Why is this not a surprise?
Fairfax County Juvenile Detention
Officer Accused of Sexually Assaulting Minor: Police
A
juvenile detention officer in Fairfax County, Virginia, was charged with raping
and having sexual contact with a minor, authorities say.
Clifton
Townsend Jr., 60, was arrested Monday on four felony sex offenses, the Loudoun
County Sheriff's Office said.
The
victim was not someone Townsend knew through his job as a detention officer,
the sheriff's office said.
Investigators
were told about the alleged crimes on Saturday.
Townsend,
of Leesburg, was charged with rape, carnal knowledge of a child and two counts
of sodomy.
He is
being held at the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center on no bond.
And another one bites the dust
Daniel Pantaleo—the police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner, who was killed five years ago on Staten Island during an interaction with police—was fired from the New York City Police Department by Commissioner James O’Neill on Monday.
A magistrate said police could force a man to unlock his phone. Is that legal?
It isn’t completely a question of
the legality it is a question of the integrity of the Fairfax County Police who
record is appalling. In the past decade, the department has murdered unarmed
citizens and lied about and ruined the lives of several innocent people they
have investigated.
Bear in mind, a magistrate is not
necessarily an attorney at law and the cop knew that when she asked permission
to break into the man’s phone.
Think she did the right thing?
Well then, how about if I SUSPECT you of a crime and break into your locked
home to prove it?
A magistrate said police could
force a man to unlock his phone. Is that legal?
By Justin Jouvenal
When Fairfax County police
arrested a man last month in connection with the brutal sexual assault in May
of a 15-year-old with developmental delays, they seized a piece of evidence
that might hold crucial evidence of the crime: his iPhone.
The phone’s GPS might have placed
Kevin Caldwell at the scene, contained texts between him and his alleged
accomplice or even video of an incident, but authorities quickly realized they
could not access any of it.
The phone required Caldwell’s
fingerprint to unlock it.
A detective resorted to a novel
and controversial approach: She went to a magistrate and got an order to have
Caldwell provide his fingerprints to gain access, but police said they
ultimately decided not to follow through with the thumbprint.
In an age of increasing
encryption, law enforcement officials say compelling a person to cooperate is
sometimes the only way to retrieve make-or-break evidence. They have asked
magistrates and judges to order suspects to give up their fingerprints to
unlock phones, as well as face scans and passwords.
The trend has touched off heated
legal battles in some state and federal courts over the constitutionality of
such searches, resulting in a welter of legal opinions. Defendants often argue
that such searches violate their Fifth Amendment rights against
self-incrimination.
“These are newer technologies for
securing devices, but they’ve been around for several years now,” said Andrew
Crocker, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“You’ve started to see police trying to force people to unlock their phones
with their fingerprints or faces and courts having to deal with that.”
Fairfax police said the incident
involving the teenage girl occurred May 16. The girl told detectives that she
went to a family event at the Mount Vernon Country Club, where she got into a
disagreement with her brother, according to a search warrant filed in Fairfax
County.
The teen went out to get some air
and ended up walking into the Wingstop restaurant on Cooper Road, according to
the search warrant, where she asked Caldwell for a ride, saying she was lost.
He declined, the search warrant states.
Caldwell and a second man, Andrew
Collins, who was an employee at the restaurant, followed the teen into the
bathroom and blocked the door, she told detectives, according to allegations in
the warrant. The girl was taken to another location she described as “sticky,”
where both men allegedly assaulted her, according to the search warrant.
After an investigation, Caldwell,
21, and Collins, 22, were arrested in July. Caldwell was charged with forcible
sodomy, and Collins was charged with animate object penetration. Neither has a
fixed address, and they have yet to enter pleas. Caldwell’s attorney declined
to comment, and it could not be determined whether Collins had an attorney.
Fairfax police Detective Alyson
Russo applied for a search warrant for Caldwell’s fingerprints to unlock the
phone in late July, citing a 2014 Virginia Beach Circuit Court ruling that
touches on many of the crucial legal arguments surrounding such searches.
In that case, police wanted the
state to force a man charged with assault to give up his passcode or a
fingerprint to unlock a phone they suspected contained video evidence of the
assault. The defendant objected, saying it would violate his Fifth Amendment
protections against providing incriminating testimony against himself.
Crocker said the courts generally
have held that the Fifth Amendment bars law enforcement from forcing people to
provide testimony that would reveal the contents of their minds.
The judge ruled that the state
could compel the man to produce a fingerprint but not a passcode.
