• Man is arrested, cuffed, booked, and jailed because. . . ready for this one? . . . he couldn’t afford to finish putting aluminum siding on his home.
• Report: When a Dutch boy reported sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the 1950s, the church had him castrated. There were at least nine other castrations.
• FAA will “review” pointless ban on electronic devices during takeoff.
• Mad Lib headline of the day! Also, “pork doughnut” sounds dirty.
• The Portland Oregonian ed page editor who recently died during sex with a prostitute . . . published 16 editorials denouncing prostitution.
• Puppycide. I’d submit that if you’re so terrified of dogs that you think you were “forced” to kill a boxer puppy and pregnant chihuahua, maybe you aren’t cut out to be a police officer.
• New York City rent control laws are even more insane than you think. 
• Now let’s talk about the real Foxconn.

Prague.

From last night’s Rangers-Devils game.

• Probably the greatest Reddit AMA to date. Includes the phrase, “I will admit I am a very sexually active Goofy . . . “
• Jonah Goldberg defends This American Life. I think he’s basically right. The retraction was contrite, complete and thorough. It’s still a great show.
• More “meth baby” panic.
• Why it’s a bad idea to punish someone for someone else’s suicide. Another good take on the Ravi/Clementi case here.
• This can’t be a positive development.
• Some very cool maps showing how Facebook networks reflect colonial empires.
• Science and libertarianism.

Prague.

• The city of Pittsburgh has settled with Jordan Miles for a whopping . . . $75,000. The photo at right is what Miles looked like after three Pittsburgh cops beat the hell out of him. They mistook for a weapon the Mountain Dew bottle the 18-year-old music student was carrying. And it just gets uglier from there. I wrote about the case in January of last year, and here’s a follow-up from December. The settlement only covers the city. The cops are still on the hook for possible civil damages, though they’ve been cleared by the state and federal government of any criminal wrongdoing. Of course, if the cops are found liable, the city—by which I mean taxpayers—will cover those damages, too.
• Next up, a judge in Louisiana has approved compensation for four DNA exonerees. One spent 30 years in prison. The other three spent 16 years each in a cell. They’ll all get $250,000, plus $80,000 in medical and education expenses, the maximum allowed understate law.
• Finally, the U.S. Department of Justice has agreed to pay a man $140,000 for the three years he was wrongly imprisoned due to some blatant misconduct by a federal prosecutor. A federal judge took the unusual step of declaring the man innocent and excoriating former Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Hinshelwood for concealing exculpatory evidence. The DOJ initially offered just $5,000 per year for the wrongful conviction and incarceration. A Florida regulatory agency ordered Hinshelwood to attend a one-day ethics workshop. The DOJ took no disciplinary action. Hinshelwood is now in private practice in Florida.

• New cops vs. cameras incidents: Arizona. Illinois. Massachusetts. New York.
• Barrington, Illinois man charged with disorderly conduct after offering to young girls a ride during a snowstorm.
• Ottawa man gets the tactical team treatment for pointing toy gun at an angry motorist.
• TSA vs. three-year-old in a wheelchair.
• NATO won’t investigate civilian casualties of its bombing of Libya.
• The Los Angeles bunker from where Hitler would rule his empire.
• Five ways Citizens United has made politics better.
• C-Span founder Brian Lamb retires. You could make a strong case that he did more for government transparency than any single person, ever.

Prague.

This week’s dog, Lucky, comes with an incredible story. From reader Larry Brothers in Sammamish, Washington:

I spent a month rescuing animals in the aftermath of Katrina. The group I was with got a call one morning from the police. A dog – a bullmastiff, according to them -  was on a shelf in the closet of a wrecked house and was “out of his fucking mind.” He had bitten a couple of them and, if someone didn’t get him down, they were going to shoot him. I arrived to find a terrified, twenty-five pound chow/shiba mix who was, in fact, out of his fucking mind. He had been stuck in that house for two weeks after the hurricane and he bore a striking resemblance to Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” It took me almost an hour to calm him down enough to get a slip leash on him and get him out of there.

Two weeks earlier, fourteen of us from Pasado’s Safe Haven in Washington had jumped on a plane to Houston, then rented several vans to head to New Orleans. We had no idea on the way there where we were going to stay or how we were going to talk our way past the police and military to get into the city. By the time the plane landed, people back at Pasado’s had secured a ranch with an enormous barn in Houma, south of the city. Louis and Linda St. Martin, a local attorney and his wife, told us to use it as we saw fit and we did exactly that. When we first arrived, we discovered that a local equestrian center had been commandeered to temporarily vet check and house the rescued animals until arrangements could be made to reunite them with their people or ship them out to shelters all over the country.

