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May 7, 2013
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Service Meant to Monitor Inmates’ Calls Could Track You, Too - The New York Times


Cory Hutcheson, a former Missouri sheriff, was charged with using a private service to track people’s cellphones without court orders.CreditMississippi County Sheriff Office

Thousands of jails and prisons across the United States use a company called Securus Technologies to provide and monitor calls to inmates. But the former sheriff of Mississippi County, Mo., used a lesser-known Securus service to track people’s cellphones, including those of other officers, without court orders, according to charges filed against him in state and federal court.

The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show.
 
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May 7, 2013
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JURY SAYS BLACK LIVES DON'T MATTER, AWARDS $4.00 (ACTUALLY ONLY PAYS OUT $0.04) FOR WRONGFUL DEATH CIVIL SUIT

The jury awarded $1 for funeral expenses and $1 each to Gregory Vaughn Hill Jr.'s three children, aged 7, 10 and 13.



When Monique Davis heard that was the amount a jury believed her fiancee's mother and three children deserved for his death in a police shooting, she didn't bother to listen to the rest of the verdict. She walked out of the courtroom, shaken.

"My heart just dropped," Davis recalled. "It was like, are y'all serious?"

Four years earlier, her fiancee, Gregory Vaughn Hill Jr., who was black, had been shot behind his closing garage door by Christopher Newman, a white Florida sheriff's deputy responding with a partner to a complaint of loud music. A grand jury declined to indict Newman, who said Hill had pulled a gun. Hill was found with an unloaded gun in his back pocket.

Hill's mother then filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Newman and his boss, St. Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara. The case went to trial this month, and on May 24 a jury cleared Newman, assigned a small bit of blame to Mascara and said Hill was almost entirely at fault because he was drunk.

The jury tallied up the damages: $1 for funeral expenses to Hill's mother, and $1 each to Hill's three children, aged 7, 10 and 13.

The decision astonished the family's lawyer, John Phillips.

"I'd have rather seen a zero than have to tell the children that their pain and suffering for losing their father is only a dollar," he said Thursday.

Which is what the family will probably get in the end.

Because the jury assigned just 1 percent of negligence to Mascara, that $4 in damages was automatically reduced to 4 cents, Phillips said. But even that was made irrelevant by the jury's finding that Hill's intoxication made him 99 percent negligent. In doing so, the jury effectively erased any damages, Phillips said.

That convoluted verdict left Phillips wondering whether the jury, after about 10 hours of deliberations, understood what it was doing — and if so, whether the jurors saw the damage amount as some sort of punishment.

"Either it was punitive or they viewed these children's pain as virtually worthless," Phillips said.

Answers to those questions may never come. None of the jurors has spoken publicly, and they are not required to justify their verdict.

Newman and his partner, Deputy Edward Lopez, responded to Hill's Fort Pierce home on Jan. 14, 2014 after someone from a school across the street called to complain of loud music, police have said. The deputies knocked, and Hill, 30, on disability leave from a Coca-Cola warehouse, pulled open the garage door. Seeing the officers, he started to close the door — and pulled out a gun, police said. Newman opened fire, his bullets piercing the door. Hill was found dead inside with an unloaded gun in his back pocket.

Phillips disputed that Hill raised the gun toward the officers, questioning how the weapon ended up in his back pocket before he died.

Phillips is preparing file a motion for a new trial, based on what he says were inconsistencies in the way Hill's gun was used as evidence during the trial, and prosecutors' revealing that Hill had been on probation at the time of the shooting for a drug charge.

After the verdict, Mascara released a statement saying his office was "pleased to see this difficult and tragic incident come to a conclusion." Newman, he added, "was placed in a very difficult situation, and like so many law enforcement officers must do every day, he made the best decision he could given the circumstances he faced."

Lawyers who represented Newman and Mascara did not respond to a request for comment.

Davis, 35, has been raising Hill's three children — the two oldest of whom she had with him — with her boyfriend.

After last week's verdict, she went home, and for two days could hardly get out of bed, wondering how she was going to explain it to the kids. She finally tried, and she said the children were struggling with it in their own ways.

Davis wants the police to admit they did something wrong, that they reacted too quickly, and she wants them to change the way they handle such situations.

"I won’t give up until proper justice is served," she said.

How that might happen, she isn't sure.
 
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Troy Ray - I need to know how to handle this situation and...

