There's no way this isn't a slam dunk case to sue the piss out of the Fargo Police, probably the US Marshals and maybe other orgs. The woman in the surveillance phone clearly looks way younger, among the many other obvious signs this woman didn't do it. I hope she wrings at least several million dollars out of the government.
It literally doesn't matter -- you're focused on the wrong thing. She could be that woman's exact twin and it wouldn't matter. Spending six months in jail and losing your house, your car, and your dog with the flimsiest of evidence is ridiculous.
'you can beat the wrap but not the ride' has been a pop culture reference in the US since the 1940s. Our society wants/supports the ability for this to be inflicted at police/court whim on people.
Which means that, if the cops (and other relevant personnel) gets it wrong, they should get served with the same injustices that they committed, no questions asked... you know, because they didn't raise any when they were the ones dishing out punishments.
> What if no one would want to work as a policemen
This is by far the worst argument. What if we held doctors accountable for malpractice and no one wanted to be a doctor? What if we held engineers liable for faulty designs that break and kill people and no one wanted to be an engineer? What if we held OCCUPATION accountable for DOING JOB BADLY / BREAKING THE LAW? Its a nonsense argument.
What would happen is that only the people that intended to be bad police would not want to the job and/or the people that were bad police (intentional or otherwise) get kicked out of the police force. Same as with every other profession. This is a fantastic outcome and we should do it immediately.
I don't think society supports it as much as you are suggesting. Marijuana is still illegal despite 65% of the nation being in favor of rescheduling. Clearly our laws do not easily mirror what the population believes.
A lawsuit is exactly what matters. They learn only the hard way, and no other way. If you want them to not be ridiculous, a lawsuit with large punitive damages is the only practical way to get there.
I disagree. The city or state gets sued and they pay the result from the taxpayer funds and literally nobody learns anything, especially not the hard way. Everyone is so completely divorced, and in some cases immune, from consequences that this will change nothing.
After a couple million dollar lawsuits the city or state will learn to be more careful with their methods. It's the taxpayer funds, but it's not an endless supply of money. Cities and states have their own budgets.
I haven't lived there in years, nor do I have exact numbers, but they make national news enough for the same problem nearly every year. I'll drop you some links if you care.
> The region's GDP is 100 billion dollars, so these are tiny amounts, although they may seem large to some.
It's a fair point and easy to handwave away "it's only $100 per resident." But it's a lot of money still. And yet that city is shutting down schools and selling off school properties to make budget this year. I bet they'd love to have those wasted millions.
> You think they can safely 10x that?
I have no idea the reason for this question. The OP said cities learn after a couple million dollar suits. I'm showing that no, they do not. If anything suits are increasing.
You can be arrested, indicted, and held in jail on pretrial, and there is literally no recourse. There are many other ways jail can happen without due process. Where I live:
* Civil contempt. Absolutely immunity. No due process. Record is about 16 years. Having a bad day? Judge can toss you in jail.
* "Dangerous." Half a year. No due process. He-said she-said.
* "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you.
Absolutely no recourse. You come out with a gap in income, employment, and, if you missed rent/mortgage, no home. Landlords will simply throw your stuff away too.
You're also basically damned if things do move forward, since from jail, you have no access to evidence, to internet (for legal research), and no reasonable way to recruit a lawyer (and, for most people, pay for one).
Can happen to anyone. Less common if you're rich and can afford a good lawyer, but far from uncommon.
The GP seems to be suggesting that there's no recourse at all, usually. You might bring suit against a police department or LE agency, but you'll fail to find any relief there. True that qualified immunity only protects individuals, but there's a raft of other things that makes it hard to get a judgement against a police department, too.
I think there's probably one major exception: civil rights violation investigations. But even then, the people doing the investigating seem to be biased toward the LEOs.
The GP's linked article doesn't seem to even talk about this, so not sure why that's there.
> You might bring suit against a police department or LE agency, but you'll fail to find any relief there.
