unlawful, would require an independent assessment of the content by the platforms — READ MORE
✓ 3 comments
Over 90 Organizations Tell Congress Not To Support Dangerous ‘Kids Online Safety’ Bill
from the it's-not-for-kids-and-it's-not-about-safety dept
We’ve written a number of posts about the problems of KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act
from Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn (both of whom
have fairly long and detailed histories for pushing anti-internet
legislation). As with many “protect the children” or “but think of the
children!” kinds of legislation, KOSA is built around moral panics and
nonsense, blaming the internet any time anything bad happens, and
insisting that if only this bill were in place, somehow, magically,
internet companies would stop bad stuff from happening. It’s fantasyland
thinking, and we need to stop electing politicians who live in
fantasyland. . . READ MORE
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NY Times Aptly Illustrates How The AT&T Time Warner Merger Was An Even Bigger Mess Than You Probably Realized
from the nobody-wins,-everybody-loses dept
The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental, historical disaster. AT&T spent $200 billion (including debt) to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and basically stumbled around incompetently for several years before recently spinning off the entire mess for a song.
The New York Times recently published the kind of merger post mortem the media usually can’t be bothered to do. . .
✓ Don’t feel too badly for AT&T though. Something the NYT doesn’t really mention is how the Trump era in general remained an all time great one for AT&T, which not only got a $42 billion Trump tax cut for doing nothing, it received numerous regulatory favors from the Trump FCC from the gutting of net neutrality and media consolidation rules to the effective lobotomization of the FCC’s consumer protection authority.
✓ The Times does mention how most of the AT&T executives who bungled the disastrous deal received massive cash payouts as “punishment.” But the Times downplays how the megadeal eliminated jobs for more than 50,000 (and counting) employees, and resulted in a generally shittier product for consumers (CNN under Discovery leadership is in the midst of a disastrous bid to shift its coverage from bland and feckless centrism to more right wing authoritarian appeasement and it’s… not going great).
✓ The Times also doesn’t really touch on the fact that mindless consolidation like this happens constantly. Or that U.S. antitrust enforcement is comically broken. Or that the press (including the Times) can routinely be found un-skeptically parroting supposed synergies of such deals pre-merger, helping create the problems they report on. At least we got a post-mortem, which is more than most major press outlets can be bothered to do in a country that treats disastrous, pointless mergers like a national pastime."
Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, competition, consolidation, doj, media, mergers, telecom, trump
Companies: at&t, directv, time warner
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San Francisco Lawmakers Think It Might Be OK For Cops To Deploy Robots To Kill People
from the [extremely-Jim-Morrison-voice]-there's-a-killer-at-the-door dept
Lots of people like to pretend California is home to certifiable Communists — a socialist collective masquerading as a state. But California is not beholden to socialist ideals. It has its own dictatorial ideological bent, one that’s only slightly tamed by its election of liberal leaders.
Every move towards the left is greeted by an offset to the right. If anything, California is the Land of Compromise. Ideological shifts are short-lived. What really lasts are the things the California government does that give the government more power, even as they ensure the electorate that their concerns have been heard.
Case in point: San Francisco. In early 2019, the city passed a ban on facial recognition tech use by government agencies. This move placed it on the “left,” at least in terms of policing the police. (The law was amended shortly thereafter when it became clear government employees were unable to validate their identity on city-issued devices.)
Communist paradise indeed. But no, not really. San Francisco’s lawmakers may have had some good ideas about trimming the government’s surveillance powers, but those good ideas were soon compromised by law enforcement. And those compromises have been greeted with silence.
In May of this year, cops were caught accessing autonomous vehicle data in the hopes of obtaining evidence in ongoing investigations. A truly autonomous vehicle creates nothing but third-party data, so there was little need to worry about Fourth Amendment implications. But still it seems a city concerned with government overreach would express a little more concern about this cop opportunism.
Nothing happened in response to this revelation. Instead, four months later, city lawmakers approved on-demand access to private security cameras, reasoning that cops deserved this access because crime was still a thing. Mayor London Breed justified the move towards increased authoritarianism in a [checks notes] Medium post:
We also need to make sure our police officers have the proper tools to protect public safety responsibly. The police right now are barred from accessing or monitoring live video unless there are “exigent circumstances”, which are defined as events that involve an imminent danger of serious physical injury or death. If this high standard is not met, the Police can’t use live video feed, leaving our neighborhoods and retailers vulnerable.