Under the following circumstances, police can and most likely will search your car:

You have given the officer consent.
The officer has probable cause to believe there is evidence of a crime in your vehicle.
The officer reasonably believes a search is necessary to their own protection (a hidden weapon, for example).
The officer has a valid search warrant.
You have been arrested and the search is related to that arrest (such as a search for illegal drugs).

As is clearly illustrated in the video below, Ray never gave police consent to search his vehicle, so, the first circumstance is not applicable.

The last two are also not applicable because police had no warrant and Ray was not under arrest.
 
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Witness says officer shot man who was handcuffed in police car in Spring Grove shooting

manda Cozio said she watched a Southwestern Regional Police officer shoot a man at close range as the man sat handcuffed in the back of a police car outside a Spring Grove bank Wednesday afternoon.

"He didn't even warn him," the 25-year-old Hanover woman said. "He pulled his gun out and shot ... No warning, nothing. The guy didn't do anything. He was sitting there ... For him to be handcuffed and sitting down, why?"

Cozio, who said she cleans the Santander Bank after closing, watched from her car as the incident unfolded in the bank's parking lot at 39 W. Hanover St.

After the man — identified later on Thursday as a 33-year-old Spring Grove man — was shot in his leg, she said, he fell to the ground. Officers then donned gloves and cut off his pants to render aid until an ambulance arrived.

manda Cozio said she watched a Southwestern Regional Police officer shoot a man at close range as the man sat handcuffed in the back of a police car outside a Spring Grove bank Wednesday afternoon.

"He didn't even warn him," the 25-year-old Hanover woman said. "He pulled his gun out and shot ... No warning, nothing. The guy didn't do anything. He was sitting there ... For him to be handcuffed and sitting down, why?"

Cozio, who said she cleans the Santander Bank after closing, watched from her car as the incident unfolded in the bank's parking lot at 39 W. Hanover St.

After the man — identified later on Thursday as a 33-year-old Spring Grove man — was shot in his leg, she said, he fell to the ground. Officers then donned gloves and cut off his pants to render aid until an ambulance arrived.

A Pennsylvania State Police news release states that "responding officers encountered a male subject inside of the bank that resulted in a confrontation."

Two Southwestern officers then emerged from the bank with the man, who had a red bandana around his neck, Cozio said.

"I seen them bring a gentleman out in handcuffs," she said. "They walked him over to the car, slammed him on the side of the police cruiser and searched him."

Cozio said she did not see police seize anything from the man. Although the man was not physically resisting police, everyone was yelling — the man, the two police officers and a woman who was standing just feet from them.

The woman yelled over and over, "He's not in his right state of mind, you don't understand," Cozio said.

At that point, the man was placed in the back of a Southwestern Regional Police car, but with his legs out and his feet on the ground. The car's rear door was open, she said.

"And they shot him," Cozio said. "They shot him in the back of the car ... while he was sitting down in the back of the cruiser ... I don't understand how this could happen."

Shooting aftermath

The man, who had been seated in the cruiser, fell to the ground after he had been shot, Cozio said.

The woman who had been screaming then yelled at police, "You didn't have to shoot him, why did you shoot him? He's not in his right state of mind," according to Cozio.

Cozio, who had been inside her car, then got out and walked over to the woman to calm her down.

"I worried about, 'Let's get (her) back, so they don't shoot her," Cozio said. "She was crying and shaking."

The woman then called York County 911 and asked for "regional police," Cozio said.

The two Southwestern Regional officers then stood in the grass and the woman got into a parked car, driven there by someone else.

A man then arrived and asked, "Who shot my son?" Cozio said she pointed to an officer and said, "Him right there." The man then approached the officer and asked him, "Why did you shoot my son in handcuffs?" but the officer did not say anything, she said.

Other officers arrived, spoke with the man, and he stopped yelling, Cozio said.

Cozio said Thursday morning she was still shaken from witnessing the incident, still trying to process what she had seen.

"Whatever he did inside the bank wasn't right, but he didn't deserve this," she said.

York Daily Record Reporter Brandie Kessler and Hanover Evening Sun Reporter Kaitlyn Greenockle contributed to this story.

Contact Ted Czech at 717-771-2033.

update: Charges filed against man who was arrested, shot by police at Spring Grove bank
 
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The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will include multiple forms of biometrics—from face recognition to DNA, data from questionable sources, and highly personal data on innocent people. It will be shared with federal agencies outside of DHS as well as state and local law enforcement and foreign governments. And yet, we still know very little about it.