I don't know if I'd go so far to say she won't find any relief, but it probably still could be a pretty tough Monell claim against the department (although it's hard to tell from the sparse details in the article):
"[A] local government may not be sued under [42 U.S.C.] § 1983 for an injury inflicted solely by its employees or agents. Instead, it is when execution of a government's policy or custom, whether made by its lawmakers or by those whose edicts or acts may fairly be said to represent official policy, inflicts the injury that the government, as an entity, is responsible under § 1983." [1]
I could see a problem if there was a policy/custom of relying on AI facial recognition alone without any other corroborating evidence (would be a really stupid practice, but I'm sure stupider things have become part of a police department's systemic practices). Or if there was a failure to sufficiently train detectives about the erroneous tendencies of this technology. Maybe the needlessly prolonged detention without bail could be an issue if there was a lack of adequate protocols to expedite in a reasonable amount of time.
Either way, still seems hard to say this a slam dunk case for her, unfortunately. But also seems too risky for the city of Fargo to not settle, at least nominally.
> "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you.
And there are definitely insane people who are a threat to themselves and others who wander around, making the streets and public transit systems unsafe and unpleasant, who need to be put into something like a psychiatric hold by something like the police.
And if you don't have police and a criminal justice system that are willing and able to impose psychiatric holds, you wind up with a bunch of incidents where a crazy mentally-ill vagrant kills someone in a public (the Iryna Zarutska murder, or any of the various cases where a homeless person randomly shoves someone into the path of an oncoming train at a public transit station); or incidents where someone else gets railroaded by the criminal justice system for intervening in a crazy mentally-ill person threatening people around them (the Daniel Penny incident - many people, even nominal anti-carceralists, are upset that he was not successfully convicted and incarcerated for murder). Not to mention all the less-newsworthy incidents where insane people walking the streets and public transit systems systematically ruin them for everyone else, either through vandalism or theft or simply screaming incoherently at people as they try to use the public commons.
It's certainly possible for the police to abuse psychiatric holds if they don't like you; on the other hand, the existence of large numbers of people who should be in some kind of psychiatric hold but aren't disrupting and vandalizing the public commons is one of the biggest quality of life and physical safety problems in my region and in many other American urban areas.
Go to Florida, be arrested. Have charges thrown out, dropped, dismissed or simply be acquitted. Florida doesn't care, they'll bill you for your incarceration at nearly $100/day. And failure to pay this bill is, itself, a felony.
>* "Insane." Psychiatric hold. Three days. Due process on paper, not in practice. Police in my town can and do use this if they don't like you.
A friend of mine was committed longer than 3 days without council or the ability to represent themselves in the hearing. Apparently the whole process of being committed is ex parte in practice in some states.
This is a bit hyperbolic and the exaggerations really undermine what I think is your broader point (that there is rarely recourse when you're held for short to moderate amounts of time). It is hard for me to believe that someone was held for 16 years on civil contempt without due process or that someone was held for half a year without due process after being deemed dangerous. The reason that is hard for me to believe is that the due process is implicit in the action you describe. Civil contempt is from a judge which implies that you're already in court - that's due process. Someone being labeled "dangerous" implies that a finding was made by a neutral party - that's due process.
Just because you disagree with the outcome doesn't mean that due process wasn't given.
Yeah it's "due process." In civil contempt the judge is a witness and prosecutor in the very "process" they're judging. That's the most perverted form of due process imaginable.
A judge should have to recuse themselves if they are acting as witness to the supposed infraction.
Civil contempt isn't some roving criminal charge that jumps out of the jury box randomly. It's meant to make somebody comply with a court order. Anybody in civil contempt holds the keys to the jailhouse door in their own hands, all they have to do is comply.
This statement should make you uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable because it is a pure expression of the power of the state. But it's still due process.
In Criminal Contempt max duration of imprisonment is limited. In civil it is not until somebody decides that one never complies. You may call it due process. I call it for what it is - A torture and fucking crime against humanity. Judge that holds person for years for being stubborn deserves nothing more than walk the plank
Any power that could force a judge to actually walk the plank for what they see as an abuse of power, is itself something like a state, that could just as easily wield that power against the stubborn defendant.