These are the reasons why I authored this legislation. It will authorize police to use non-City cameras and camera networks to temporarily live monitor activity during significant events with public safety concerns, investigations relating to active misdemeanor and felony violations, and investigations into officer misconduct.
When the going gets tough, the elected toughs get chickenshit. All it took to generate carte blanche access to private security cameras was some blips on the crime radar. Whatever gains were made with the facial recognition tech ban were undone by the city’s unwillingness to stand by its principles when isolated incidents (hyped into absurdity by news broadcasters) made certain residents feel ways about stuff.
The news cycle may have cycled, but the desire to subject San Francisco to extensive government intrusion remains. If the cops can’t have facial recognition tech, maybe they should be allowed to kill people by proxy. It’s a super-weird take on law enforcement, but one that has been embraced by apparently super-weird city legislators, as Will Jarrett reports for Mission Local.
A policy proposal heading for Board of Supervisors approval next week would explicitly authorize San Francisco police to kill suspects using robots.
The new policy, which defines how the SFPD is allowed to use its military-style weapons, was put together by the police department. Over the past several weeks, it has been scrutinized by supervisors Aaron Peskin, Rafael Mandelman and Connie Chan, who together comprise the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee.
Yikes. Turning residents into Sarah Connor isn’t a wise use of government power. Giving police additional deadly force powers is unlikely to heal the immense rift that has developed as cops continue to kill people with disturbing frequency, all while enjoying the sort of immunity that comes with the territory.
Attempts to mitigate the new threat authorized by this proposal were undermined by the San Francisco PD, which apparently thinks killing people with modified Johnny Fives is a good idea:
Peskin, chair of the committee, initially attempted to limit the SFPD’s authority over the department’s robots by inserting the sentence, “Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person.”
The following week, the police struck out his suggestion with a thick red line.
It was replaced by language that codifies the department’s authority to use lethal force via robots: “Robots will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers are imminent and outweigh any other force option available to SFPD.”
The edit may seem all pointy-eared-Spock logical when taken at face value. But it isn’t. What cops believe poses an “imminent threat” to officers is so far outside the norm expected by “reasonable” citizens, it makes this edit meaningless. Cops are allowed to make highly-subjective judgment calls — the sort of thing that often leads to unarmed people (especially minorities) being killed by law enforcement officers. Add this right-optional autonomy to autonomous killing machines and you’re asking for the sort of trouble residents will be forced to subsidize as the city settles lawsuits triggered by cops who think a person’s mere existence is enough of a threat to justify deadly force.
Adding this to the arsenal of rights-optional weapons deployed by the
SFPD ushers in a new era where cops can be judge, jury, and
executioner. I mean, in many cases they already are. But this adds a
level of Judge Dredd-adjacent dystopia where cops can try to claim it wasn’t them but rather the one-armed man robot. The San Francisco legislator should kill this bill deader than the residents the SFPD kills.
The “imminent threat” justification is too vague and too easily abused
to allow officers to absolve their own guilt by allowing a robotic
assistant to perform killings on their behalf.
Filed Under: autonomous killing, london breed, robot police, robots, san francisco, sfpd
Daily Deal: Cyber Monday Deals Roundup
from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept
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Filed Under: daily deal
Contrary To Popular Opinion, Most Teens Get Real Value Out Of Social Media
from the the-data-disproves-the-moral-panic dept
There’s this narrative out there that “it has been decided” that social media is “bad for children” and that it is such a big danger that “regulation is needed.” A few months ago, we wrote about a Berkeley professor who claimed that this was settled and that there was “no longer any question as to the nature of the harm to children around the globe.” In that post we went through all of the linked research showing it proved nothing of the sort.
For example, lots of people rely on the reporting around the Frances Haugen leaks from inside Facebook to argue that “Facebook knew” that Instagram causes “body image issues” for children (and then most people leapt to the belief that the company then ignored and downplayed that finding). But, as we noted, the actual study told a very, very different story. As we pointed out at the time, the study was an attempt to do the right thing and understand if social media like Facebook was actually causing negative self-images among teenagers, and the study found that for the most part, the answer was absolutely not.
It looked at 12 different potential issues, and surveyed teenaged boys and girls, and found that in 23 out of 24 categories, social media had little to no negative impact, and quite frequently a mostly positive impact. The only issue where the “negative impact” outweighed the “positive impact” was on “body image issues” for teenaged girls, and even then it was less than one-third of the teen girls who said that it made it worse for them. And the whole point of the study was to find out what areas were problematic, and which areas could be improved upon. But, again, in every other area, “made it better” far outranked “made it worse.”
