This video has been around for a while (7 years on YouTube) but it’s chock full of good practical advice, from both Professor Duane and Officer Bruch, so that I think it’s worth posting here.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth the 50 minutes it takes to watch it.
Avoiding talking to the police without counsel is a recurring topic at Popehat.com: in this post for example. That one’s worth your time too.
What happened when Portugal decriminalised drugs?
Joint-rolling class. Heh.
Here’s a post at MarginalRevolution about an article by Judge Alex Kozinski (PDF) which appears at GeorgetownLawJournal.org.
The judge’s article is a bit lengthy but I still recommend you RTWT.
Kozinski Indicts the US Justice System
Federal Judge Alex Kozinski (9th circuit) has written a scathing indictment of the US justice system. Kozinski starts out discussing a number of myths such as that eyewitness testimony or forensic evidence is highly reliable. Business Insider gives a quick rundown of this part of the paper but they clearly didn’t read very far because the incendiary material comes later.
Kozinski, writing in part based on his personal experience as a judge, says that prosecutors are too often running roughshod over justice:
…there are disturbing indications that a non-trivial number of prosecutors—and sometimes entire prosecutorial offices— engage in misconduct that seriously undermines the fairness of criminal trials. The misconduct ranges from misleading the jury, to outright lying in court and tacitly acquiescing or actively participating in the presentation of false evidence by police.
[…]
Via Coyoteblog
From The Washington Post, a sensible opinion about the tempest-in-a-teapot over the Confederate flag.
There’s no race war in America
Did you know that this newspaper is named for a slaveholder? It’s right there on our masthead, the name of a man who for 56 years held other human beings in bondage on his Virginia plantation — a man, according to the official Mount Vernon Web site, who “frequently utilized harsh punishment against the enslaved population, including whippings.” This dreaded symbol of oppression is delivered to the doorsteps and inboxes of hundreds of thousands of people each morning.
Sure, George Washington also emancipated his slaves in his will, won our independence and became the father of our country — but no matter. It is an outrage that this paper continues to bear the name of such a man.
It is time to rename The Washington Post!
Think that’s stupid? You’re right. But there’s a lot of stupid going around today. The latest example: The TV Land network has pulled the plug on reruns of one of America’s most beloved shows, “The Dukes of Hazzard,” because the car in the show, the General Lee, bears a Confederate flag. There is nothing racist about “The Dukes of Hazzard.” It is a show about moonshine, short shorts and fast cars. What is accomplished by banning “The Dukes of Hazzard”? Nothing. […]
This impulse to wipe away history is Stalinist. Just like Joseph Stalin once erased people from photographs, we’re now erasing people from our collective history.
These historical purges are not only wrong, they are also completely unnecessary. If you want to see where race relations are in the South, just look at how the people of Charleston, S.C., reacted to the shootings at Emanuel AME Church. There were no race riots. The city didn’t burn. People came together — black and white — to mourn and heal together. The white mayor of Charleston joined hands with the state’s black senator and its Indian American governor to pray. Thousands of people of all races, creeds and colors formed a “unity chain” that stretched two miles across the Ravenel Bridge to honor those who died.
This is refreshing news.
Civil Forfeiture Now Requires A Criminal Conviction In Montana And New Mexico
Just in time for the Fourth of July, states are declaring their independence from civil forfeiture.
Enabled by civil forfeiture laws, police can seize and keep property without the government ever filing criminal charges. Innocent Americans actually must prove their own innocence in court if they ever hope to regain their property. Local, state and federal law enforcement agencies routinely seize property and pad their budgets with forfeiture revenue. Outlets as diverse as The New Yorker and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver have detailed this travesty of justice.
But thankfully, civil forfeiture’s days may soon be numbered. Starting July 1, two major reforms from Montana and New Mexico will go into effect. […]
Via Radley Balko
We could have paid — and some of us were paying, I’d bet — for medical coverage for the uninsured without all the bureaucratic and corporate overhead imposed by Obamacare. We could (and some maybe were) helping those who were bankrupted by the costs of medical care for catastrophic cases.
But it’s much easier and so much more satisfying to pass another law, isn’t it? The President gets to preen, the Democratic party gets another notch in its gun belt, and those who supported this disaster-in-the-making get whatever satisfaction comes from that.