Judges are not above the law. They could be and are being made to "walk a plank". Problem is that we have many laws that are very shitty and allow abuse and are heavily distorted to benefit anyone but "we the people"
Qualified immunity doesn't apply to criminal cases. It is used to defend against civil suits. It is unfortunately very easy to find many cases where it leads to injustice. For example:
>...Abby Tiscareno, a licensed daycare provider in Utah, was wrongfully convicted of felony child abuse when a child under her care suffered brain hemorrhaging. After calling emergency services, subsequent medical tests supported these findings. However, during her trial, requested medical records from the Utah Division of Child and Family Services (DCFS) were not provided. It wasn’t until a civil suit that Ms. Tiscareno saw pathology reports suggesting the injury could have occurred outside of her care. She was granted a new trial and acquitted. Her subsequent lawsuit for due process violations, alleging that DCFS failed to provide exculpatory evidence, was dismissed due to lack of precedent indicating DCFS’s obligation to produce such evidence.
Off of taxpayer money sadly. Imo we really need a fix for this. When cops are grossly negligent the money should come out of their aggregate pension fund (or at least partially).
> we really need a fix for this. When cops are grossly negligent the money should come out of their aggregate pension fund
This is on us as voters. If we didn’t piss our pants every time a police union sneezed, we’d realize wholesale restarting police departments is precedents in even our largest cities.
Yes, this is the key point. Tax payers get a nice big bill while the people who caused the problem get a nice paid vacation while they conduct an internal "investigation" that typically finds they did nothing wrong.
Yeah, of course they need to held accountable, and we need to vote in people who will do so. What I'm suggesting is an alignment of incentives that will ensure that police will try to do their best to not be negligent.
Of course there's a balance that has to be struck so that police are empowered enough to act. So perhaps something like settlements against the police being 30% borne by the police pension fund and 70% by taxpayers is sufficient. I think this will also make police very enthusiastic about bodycams and holding each other accountable.
I'm usually a big supporter of labor unions, but police unions in the US generally have an outsized amount of power, and even when mayors etc. want to hold police accountable, the union ends up bending the mayor over a barrel.
I'm not sure what the solution is here. Forbid police from unionizing? That would probably have some bad consequences too.
despite this being something practically everybody wants, the fact that it hasn't happened is not a coincidence and speaks to the power of police unions/guilds and their lobbying arms. outside a few toothless instances, those groups are extremely good at reframing these attempts and mobilizing their bases to vote against the broader public interest.
> despite this being something practically everybody wants,
No, everybody does not want police accountability. Half the population will fall on a grenade to prevent that. They know that the purpose of the police is to keep the undesirables in line, and they never envision that they will ever fall in that category.
oh, i generally don't disagree with you on that point; i specifically meant that when presented with the question "do you want your tax dollars to pay for police liabilities?" the answer is probably almost always "no".
Sure. But when you ask "Do you want the police to be unable to do their job and live in a lawless hellscape ran by gangbangers and ISIS cartels?, the answer is also 'No.'
The problem is that the mass media sets the framing of acceptable discourse, and that mass media is in large part an ideological monoculture. And even when it's not, it is happy to present absolutely insane batshit lunacy as 'one of the two sides' of an issue.
yeah - i think the media is certainly culpable, but i also think this speaks to the power of police unions like i mentioned earlier. media is happy to present stories presented to them on silver platters by "respected" institutions because they carry all the hallmarks of legitimacy.
Almost all taxpayer funded pension funds are already underfunded. It makes no difference if the funding decreases or increases, the government employee will still get their benefit. The government would have to go through bankruptcy to get the benefit amount reduced.
imho the US Marshals are the only innocent party here, as my understanding is they don't do investigations and just serve warrants without any knowledge of the underlying case.
It's pretty common when a dog is abandoned. Likely her children couldn't afford to care for it. I suppose there is a chance they put it up for adoption (same outcome is likely).
No large scale orgs that I know of. Our local bar has an attorney who does work against it, she has her number at the jail where other inmates will pass her number around if some mentions their dog, and intake officers will often suggest to inmates that if they have pets to call her. She is absolutely the most hard core lover of dogs I have ever met, and she will literally drive/run into danger to get to a canine to get it to a local non-kill shelter.
People famously do not learn from the experiences of others. It's a big reason why life is so hard when you'd expect it to be pretty easy based on our collective experience.