Of course, you might question whether or not you can believe Facebook’s own research. But now the Pew Research Center, whose work tends to be impeccable, has released a study also highlighting how social media generally seems to be making teenagers’ lives better, not worse.
Eight-in-ten teens say that what they see on social media makes them feel more connected to what’s going on in their friends’ lives, while 71% say it makes them feel like they have a place where they can show their creative side. And 67% say these platforms make them feel as if they have people who can support them through tough times. A smaller share – though still a majority – say the same for feeling more accepted. These positive sentiments are expressed by teens across demographic groups.
When asked about the overall impact of social media on them personally, more teens say its effect has been mostly positive (32%) than say it has been mostly negative (9%). The largest share describes its impact in neutral terms: 59% believe social media has had neither a positive nor a negative effect on them. For teens who view social media’s effect on them as mostly positive, many describe maintaining friendships, building connections, or accessing information as main reasons they feel this way, with one teen saying:
“It connects me with the world, provides an outlet to learn things I otherwise wouldn’t have access to, and allows me to discover and explore interests.” – Teen girl
So, once again, the general sentiment is that for many teenagers social media improves their lives. For an even larger portion, it neither improves nor makes their lives worse. It’s just a small percentage who find it problematic.
And… that sounds about right. For lots of people of all ages the evidence suggests that, when used well, social media is a nice and useful tool for staying connected with friends, and sometimes enabling them to express themselves better.
It is true that, for some people, it becomes a challenge, and they get sucked into it, and it becomes problematic. But, honestly, given that most teenagers have periods of their teenage years where they feel isolated and alone (for which it would be easy for them to blame social media), these numbers seem astoundingly positive.
The report does note that the “negatives” of social media are mostly around teens feeling “overwhelmed because of all the drama” and that it makes them feel “like their friends are leaving them out of things.” But, um, those feelings happened in the pre-internet days quite frequently as well. They’re, sorta, what happens as a teenager. It’s unclear that we can or should blame anything on the internet for that.
Perhaps even more interesting, the Pew study suggests that all of the media coverage about social media being bad for teens has convinced kids that it must be true… for others. Because they’re not really seeing it themselves. The numbers here are striking. While 32% believe that social media is “mostly negative” for “people their age” only 9% think it’s true for themselves personally:
There’s a lot more in the study that shows there is a lot of nuance here, but one thing seems extremely clear: the idea that social media is universally bad and dangerous for kids is completely false. For many, many kids, it’s actually quite positive. For some it’s neither good nor bad. It’s only bad for a small percentage who have struggled with it. And, even then, the reasons why they’re struggling sound an awful lot like the kinds of social struggles that existed long before the internet or social media existed.
All of this seems to raise some pretty important questions — especially about politicians, academics, and the media who keep feeding us this moral panic that social media is unquestionably bad for teenagers. In California, we’ve already seen a terrifyingly problematic law pass unanimously, with it being stated in the law itself that social media was known to be dangerous for kids.
Similar bills are showing up in states across the country.
Meanwhile, in Congress, lawmakers are rushing to pass KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, build on this very same premise.
And, yet, once again we see that the very factual basis for these laws is false.
Stop letting policymakers and the media scare people into believing a moral panic that just isn’t true. Because, in the process, we’re passing a variety of dangerous laws that will actually do a ton to stifle these services that many more people get true value out of, and replace it with something much more limited, with much greater surveillance.
Filed Under: moral panic, social media, teens
Companies: pew research
Mercedes Puts Faster Acceleration Behind A Subscription Paywall
from the working-windshield-wipers-for-$50-extra-a-month dept
Back in July, BMW raised a bit of a ruckus when the company announced that it would be making heated seats a luxury option for an additional $18 per month. Now, Mercedes aims to take the concept one step further by announcing that buyers of the company’s new Mercedes EQ electric models will need to pay a $1,200 (plus taxes and fees) yearly subscription to unlock the vehicles’ full performance.
The Drive points to Mercedes’ online store, where they note that buyers of the vehicle will need pay a monthly subscription to unlock an “acceleration increase”:
According to Mercedes, the yearly fee increases the maximum horsepower and torque of the car, while also increasing overall performance. Acceleration from 0-60 mph is said to improve by 0.8-1.0 seconds and the overall characteristics of the electric motors are supposed to change as well. The extra performance
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