Health Insurance Companies Seek Big Rate Increases for 2016
WASHINGTON — Health insurance companies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.
The Oregon insurance commissioner, Laura N. Cali, has just approved 2016 rate increases for companies that cover more than 220,000 people. Moda Health Plan, which has the largest enrollment in the state, received a 25 percent increase, and the second-largest plan, LifeWise, received a 33 percent increase.
Jesse Ellis O’Brien, a health advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, said: “Rate increases will be bigger in 2016 than they have been for years and years and will have a profound effect on consumers here. Some may start wondering if insurance is affordable or if it’s worth the money.” […]
“Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness” – Penn Jillette.
Love your country, not your government.
Using the trumpet for the anthem was a nice touch.
This is one of several clips of Challenger (the Free-Flying National Anthem Eagle) flying at public events.
At least Mr. Gorman recovered his money and his attorney fees. But I doubt they paid him interest for the 2½ years they’ve held his money.
Judge Orders Lying, Cheating Government To Return $167,000 To The Man They Stole It From
A federal judge has just ordered the government to return $167,000 it took from a man passing through Nevada on his way to visit his girlfriend in California. The officers really wanted that money, too. They used two consecutive stops to jerry-rig some probable cause… even though at that point they thought they were only dealing with $2000. From the original stop forward, the entire situation was deplorable, indisputably showing that everyone involved was more interested in taking (and keeping) a bunch of cash than enforcing laws or pursuing justice.
The order is a jaw-dropping read. It begins with the flimsiest of “reasonable suspicion” and heads downhill after that. […]
This order shows law enforcement at its ugliest: willing to lie and cheat to maintain control of what it stole.
Make it a rule: never carry more than petty cash when you travel in the US. There are just too many legally-sanctioned robberies.
Taking someone’s assets is robbery even if those assets were gained illicitly. You’ve got laws: try the people and punish those convicted. If there’s a fine involved then you can seize their assets.
Peter Suderman writes at Reason’s blog (my emphasis below).
In Upholding Obamacare’s Subsidies, Justice Roberts Rewrites the Law—Again
Time to start calling the Affordable Care Act SCOTUScare.Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has rewritten the law to save Obamacare—again. […]
“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” he writes. “If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”
And so Roberts decided that a law which explicitly and repeatedly states that subsidies are limited to exchanges “established by a State,” and which defines “State” as one of the 50 states or the District of Columbia, actually allows subsidies in exchanges established by a State or the federal government. Roberts’ decision does not interpret Obamacare; it adds to it and reworks it, and in the process transforms it into something that it is not. […]
As Justice Antonin Scalia writes in a scathing dissent, Roberts presumes, with no definitive evidence, that his interpretation is the one that Congress intended. “What makes the Court so sure that Congress ‘meant’ tax credits to be available everywhere?” Scalia asks. “Our only evidence of what Congress meant comes from the terms of the law, and those terms show beyond all question that tax credits are available only on state Exchanges.” […]
As even Roberts admits in his opinion, the law “contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting” and generally “does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.” It is a shoddy, messy piece of legislation, held together, barely, by Supreme Court duct tape.
It looks like we’ll be saddled with the PPACA indefinitely, despite passing it and finding out what’s in it.
This struck me for a couple of reasons. First is the heavy-duty geekery going on to build a 500-ton vehicle.
How an enormous Caterpillar mining truck is built
Forget a factory assembly line. The Cat 797 mining truck is so gigantic, it’s assembled on-site. Watch how it’s done.Everything about the Cat 797 mining truck is huge. It has 4,000 horsepower, the engine displacement is nearly 6,500 cubic inches, it weighs more than a million pounds, and it has a payload capacity of 400 tons. “Big” barely does it justice.
What does it take to build such a monster? Caterpillar shows us in the Cat 797 assembly video. It starts at the plant in Decatur, IL, but the pieces aren’t assembled into a mammoth machine until they get out to the job site.
The second reason is memories: my dad spent all his working life at Caterpillar and my sister works there now. In fact, I think sis has been up inside one of these monsters (though they didn’t let her drive, as I recall).
I recall stories from the 60s about the Scottish woodcarvers Caterpillar had "imported" whose job it was to carve the masters for sand casting. Imagine carving a full-scale wooden crankshaft or cylinder head for a large diesel engine. (Not the engines used in the 797, I should add.)