It was a well-intended cluster fuck. Different rescue groups would arrive with trucks and vans full of animals and have to spend hours checking in—after rescuing in 95 degree heat all day. Often the Center would reach capacity before all the animals were unloaded and the rescuers would have to leave to try to find some other place for them. And, of course, the in-fighting was stupendous. The Humane Society, the ASPCA, local groups… everyone wanted to have endless meetings about who was in charge. ‘Protocol’ seemed to be the watchword. We said fuck a bunch of protocol and set up two hundred wire kennels in the barn. Back in Washington, Pasado’s sent out emails and appeals on their website for volunteers. No experience necessary, bring your sleeping bags and tents and come help save lives. No certification or degrees required, unlike most of the other groups.

Within two weeks, we had vets and vet teams from all over the country and hundreds of volunteers. We had people donating private planes with the seats removed to fly animals to no-kill shelters all over the country. Some just loaded up vans and drove hundreds of miles or more to deliver them.

Some people were there for a few days and some for a few months. We saved over 1200 animals and were blackballed in Louisiana for refusing to follow protocol.

Lucky wouldn’t let anyone handle him but me. He was in the barn for several days before he was shipped out to a shelter. Over the ensuing months, I thought about him often. I had considered taking him home but I had two cats and two other dogs at the time and I didn’t want to get him all the way back to Washington to find he couldn’t get along with everyone. I even tried to find him a couple of times but, unknown to me, his identification number from the barn had been copied down wrongly, so it was fruitless.

In February of 2006, I was talking with a friend in Alabama whom I had met when she came to volunteer with us. She was the best I’ve ever seen with aggressive dogs and she ran a shelter in Alabama. We were reminiscing and, of course, Lucky’s name came up. I told her I hadn’t been able to locate him.

Four days later, she called me. Someone had just surrendered him at her shelter. I had her fly him to Washington immediately.

Today, Lucky is approximately 7-8 years old and shares our house with four other rescued dogs and my unbelievable wife, Amanda, who is – naturally – a dog trainer. My cats have passed away but Lucky did fine with them. He loves his housemates but, not unexpectedly, he has his problems. He is fiercely protective of our home and doesn’t do well with people or dogs he doesn’t know extremely well. That isn’t going to change, so we manage his behavior when people are over by putting him in my office with some toys and a frozen peanut butter kong. He thinks he’s died and gone to heaven.

The photo above is obviously the before. The after is below. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go hug my dog.

Scott, a West Point grad and Duke graduate student, was shot and killed outside of a Las Vegas Costco after he got into an argument with a Costco employee. The employee apparently saw that Scott was (legally) carrying a weapon, panicked, and called the police. In their testimony at the coroner’s inquest, police said that as Scott was leaving the Costco, they simultaneously told him to drop his weapon and put his hands in the air. When he didn’t comply with both, which of course was impossible, they killed him.

The coroner nonetheless found the shooting justified. Which shouldn’t be surprising. Las Vegas hasn’t fired a police officer for shooting someone in any of the 378 times it’s happened over the last 20 years. (Although one of the cops involved in the Scott shooting was later fired and criminally charged in a separate case for providing a gun to a felon.)

Scott had no prior criminal record. His family had been pursuing a lawsuit. But they’ve now given up, apparently out of frustration. Here’s the press release, in full:

Scott Family Announces Erik B. Scott Lawsuit to be Dismissed

Las Vegas, NV (March 13, 2012) – Upon advice of legal counsel, the family of Erik B. Scott has dismissed its lawsuit against the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Sheriff Doug Gillespie and the three officers who shot and killed Erik on July 10, 2010.

“We are extremely disappointed, and this action is being taken with great reluctance,” said William B. Scott, Erik’s father. “We thank our attorney, Ross Goodman, and his team for their outstanding efforts on Erik’s and our behalf. It’s time to move on with our lives.”

