Nesrie
3287
Cancel culture is so strong we have stories from the right’s failed celebrities right from their jail, Shaman, or prison, Tiger King, cells.
There’s a journalist for the Des Moines Register who was covering riots in Des Moines last year. She was arrested and pepper-sprayed, including in that order. Now she’s on trial for “failure to disperse and interference with official acts” because she was, you know, covering the riots.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/03/08/iowa-reporter-trial/
If found guilty of these two misdemeanors, she could spend up to a month in jail. But worse, it’ll send a signal that journalists don’t have the freedom to report on important events that they thought they had.
Sure, being a journalist doesn’t mean they have
but come on!
This was cute of the DMPD, too:
For months, prosecutors refused to release footage of Sahouri’s arrest to her lawyer, contending it would be too costly to produce body-camera footage and that they didn’t need to share evidence for a misdemeanor case. When a judge finally ordered them to turn over video and other evidence, police said the arresting officer, Luke Wilson with the Des Moines Police Department, hadn’t hit a button to preserve the footage.
Klinefeldt asked a judge on Friday to dismiss the case, arguing that police could have retrieved the footage within days after the arrest. The judge declined but did order prosecutors to turn over materials used to train officers on body-camera usage.
There really needs to be a national standard on body cams, including an adverse inference against the prosecution* when the state claims “oops!”.
*IANAL, don’t hurt me for mangling the terms of art
Simply tie proper usage of bodycams to qualified immunity and you solve a lot of problems. No bodycam evidence means no qualified immunity. We have that technology in place to protect BOTH officers and suspects. The fact that many officers refuse to use that technology as it is supposed to be used tells us all we need to know about the state of policing in America.
QI needs to flat-out DIAF, so I would rather not give it more legitimacy by enshrining it in bodycam regulation.
ShivaX
3293
Is this where Greenwald goes? Hell if I know.
Djscman
3294
Whew! She was acquitted by a jury. That was some speedy justice!
Looks like some other police body cams that weren’t turned off or absent-mindedly deleted helped prove her side of the story, too.
Under questioning, the officer conceded that Sahouri had been affected by the pepper spray, but said she had been one of the only people who failed to leave the scene, and that she didn’t identify herself as a reporter. … “I put up my hands and I say ‘I’m press’ because he was coming like, right at me, and I didn’t think it was a good idea to run from officers,” Sahouri testified. "He grabbed me, he pepper-sprayed me and said, ‘That’s not what I asked.’” … [At] trial, the defense called up a second officer, Natale Chiodo, who arrived in the parking lot just after Sahouri’s arrest. That officer’s body camera had recorded the journalist in Wilson’s handcuffs, complaining that she had been blinded by the pepper spray, saying, “I’m with the Des Moines Register … I’m just doing my job. I’m a journalist.”
Score one for the free press!
Zylon
3295
Apparently she was afraid of being pepper-sprayed in the courtroom as well.
Menzo
3296
I guess I’ll never understand why a cop who blatantly lies, and says “she never identified herself” and then video surfaces that shows she actually did, isn’t immediately fired.
Nesrie
3298
They’ll just drive that one out.
Trump wasn’t so bad after all!
/s
Is the NYT going to write a long thought piece on how DJT inherited a recovering and relatively humming economy and gravy trained on Obama’s accomplishment for four years? Would be fascinating.
KevinC
3301
Yeah, text of the article makes it sound like we have so much to be thankful to the Trump administration for. The last paragraph in particular is classic Trump dysfunction caused by his malignant narcissism.
Fuck the New York Times.
RayRayK
3302
WaPo’s story on Trump pressuring Georgia officials has recently been heavily corrected. Using a non-WaPo link to help people get around paywalls.
“Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now.’”
The correction, in full:
Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.
Sometimes sources aren’t perfect. Still, the POTUS should never directly call an election official, especially regarding his own election. That is still abusive use of power of his office.
The corrected quotes are actually worse than the original wrong ones. ‘Find the fraud’ could be interpreted as unbiased, but ‘only look at the ballots where I lost’ certainly isn’t.
Yeah, going from she would be “a national hero” to she had “the most important job in the country right now.” sounds very much like somebody working from memory.
Nesrie
3306
This does not seem… better.