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal (behind its paywall).
Lessons from a little pink house, 10 years later.
June 23 marks the 10th anniversary of Kelo v. City of New London, when the Supreme Court held in a 5-4 ruling that government could use eminent domain to take private property for “economic development.” At issue in the case were 15 homes, including a little pink house owned by Susette Kelo, in the city of New London, Conn., which wanted to transfer the properties to a private nonprofit with plans to revitalize the area. But after the court ruled and the houses were razed (with the exception of Ms. Kelo’s, which was moved at private expense), those plans fell through.
The condemned land remains empty, housing only a few feral cats. After Hurricane Irene in 2011, the city used it as a dumping ground for debris. Yet the first real development since the Supreme Court’s controversial decision might now be on its way: New London Mayor Daryl Finizio, who was elected in 2011 as a critic of the government taking, recently announced a plan to turn the former site of Ms. Kelo’s house into a park that will “serve as a memorial to all those adversely affected by the city’s use of eminent domain.”
It would be a fitting tribute. Although the Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo was consistent with precedent, it was nonetheless a serious error.
How touching that the mayor of New London wants to make a park as a "memorial to all those adversely affected by the city’s use of eminent domain."
If I were one of the victims, I think I’d prefer to have my house and land back.
Via CoyoteBlog I ran across some news recently that left me thinking worse of my fellow citizens. Some people just can’t leave well-enough alone.
First, here’s a report about Deborah Vollmer in Chevy Chase, MD. She seems to be conducting some type of social justice warfare over property zoning. (My emphasis below.)
Declaring war against thy neighbor over a house and a shared driveway
Deborah Vollmer wants to make one thing very clear. Under no circumstances can you park on the driveway. This is not a drill. This is not a joke. Please park on the street.
This isn’t just a driveway, Vollmer explained, stepping across it on a soggy Thursday morning. It is the fault line dividing two titanic forces, a battlefield between past and present, between the haves and the have-nots, between environmental conservation and environmental degradation.
Put another way, the driveway separates her million-dollar house from her neighbor’s million-dollar house.
Suddenly, a figure materialized at the window in the neighbor’s house. It was Vollmer’s next-door neighbor and nemesis — an elegantly dressed, blond-haired woman named Linda Schwartz, who at this precise moment looked very unhappy. Seconds later, a garage door screeched open and Schwartz backed her Mercedes-Benz onto the driveway.
Vollmer, eyes widening in alarm, darted out of sight. “I got to get out of here!” she yelled as she vamoosed. “There’s a no-contact order against me!” […]
Thus passed another tense moment in what local officials say has become the town of Chevy Chase’s lengthiest, costliest, and most litigious neighborhood spat in recent memory. What began as a contested building permit six years ago has spiraled into a clash of wills, spawning five lawsuits, two misdemeanor convictions, arrests, anger-management classes, and a court order that Vollmer steer clear of the Schwartzes — or risk spending 18 months in the slammer.
“It is so sad that this has happened,” said Arthur Schwartz. “She is independently wealthy, has not had to work and has little else to do but continue to sue us and her own town, without regard to the law or what any court has told her.” […]
Read the whole thing to get the flavor of Ms Vollmer’s state of mind. Thank goodness she doesn’t live in my neighborhood.
And from the other coast, Megan McArdle writes about Barbara Berwick’s suit against Uber (and quotes one of Coyote’s posts). RTWT.
‘Employee’ Label Would End Uber as We Know It
If you’re a freelance writer who occasionally sells articles to a website, are you actually an employee? If you live in California, I think the answer might be — yes?
The California labor commissioner has ruled that Uber drivers are employees, not contractors, because they can’t be Uber drivers without the application, because the company pulls DMV records and does background checks, and because the company specifies various rules about how the work may be performed and cuts off access to the application if you get persistently low ratings or are inactive for 180 days (presumably since they no longer have good data on your driving ability).
On the face of it, this ruling seems ludicrous. Raise your hand if you’ve ever had an employer who said: “Hey, as long as you don’t actively alienate the customers, you can just show up and work whenever you feel like. No need to let me know when you’re coming, just show up and I’ll pay you for any work you do. Just put in a couple of hours every six months, m’kay?” Yeah, I never had that job either, and neither did anyone else who wasn’t blackmailing the boss or working for a family member. […]
But wait… there’s more! Here’s an article by Lauren Smiley about Ms Berwick and her legal actions against Uber and others.