“We feel Erik was wrongfully killed, through an incredibly tragic mistake,” he added. “Officer William Mosher claimed he tapped Erik on the shoulder, and Mosher confirmed, at the coroner’s inquest hearing, that Erik responded by stating that he had a concealed firearm. Erik was trying to comply with the officer’s conflicting commands, when Mosher fired two shots. The commands and those first shots occurred within two seconds. Mosher’s first round hit Erik in the heart, killing him instantly. The second round went through Erik’s right thigh. Officers Mendiola and Stark then fired another five rounds into Erik’s back, after my son was on the ground and dying.”

Despite multiple witnesses confirming Erik was complying with Officer Mosher’s commands, recent Ninth Circuit Court opinions finding “qualified immunity” for police officers, even after agreeing excessive force had been used, makes it difficult to proceed with this lawsuit.

“While we believe the Costco surveillance-video data — which captured the shooting — provides irrefutable evidence that Erik was wrongfully killed, the ‘missing’ segment of that video makes it difficult to overcome those qualified-immunity legal issues,” Scott said.

Odd how critical portions of surveillance video often turn up missing, isn’t it?

I’ve written a couple columns for Reason over the last couple years about allegations that NYPD was underreporting serious crimes in order to juke the CompStat figures. And of course at the same time, NYPD was stopping tens of thousands of people for stop-and-frisks and making petty marijuana arrests. Put the two together, and you get a perverse policy of manufacturing petty crimes and false arrests while downgrading—sometimes not even bothering to investigate—violent crimes with actual victims.

NYPD has denied these allegations. When NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded NYPD management in his precinct talking about quotas and downgrades, they raided his home and forcibly committed him to a psychiatric hospital.

When the Schoolcraft allegations first surfaced, NYPD Chief Commissioner Ray Kelly ordered an investigation. NYPD has since tried to sit on the results of that investigation. Last week, the Village Voice reported on its contents. And they’re damning.

 . . . at the same time that police officials were attacking Schoolcraft’s credibility, refusing to pay him, and serving him with administrative charges, the NYPD was sitting on a document that thoroughly vindicated his claims.

Investigators went beyond Schoolcraft’s specific claims and found many other instances in the 81st Precinct where crime reports were missing, had been misclassified, altered, rejected, or not even entered into the computer system that tracks crime reports.

These weren’t minor incidents. The victims included a Chinese-food delivery man robbed and beaten bloody, a man robbed at gunpoint, a cab driver robbed at gunpoint, a woman assaulted and beaten black and blue, a woman beaten by her spouse, and a woman burgled by men who forced their way into her apartment.

“When viewed in their totality, a disturbing pattern is prevalent and gives credence to the allegation that crimes are being improperly reported in order to avoid index-crime classifications,” investigators concluded. “This trend is indicative of a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct.”

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The investigation found that crime complaints were changed to reflect misdemeanor rather than felony crimes, which prevented those incidents from being counted in the all-important crime statistics. In addition, the investigation concluded that “an unwillingness to prepare reports for index crimes exists or existed in the command.”

Moreover, a significant number of serious index crimes were not entered into the computer tracking system known as OmniForm. “This was more than administrative error,” the probe concluded.

There was an “atmosphere in the command where index crimes were scrutinized to the point where it became easier to either not take the report at all or to take a report for a lesser, non-index crime,” investigators concluded.

The Voice talked to criminologists and former NYPD officials who say there’s no reason to think the problem is limited to the 81st Precinct.

John Eterno, a criminologist at Molloy College and a former NYPD captain, says that what was happening in the 81st Precinct is no isolated case. “The pressures on commanders are enormous, to make sure the crime numbers look good,” Eterno says. “This is a culture. This is happening in every precinct, every transit district, and every police housing service area. This culture has got to change.”

As for Mauriello, he’s no rogue commander, says Eterno, who has published a book about crime reporting with John Jay College professor Eli Silverman. “Mauriello is no different from any other commander,” he says. “This is just a microcosm of what is happening in the entire police department.”

Indeed, it is clear from Schoolcraft’s recordings that Mauriello was responding to pressure emanating from the Brooklyn North borough command and police headquarters for lower crime numbers and higher summons and stop-and-frisk numbers.

This ought to be a much, much bigger scandal. Political pressure to produce ever-lower crime stats was providing an incentive to downgrade or refuse to investigate rapes, robberies, and assaults. All the while, NYPD cops were stopping hundreds of thousands of black and brown people for no reason at all, subjecting them to searches, then, in some cases, arresting them with little cause, only to release them hours or days later.

The evidence on whether CompStat and Broken Windows really contributed much to the crime drop is mixed. But we’re seeing increasingly alarming evidence that the two policies have had some pretty awful unintended (but, when you think about it, entirely predictable) consequences.

