Should you ever talk to the police to exonerate yourself? Professor James Duane explains why you should never talk to the police. Ever. Even if you are completely innocent. Sounds like good advice to me. It's not just a clever defense lawyer tactic. It's a Constitutional right that has been upheld repeatedly by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Paul Kinsella is a fascinating fellow. Though he is not with any branch of law enforcement, he has taken it on himself to delve into the tactics of the Nigerian scammers. You know, they might as well be called Nigerian spammers. And, believe it or not, though most of us simply delete those emails, over the course of a year many people fall for the scam and they lose substantial money in the process. Kinsella is featured in "Master Baiter," a detailed and entertaining article written by Nicolas Phillips and published in this week's Riverfront Times. Kinsella, a 37-year old Illinois native as well as a father of two, scams the scammers with gusto. And he loves to tell them that they've been scammed by him. Kinsella has often tried (and sometimes succeeded) in convincing the scammers that he wants to work with them to rip off victims. Check out Kinsella's website (419hell.com)to see many of the flavors of the scams, along with the people running them. Quite impressive. He must spend incredible numbers of hours running his operation. The payoff? He has learned of the identities of 26 potential victims and prevented 14 of them from actually paying the money. To see the FTC's warnings about the Nigerian scams, go here. Kinsella is multifaceted. He intentionally dropped 100 fake-lost-wallets to see how honest people were (74 were returned), resulting in a lot of publicity. He's also a cartoonist and . . . oh yeah, consider this other service he offers:
He also created AfterLifeTelegrams.com, which works like this: For $5 a word, you write a telegram to a deceased loved one. Kinsella then arranges for a terminally ill person to memorize the message and pass it along.
As I learned from my days working as an Assistant Attorney General, it takes a scammer to catch a scammer. Check out the article in the RFT. It's full of facts, figures and entertaining vignettes about Kinsella, the Nigerian scams and much more.McClatchy has now found a most intriguing (and, in retrospect, a most predictable) connection.
The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
Read more about it at Koz. And also check out the new disclosure that the Bush Administration did its damndest to destroy a memorandum highly critical of the legality of its decision to torture prisoners. And now we know that Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney personally approved waterboarding. Finally, consider this conversation involving FOX's Shepard Smith and Judith Miller (the Judith Miller), who unrelentingly attack the memos for trying to justify torture. Maybe Miller is in a redemptive phase . . . THEN, listen carefully at exactly 5:07 of the video to hear a walloping Freudian slip by the conservative think-tanker, Cliff May, a guy who claims that waterboarding is fun and games, who accidentally admits that the Bush-approved techniques WERE torture (listen for the critical word is "it"). Yes, Cliff, it was torture and you (and everyone else in the country) know it. Miller raises the point that even Israel, which knows a thing or two about interrogating prisoners, outlawed waterboarding long ago because it is torture. But there's still more. Consider Republican strategist and Cheney-admirer Phil Lusser's "magic eyeballs" in a conversation with Lawrence O'Donnell and Norah O'Donnell. Go to the end of this video and you'll hear Lawrence O'Donnell clean Lusser's clock. It's all falling apart like a house of cards. After years and years of insanity, it's finally happening. Yes, sunshine is the best disinfectant.You often hear people claiming that the case is strong because there was an "eyewitness." It's becoming increasingly clear, however, that eyewitness testimony is often worse than useless. Modern DNA testing has exposed just how weak eyewitness testimony can be, as presented Radley Balko, in Reason:
Law and Human Behavior, false eyewitness testimony contributed to 77 percent of the 230 wrongful convictions exposed by DNA evidence over the last decade (the number of exonerations has grown since the study was conducted). These of course are only those cases for which DNA testing was available, which are usually murder and rape cases—crimes for which, generally speaking, there is also usually other evidence available. In crimes where investigators are more likely to rely only on eyewitnesses, robberies or muggings, for example, it’s likely that the problem is even more pronounced.
A friend has recently blogged about her experience being informally arrested and handcuffed around the corner from her apartment in the afternoon. She was going for a walk, and police pulled up, told her they had a warrant, handcuffed her, and then began checking her identity. She certainly wasn't who they were looking for, nor did the incident last a long time. I think that her peaceful Zen attitude, presumably nun-induced, kept it from being an experience worth suing about.