The Many, Many Cases of the Woman Who Just Beat Uber
“I’m enjoying my five minutes of fame.”As Barbara Ann Berwick tells it, she came to San Francisco in 1969 “to be a hippie” — but ended up as an online funds trader, a defeated political candidate, and a repeat litigant, who has pressed legal claims against everyone from a hospital to a media company for leaving newspapers at her doorstep. (She lost.)
Now, though, Berwick has won an important blow against one of the most powerful companies in today’s San Francisco. The California Labor Commissioner’s Office determined her to be an employee of Uber — not just a contractor — and awarded her approximately $4,000 in expenses, according to court documents. […]
Berwick waved off naysayers who will accuse her of cruising for another legal settlement by taking the wheel of her car for Uber. This is, after all, a time when the behemoth ridesharing company faces battles across the country about classifying its drivers as contractors, meaning that they are not eligible for benefits or other perks. She wasn’t cynical, says Berwick. She said she’d been homeless in the past. But now in general, “I’m doing quite well.”
“I want social change,” Berwick says. Before she took the Uber gig, she says, she didn’t realize that she’d be driving as a contractor. “I didn’t actually read the box I checked, so I assumed I’d be an employee, because it makes no sense to be an independent contractor. I found out real fast.” She says she was regularly driving more than 40 hours a week.
She says she stopped driving in September and filed her claim. […]
I think Berwick got her "social change" – for herself and for all the other Uber drivers in California. Be sure to tell Barabara "Thanks," folks.
Ms Berwick’s claim that she didn’t understand that she’d be treated as a contractor strikes me as pretty disingenuous. A person who’s been an online trader and a repeat litigant (a) doesn’t read agreements and (b) doesn’t know how Uber works? What?
Perhaps there’s more behind her suit against Uber than has been reported. Who benefits from the labor commissioner’s decision? Not Uber, certainly. Not most other Uber drivers, probably. Berwick’s benefits were the small windfalls of $4,000 and "five minutes of fame," so no clear winners so far.
So who will benefit from this?
Or did Berwick have her eye on more than recovering her expenses?
From the Post-Dispatch this week; readers can draw their own inferences.
Nixon gets $50K from UAW days after veto on right to work
June 13, 2015 11:20JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Democratic Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has received a $50,000 campaign contribution from the United Automobile Workers.
The donation posted in campaign finance documents this week came on June 10, less than a week after Nixon vetoed a contentious right-to-work measure. […]
And, no, I don’t know how much money was contributed (or to whom) by people & organizations who were supporting the Right-to-Work law in Missouri.
While meandering the web one day, I came across the Smoking Policy statement for The Vortex. I’ve never been there but I gather it’s a bar/grill kind of place with a couple of locations in Atlanta, Georgia. (My emphasis below.)
We allow the smoking of cigarettes and e-cigarettes on our premises. If you decide to smoke either one, please only do so in our designated smoking area. Be advised, we do not allow the smoking of cigars, pipes, clove cigarettes or anything forbidden by our Statist overlords.
WE LOVE FREEDOM OF CHOICE
While we’re happy to welcome smokers and non-smokers alike, we will never tolerate crybabies. So if your personal preference is to avoid being around any amount of smoke, then this may not be the place for you. That’s okay. Don’t be sad. We’re not. There are many “smoke-free” establishments in town that will gladly welcome your business. We believe that freedom of choice should always be celebrated, as it’s a rare commodity these days.
THE REAL DANGER
Ultimately, we feel that matters of personal risk assessment are best left to the individual, not the State. We believe that sovereign individuals must have supreme authority over their personal choices with regard to their own body, life and behavior, without the interference of governing powers. As advocates for this kind of freedom, we are deeply concerned that more citizens do not seem to understand the real dangers of coercive legislation. Any time you create a State apparatus capable of repression, it will inevitably fall into the hands of bullies, busy-bodies and tyrants. History has proven this time and time again.
Second-Hand Smoke is better than Second-Hand Fascism.
An establishment with a sensible policy like this one – plus the declaration that The Vortex is an "Official Idiot-Free Zone" is my kind o’ place. If & when I get to Atlanta, I believe I’ll stop by.