• A point that can’t be made often enough when discussing labor in the developing wrold.
• Jeffrey Havard again denied by the Mississippi Supreme Court. I’ve written about Havard’s case several times, but here’s a good summary. The only real evidence against him was now-disputed testimony from Steven Hayne. Yet he’s now perilously close to an execution date.  I’ll have more on this later.
• Jacob Sullum on the injustice in the Dharun Ravi verdict. It’s disappointing to see people normally skeptical of the criminal justice system celebrating Ravi’s possible imprisonment.
• NPR asks three people who want to go to war with Syria what we should do about Syria.
• Senators say if they could tell you how the PATRIOT Act is being used, you’d be appalled.
• Police officer accused of sexual battery, rape while in uniform offered deal to plead guilty to extortion. He’ll get probation and the chance to clear his record entirely.
• State politicians aren’t using money from the mortgage settlement to help out homeowners. So basically, politicians used desperate homeowners as a prop to punish banks in order to get funding to help pay down budget deficits created by politicians. If you’re surprised by this, you haven’t been paying attention.

I was hoping to visit Saint Petersburg and the Baltics for my vacation this year, but I discovered that it’s a huge pain for Americans to visit Russia right now. Think I’m going to do Berlin and Copenhagen instead. But what a beautiful city.

• Photos of peopleless places.
• Eugene, Oregon police officer gets a $250,000 settlement for his demotion after he raised concerns about “multiple, inadvertent discharges of high-­powered weapons by SWAT team members.”
• Headline of the day.
• Google now has more revenue than the entire U.S. newspaper industry.
• Family of Rachel Hoffman, the 24 year-old Florida woman murdered after she was pressured to work as a police informant, gets a $2.4 million settlement.
• The Nation sticks up for corporate welfare.

Great article in the Nashville City Paper about the proliferation of distilleries in Tennessee. Until just a few years ago, there were only two, Jack Daniels and George Dickel. Now there are about a dozen. Here’s why:

From the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 until the most recent law change, it was exceptionally difficult to get legal approval to distill spirits in the state of Tennessee. Only a few counties allowed the practice, and for a distillery to be approved it had to get a referendum on the ballot and then win a countywide vote. This made it nearly impossible for new producers to start up.

In 2009 all that changed. A bill was drafted that would permit distilleries in any county in Tennessee where there are both operating liquor stores and liquor by the drink, which opens up much of the state. But there was a moment where things didn’t look good for the bill.

“A state senator said to us at one point: ‘Wine is good because Jesus drank wine. But beer and whiskey are bad, because Jesus did not drink those,’ ” Darek Bell of Nashville-based Corsair Distillery recalled. “It felt like we had traveled back in time to Prohibition.”

“At one point it looked like the bill would fail,” Bell said. “An older representative got up and spoke. He said ‘I don’t know anything about this stuff. But if it will help the farmers in my community sell more corn, then I am all for it.’ And just like that, the opinion turned, and the bill seemed to sail through after that.”

But that doesn’t mean there still aren’t some daunting regulatory hurdles. The most asinine is probably the wholesaler/distributor laws, variations of which are common to many states. The only real purpose of these laws is to drive up the cost of booze in order to enrich people who run alcohol wholesaling businesses. Wholesalers are also licensed by the state, and usually given state-granted monopolies over large chunks of territories.

 [T]o make it to the shelves, a distillery must sign on with a distributor, which is a very delicate aspect of the process. Tennessee liquor distribution, which also includes wine and higher-alcohol beer, is subject to what is known as a franchise law. This law was put in place to protect the franchisee, in this case, the wholesaler. According to local attorney Will Cheek, once a distiller enters into a contract with
a wholesaler, it is very, very difficult to terminate that contract. In fact, he couldn’t recall a single case of  such a relationship being terminated.

So, hypothetically, were a distiller to ever get crossways with the distributor for whatever reason, leaving that relationship would be nearly impossible.

“It’s a harder choice than choosing your spouse. Getting divorced is far easier than breaking up with your distributor,” Cheek said.

This could prove especially difficult for microdistilleries, which might not get as much notice on a wholesaler’s radar. Cheek said the law is structured to protect the wholesalers from big, out-of-state competitors.

“From a distiller’s standpoint, the law is ridiculous. It offers every protection to the wholesaler and almost none for the distiller,” he said.