The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings. Other data DHS is planning to collect—including information about people’s “relationship patterns” and from officer “encounters” with the public—can be used to identify political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships. These data points are also frequently colored by conjecture and bias.

http://www.planetbiometrics.com/article-details/i/5614/desc/dhs-reveals-details-of-rfp-for-hart/
 
May 7, 2013
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A Private Prison Company Gave 1,300 Recordings of Confidential Inmate Phone Calls to Prosecutors – Mother Jones

More than 1300 private conversations between a private prison’s inmates and their lawyers were recorded according to information in a new lawsuit against CoreCivic, the private company running the facility, and its technology provider Securus Technologies. Numerous charges and convictions against the inmates could ultimately be overturned if a judge finds prosecutors violated attorney-client privilege by listening to the recordings.

Securus, the company responsible for recording the calls, has already faced legal action for illegally taping communications.

More at link
 
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Dropped phone: Deputy involved in OWI arrest under investigation for possible prostitution | FOX6Now.com

"The photos on the cellphone were not, maybe, normal," said Julius Kim, attorney.

Kim represents the woman pulled over and arrested for OWI in February. When she was released from custody, she found something unexpected in her personal belongings -- a cellphone belonging to the deputy who pulled her over.

"The phone contained what she believed to be evidence of illegal behavior," said Kim.

That includes photos of women at hotels in lingerie, and in text messages -- payments in the form of gift cards to multiple women. Prosecutors are looking to determine whether there was any prostitution, and they're seeking the phone's GPS history to see whether the deputy met with these women in person.
 
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May 7, 2013
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FILE UNDER: DUH

https://www.fastcompany.com/9025730...-vast-postal-surveillance-system-mail-covers?

The U.S. Postal Service regularly photographs the front and back of every piece of U.S. mail, or about 150 billion parcels, envelopes, and postcards every year. A longstanding practice known as the “mail cover” program enables law enforcement to obtain address information and images of the outsides of mail as part of an investigation without the need for a warrant through the Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Postal Service’s policing arm.
 
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https://www.13wmaz.com/article/news...-co-over-false-drug-test-results/93-615262432

COTTON CANDY OR METH? WOMAN SUES MONROE CO. OVER FALSE DRUG TEST RESULTS

A Monroe County woman says she spent nearly four months in jail because a roadside drug test falsely labeled a bag of cotton candy as methamphetamine.

Author: WMAZ Staff
Published: 11/16/18

Deputies said they stopped the car Fincher was riding in because of its dark window tint, but later admitted that the windows were legal.
Fincher said when Monroe deputies Cody Maples and Allen Henderson saw a large open plastic bag inside the car, she told them it contained blue cotton candy but they didn't believe her.
The deputies used a roadside field test that said there was meth in the bag.
Fincher was arrested and charged with meth trafficking and possession ot meth with intent to distribute.
A judge set her bond at $1 million, her lawsuit said, but Fincher remained in jail because she couldn't pay the cash bond.
But in March 2017, GBI lab tests came back to say that the substance in the bag was not an illegal drug.
The charges against Fincher were dropped four weeks later, in April 2107.
Fincher's lawsuit argues that the Monroe County Sheriff's Office was reckless and negligent and violated her civil rights.
The suit said the test was manufactured by Sirchie Acquisitions, a company based in North Carolina.
The test, called Nark II, has a history of false positive test results, the suit says.
Blue food coloring used in the cotton candy would likely cause a false positive test result, the suit argues.
Deputies Maples and Henderson were not trained in identifying street drugs or in performing the Nark II test, the lawsuit also says.
Fincher's lawsuit is asking a jury to award damages from the county, the two deputies and Sirchie.
Ricky Davis, spokesman for the sheriff's office, referred questions on the case to Benjamin Vaughn, the Monroe County attorney. We could not reach Vaughn for comment.
 
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https://www.masslive.com/news/boston/index.ssf/2018/12/federal_judge_rules_mass_law_p.html

Federal judge rules Mass. law prohibiting secret audio recording of police, government officials is unconstitutional

By Noah R. Bombard
[email protected]

A federal court judge Monday ruled a Massachusetts General Law prohibiting the secret audio recording of police or government officials is unconstitutional.

Chief United States District Judge Patti B. Saris made the ruling on two similar cases -- one involving two Jamaica Plain residents who frequently record police officers and a second case involving Project Veritas, the undercover organization founded by conservative political activist James O'Keefe.

Both cases involved defendants who had not secretly recorded police but claimed that the Suffolk District Attorney's office and the Boston Police Department were interpreting state law in such a way that was preventing them from doing so without the risk of legal repercussions.