News from the Riverfront Times.
St. Louis County SWAT Team Killed Family Dog Over Code Violation, Suit Says
A St. Louis County woman claims a police tactical unit killed her dog while investigating whether her home had natural gas.
On Tuesday, a South County woman filed a federal lawsuit that dog lovers should read with caution — the allegations are pretty disturbing.
In the lawsuit, Angela Zorich claims that St. Louis County Police tactical officers — aka the department’s SWAT team — raided her house in April 2014 and killed Kiya, her four-year-old pit bull.
The reason for the raid: to check if her home had electricity and natural gas service.
“This is an example of police overreaching and using excessive force to get a family out of their house,” said Kenneth Chackes, the attorney who represents Zorich.
Online court records suggest that Zorich and relatives have had various landlord actions and complaints filed against them since 2005 at two separate addresses in south St. Louis County.
Chackes preferred not to elaborate on the complaint, which is already 24 pages long. The St. Louis County Police Department declined to comment since the lawsuit is pending. […]
I don’t know the merits of this woman’s suit so I have no opinion about whether she deserves to win it. She might be a lowlife just trying to cash in.
The County police aren’t commenting so I suppose we’ll have to wait until it goes to trial to hear their side.
On the other hand, if the county police really did send ‘tactical officers’ on a visit about code compliance then What The Hell?
When did that become operating procedure? It takes a person armed with a gun to tell me that not all of my electrical outlets are grounded, that my house needs painting, or that my yard needs mowing?
And if those officers really did shoot her dog in the course of that compliance-checking visit then I hope she wins her suit and cleans the county’s clock – even though I’d be helping to pay whatever damages she’s awarded.
Here’s a video that highlights something I think most people take for granted.
All that work to generate the electricity that costs me about 2/10 of a cent. How many Roberts for a penny’s worth of current? 5.
He’s lucky he only had to power a toaster. One of my grandmothers had no toaster. Instead, she toasted bread using the broiler in her electric oven – one side at a time. (And was that slow.) I’d like to see Robert toast bread that way.
As for granny, it gets worse: on cool mornings in spring or autumn, she’d turn the oven on with its door open to take the chill out of her kitchen.
Looking at the #toasterchallenge hashtag, I imagine that the video makers’ point is that we should all conserve energy as much as possible.
But I don’t regard energy as some finite resource that we’re likely to completely consume in the near future. We hadn’t run out of coal when we switched to oil. We hadn’t run out of trees when we switched to coal. I doubt that we’ll have run out of oil when we switch to… whatever.
As one of Carl Sagan’s sons (I don’t recall which one) said: life is possible because the Earth exists in the sun’s energy gradient. That gradient – that waterfall of energy we live within – is what drives it all. And I think we’ve got a few billion years to go before we’ll need another star.
Assuming that the market’s allowed to work, energy will continue to be available pretty much indefinitely. It may not always be available at today’s bargain prices, which allow us to waste it on things like air travel for pleasure, power sports, global computer networks, vanity satellite launches, quick and easy cooking, well-lit roads and sidewalks, and toasting bread in electric ovens.
But it’ll be available.
Update 6/6/15: Now here’s a way to toast bread that wastes even more energy than granny’s method, I think. I hate to think how many ‘Roberts’ this would take.
Via engadget
Update 6/2/15:
Maybe I was too pessimistic above or too into the current group think about energy. This article appeared recently at Bloomberg Business.
The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change Forever
The renewable-energy boom is here. Trillions of dollars will be invested over the next 25 years, driving some of the most profound changes yet in how humans get their electricity. That’s according to a new forecast by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that plots out global power markets to 2040.
Here are six massive shifts coming soon to power markets near you: […]
Prices are coming down for rooftop solar and — more importantly — for home energy storage. (See Tesla’s Powerwall.)
Dry battery storage is still a little spendy; the Powerwall unit’s not cheap when you start looking at its lifetime and replacement costs. But when I can store 30-40 kWh in my basement for 10¢/kWh (counting maintenance & replacement), I’ll be all over that.
Who needs reaction mass? And who understands the physics behind this?
I ran across a mention of testing an EM drive in vacuum a couple of weeks ago but didn’t pay it much attention because of where I found it. Then Paul sent a link to this article at a NASA site which makes me take it more seriously.
If you’re interested in space flight, RTWT. It could be a game-changer.