If you sat down and consciously tried to design a system prone to corruption and highly favorable to large, incumbent alcohol companies at the expense of upstarts, I don’t think you could do much better than this.

But the most beautiful example of regulatory nonsense can’t be blamed on Bible Belt temperance. It comes courtesyof the federal government. In order to get a federal permit for whiskey-makin’ . . .

 . . . you have to be able to prove you know how to make whiskey but are not allowed to have actually made it . . .

Wonderful, isn’t it? It’s illegal to distill booze for any reason, even solely for personal consumption. So to get a federal permit, you really do have to swear to the feds that you know how to distill, but it’s illegal for you to ever have tried.*

Related: This Tennessee-distilled wonderfulness is the best bourbon I’ve ever had. Don’t be deterred by the chocolate. It’s delightfully subtle.

*A commenter points out that someone could conceivably have learned the art of distilling in another country. Good point! That also means that when it comes to whiskey-making, the feds are giving a huge advantage to .  .  . foreigners!

• If elected, Rick Santorum promises to crack down on Internet porn. Which raises an important question: Why does Rick Santorum want more people to be raped?
• The progressive case for federalism.
• San Diego policy of enforcing curfew by rounding up, cuffing, sometimes arresting hundreds of kids doesn’t do much to prevent crime.
• Battle of the NCAA Tournament mascots.
• Another questionable shaken baby conviction.
• Oregon man shot by police after mistaking for prowlers a SWAT team that was preparing to raid his neighbor’s home.
• World’s ugliest dog passes away.
• U.S. asserts global jurisdiction to extradite U.K. citizen accused of criminal hyperlinking.

Here’s video of Collinsville, Illinois K9 officer Michael Reichert violating the civil rights of two guys returning from a Star Trek convention. This one has it all. According to the video, Reichert lies about why he pulled them over. He lies to justify the K9 search. He then conducts a dubious pass around the car with his dog, after which he lies about the dog alerting. When he doesn’t find any drugs, he lies about the dog alerting to some marijuana “shake” on the floor. Finally, we learn at the end of the video that Reichert has two (!) prior convictions and had resign from a previous police department for lying under oath about a drug case.

The kicker: Reichert found out that the driver had an old arrest that was supposed to have been expunged when he ran the driver’s license. This was one of his justifications for conducting a search.

MORE: I’m looking into this story. Looks like Reichert only has one conviction, for selling knock-off sunglasses. The other incident referred to in the video involved a federal drug case in which the judge dismissed Reichert’s testimony. More to come.

MORE II: The Collinsville Police Department obviously disputes the video narrator’s interpretation of the stop and search and Reichert’s justification for them. I’ll have a piece on this for HuffPost soon.

Stossel takes on overcriminalization. The “wetlands” case at around the nine minute mark is just devastating.

• U.K. man inadvertently finds child porn while downloading music. Calls the cops (mistake!). He’s now barred from seeing his daughter. (MORE: Looks like the ban was recently lifted.)
• Fun, geeky Reddit thread if you have some time to kill.
• I seem to remember some people getting awfully upset when Rep. Paul Ryan had an expensive bottle of wine with dinner. Be interesting to see if those same people get upset about this.
• CBO says Obamacare will cost almost twice what the White House claimed as the law was being debated. That silence you hear is millions of Americans not gasping in shock.
• Here is a story about exploding pig poop.
• Why is Obama keeping a journalist imprisoned in Yemen?
• Origins of the food truck craze.
• Here what it looks like to be dealt a full house, and still manage to overplay your hand.

• Here’s a pretty cool CGI tour of ancient Rome.
• I don’t agree with conservatives all that often, especially on social issues, but this is a pretty strong piece on the denigration of conservative women.  It’s the same sort of mentality that lets white liberals think they can use racial epithets against black conservatives.
• Bieber’d.
• Prosecutor pressured to resign after his misconduct contributed to a wrongful conviction. Also, hell’s citizens fitted for ice skates.
• Former Carter administration official takes on Christian Coalition founder over decriminalizing marijuana.
• Washington’s high-powered terrorist supporters.
• There oughtta be a law . . .
• Libertarianism happens to people. (Thanks to T.J. Brown for the link.)
• Fun behind-the-scenes look at the best scene (so far) from the current season of Justified. (Spoiler alert if you aren’t caught up.)

The SWAT team would like to talk to you about your waistline.

(Thanks to Mark Noble for the link.)