Evaluating NASA’s Futuristic EM Drive
April 29, 2015 by José Rodal, Ph.D, Jeremiah Mullikin and Noel Munson – subedited by Chris GebhardtA group at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has successfully tested an electromagnetic (EM) propulsion drive in a vacuum – a major breakthrough for a multi-year international effort comprising several competing research teams. Thrust measurements of the EM Drive defy classical physics’ expectations that such a closed (microwave) cavity should be unusable for space propulsion because of the law of conservation of momentum.
EM Drive:
Last summer, NASA Eagleworks – an advanced propulsion research group led by Dr. Harold “Sonny” White at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) – made waves throughout the scientific and technical communities when the group presented their test results on July 28-30, 2014, at the 50th AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference in Cleveland, Ohio.
Those results related to experimental testing of an EM Drive – a concept that originated around 2001 when a small UK company, Satellite Propulsion Research Ltd (SPR), under Roger J. Shawyer, started a Research and Development (R&D) program.
The concept of an EM Drive as put forth by SPR was that electromagnetic microwave cavities might provide for the direct conversion of electrical energy to thrust without the need to expel any propellant.
This lack of expulsion of propellant from the drive was met with initial skepticism within the scientific community because this lack of propellant expulsion would leave nothing to balance the change in the spacecraft’s momentum if it were able to accelerate.
What amazes me (and apparently many others) is that you don’t need to haul along a bunch of reaction mass to throw away behind you in order to accelerate.
Heinlein wrote an article about interplanetary travel at constant acceleration. (He and many others have written novels based on that assumption, of course.) The travel times are remarkably shorter than building up an initial velocity and then coasting – which is how we do it now. The critical factor in using constant acceleration has always been carrying the reaction mass you needed to expel in order to get the acceleration.
Even a constant acceleration of 0.1G (0.98m/sec2) makes a huge difference in travel time.
And now – maybe – that’s not necessary after all? Wow. I don’t know if Larry Niven would classify this as an example of his reaction-less drive but I think it’s pretty close.
News from Houston, Texas: read it and fear your government.
My emphasis in the final line because the idea that los Federales can highjack your equipment for a criminal purpose – without your knowledge – and leave you without recourse from your insurer is adding injury to injury.
Judge: Feds owe trucking company nothing over DEA informant murder (update)
Posted on April 28, 2015 | By Dane SchillerOfficers from multiple agencies work at the scene of a shooting in which Drug Enforcement Administration informant Lawrence Chapa, who was posing as a truck driver to infiltrate the drug world, was shot to death at Hollister near Champions Walk Lane Monday, Nov. 21, 2011, in Houston. ( James Nielsen / Chronicle )
A Houston-based federal judge ruled that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration does not owe the owner of a small Texas trucking company anything, not even the cost of repairing the bullet holes to a tractor-trailer truck that the agency used without his permission for a wild 2011 drug cartel sting that resulted in the execution-style murder of the truck’s driver, who was secretly working as a government informant.The ruling by U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal, which was made public late Monday, heads off a potentially embarrassing civil trial that was supposed to start early next month at the federal courthouse.
Andy Vickery, a lawyer representing trucking company, said he was floored by the ruling.
“She is basically saying you can’t sue the feds,” he said by phone.
And he emailed this reaction:
A federally deputized corporal from the Houston Police Department decides to pay your small company’s driver to drive your truck to the Mexican border, load it up with illegal drugs, and try to catch some bad guys. He knows that the driver is lying to “the owner” – although he doesn’t know your name or identity and doesn’t bother to find out. The bad guys outwit the cops. Your company’s driver is killed. Your truck is riddled with bullet holes.
Query: is our federal government liable to pay for the damages to you and your property?
Answer: Nope.
He said an appeal is already in the works.
Trucking company owner Craig Patty has said that the truck was used and damaged in a drug sting against one of Mexico’s most violent cartels without his permission and that his family lived in extreme fear they would face retaliation from the cartel, even though they had no idea what the government was doing. […]
Patty’s truck was impounded and later released to him, but was out of service for months. The DEA refused to pay for the damages, as did Patty’s insurance company, which ruled that the truck had been used in a criminal act, and therefore the damages weren’t covered.
DEA delenda est!
H.T. Paul
No Truce With Kings 