There are some astonishing figures coming out of Virginia:

In September 2004, Mark Warner, then Virginia’s governor, ordered a random audit of 31 old criminal cases after a vast trove of biological evidence was discovered lying around in old case files saved by state forensic serologists. The testing of those 31 samples led to the exonerations of two convicted rapists. Warner, embarrassed by the revelations, then ordered in late 2005 that every sample obtained between 1973 and 1988 be rechecked. It amounted to thousands of files . . .

At the time Virginia’s audit began, Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to exonerate hundreds of prisoners across the country, noted in astonishment that “a random sample of convicted felons and we’re getting a 7 percent exoneration rate” in Virginia. But it appears that a 7 percent exoneration rate may be grossly understating the problem. UVA’s Garrett suspects that the error rate may actually be as high as 17 percent. As he discovered in his own research, Barbour’s conviction, based on the testimony of a single eyewitness, reflects the reality that of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA testing, a whopping 76 percent were misidentified by eyewitnesses.
Whatever the percentage of error on the part of Virginia’s criminal justice system, one thing is certain: Only a handful of the falsely convicted have received the exonerations they deserve.

Due to a widespread sense of shame and an eagerness to take responsibility for its mistakes, the state of Virginia is now opening up its DNA testing process, inviting outside labs to help with the testing project, as well as to independently verify the results from the state lab. The state is also inviting journalists and academics to scrutinize the project to look for errors and oversights.

Just kidding.

It was a project intended to take 18 months at a cost of $1.4 million dollars. Now in its seventh year, the cost of the project hovers at $5 million. Nobody has any idea exactly how the Virginia Department of Forensics has conducted its work. Indeed, no one knows much about the specifics of the crime lab’s work at all . . .

University of Virginia law school professor Brandon Garrett (who has contributed to Slate) is an expert on wrongful convictions and DNA exoneration. His landmark study, Convicting the Innocent, scrutinized the cases of the first 250 people to be exonerated nation-wide by DNA testing. To hear him tell it, Virginia’s statewide audit is a mystery wrapped in obfuscation. “This DNA testing program began two Governors ago,” he says, “but its operation has remained shrouded in secrecy. We do not know how the authorities chose to test the cases that they have tested. We do not know how long the authorities have known about the many dozens of cases where DNA has excluded the individuals. We do not know what local prosecutors plan to do about the cases where DNA may prove innocence.”

The state’s actions only get more sordid from there. State officials initially refused to make any attempt at all to let convicts know that their DNA was being tested. When compelled to do so by the state legislature, they’ve complied only in the most bare-bones sense of the word. They’re still refusing to release the information to the public. Instead, they’ve sent letters loaded with legalese to the last known addresses of the convicted. Some of these cases are decades old. They finally relented and have allowed pro bono attorneys to track down the convicts, but only under the stipulation that the attorney who does the tracking agree to not represent the convict in any subsequent legal action.

If you want to squeeze some dark humor out of this tragedy, look to the absurd justifications state officials are giving for their obstinacy. For example, here’s one official’s explanation why they initially balked at letting pro bono attorneys track down the exonerated:

 ”If you send a young, new attorney to a bad neighborhood, bad things could happen.”

And here’s why the state made no effort to send DNA results from the exonerated who have since died to their next of kin:

“That information is private and personal, and maybe that individual doesn’t want his family members to have a copy of the report. We have to protect the sensitivity and privacy of those individuals.”

So yes, state of Virginia may wrongly convict you, then send you to prison for decades for a crime you didn’t commit. But rest assured. Should DNA testing exonerate you after your death, the state will honor your privacy and “sensitivity” by refusing to notify your family that you were innocent all along.

So the special criminal justice issue of Reason that Jacob Sullum and I co-edited is a finalist for three Maggie awards, including best magazine, and best theme issue. (Jacob Sullum’s brave feature on sex offender laws is also a finalist.)

I’m also separately a finalist for the column I wrote about the Sal Culosi case.

Overall congratulations to my former colleagues, too. Reason is a finalist in eight categories.

Florida teen is arrested for small amount of pot, sustains a head injury after an incident with the guards, suffers a stroke, and dies in his jail cell.

A West Palm Beach grand jury declared “fundamentally inadequate” the medical care given to an 18-year-old who died after two head injuries he received at the county juvenile lockup were ignored for hours by guards, supervisors and the facility’s superintendent.

This is wonderful.