“The fingerprint, like a key . . . does
not require the witness to divulge anything through his mental processes,” the judge wrote in his opinion. “Unlike the production of physical
characteristic evidence, such as a fingerprint, the production of a password
forces a ‘defendant’ to disclose the ‘contents of his own mind.’ ”
Other courts have decided
differently. Some have compelled defendants to reveal passcodes, even jailing
people who have refused. Courts in California, Illinois and Idaho have found
that compelling the production of fingerprints is unconstitutional under the
Fifth Amendment, although most of those decisions have been reversed.
The Fairfax public defender’s
office, which is representing Caldwell, objected to the police’s quest for his
fingerprints. “It is a violation of the 5th Amendment to compel someone’s
fingerprint,” Dawn Butorac, a public defender, said in an email.
But Fairfax police Capt. Eli Cory
said the searches were lawful. He said that such searches are rare and that the
department did not maintain statistics on how often they happen. Because the
case is pending, he declined to say whether police ever gained access to
Caldwell’s phone through means other than the fingerprint.
“We face encryption all the time
in some shape or form,” Cory said. “It’s something we have to overcome in the
context of law.”
In major rulings in recent years,
the U.S. Supreme Court has strengthened privacy protections around police
searches of cellphones, citing the wealth of information they contain. Last
year, the high court ruled that police generally need to obtain a warrant to
get cellphone location data; and in 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that
authorities must obtain a search warrant to look through the contents of a
cellphone.
Riana Pfefferkorn, associate
director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet
and Society, said the issue of compelling defendants to give up access to their
phones may be an issue the Supreme Court ultimately takes up, too.
“The constitutional
questions are still developing,” Pfeffer
For those of you who argue that ALL cops are not mentally challenged, read these two cases.....
Charges Dropped for 119 People
After Cop Caught on Video Planting Meth on Innocent Grandma
Jackson County, FL — Dozens of
innocent people who were rotting in jail have been freed and their charges
erased after the corrupt cop who put them there was caught on his own body
camera planting meth on an innocent mother. Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputy
Zachary Wester has since been fired and a slew of lawsuits are now rolling in.
Wester’s fall from law
enforcement grace and the 119 people who were exonerated are due largely in
part to the diligence of a single person, assistant state attorney at the 14th
Judicial Circuit, Christina Pumphrey.
Pumphrey’s job as assistant state
attorney included reviewing evidence before moving forward with charges against
individuals. When she began reviewing cases, she found something very peculiar.
“This is an exaggeration, but it
felt like his (Wester’s) name was on half the cases,” Pumphrey told The
Appeal.“It was seriously disproportionate.”
When Pumphrey began watching the
body camera footage from Wester’s arrests, she found something even more
disturbing. Many times, Wester was seen conducting illegal searches. Also, his
written affidavits did not match what she watched in the videos. But that
wasn’t the most telling aspect of all these videos.
While it is no question that
folks will claim that drugs found on them or in their possession “aren’t
their’s” and “they don’t know how that got there,” nearly all of Wester’s cases
had this. The videos showed that people were utterly shocked when Wester
claimed to have found drugs in their vehicles. While a single person may have
been lying, when everyone reacts the exact same way, something is up.
Although she reviewed multiple
videos, Pumphrey never saw the actual act of Wester planting drugs or otherwise
hiding them. However, all that changed when Wester pulled over Teresa Odom in
February of 2018.
In that video, Wester pulls Odom
over, claiming her tail lights aren’t working. However, it would later be
revealed that her tail lights were, in fact, working fine and Wester had
targeted her to frame her.
In the video, Wester is extremely
nice to the woman, complimenting her, joking around, and making small talk. But
in the back of his mind, he knew the entire time that he was going to plant
meth on her and have her thrown in a cage—an insidious move indeed.
After threatening to have a K-9
come search her car, Wester tells Odom that she can avoid the K-9 if she just
lets him search her truck himself—a huge mistake.
An LAPD officer accidentally
filmed himself putting cocaine in a suspect’s wallet
It’s reportedly the first LAPD
body camera video that the media and public have seen.
By German Lopez
Police officers can’t seem to
stop filming themselves potentially planting evidence.
The latest incident comes from
Los Angeles, where an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
accidentally filmed himself placing cocaine in a suspect’s wallet, according to
a new report by CBS Los Angeles.
The body camera video shows
police picking up Ronald Shields, who was charged with felony hit-and-run,
having a gun in the trunk of his car, and cocaine possession in April. The
police report claimed cops had found the cocaine in Shields’s left pocket.
The footage tells a different
story. LAPD officer Gaxiola, as CBS Los Angeles identified him, picks up
Shields’s wallet from the street and shows it to another officer who then
points to Shields. Gaxiola then puts the wallet back down, picks up a small bag
of white powder from the street (which later tested positive for cocaine),
picks up the wallet, and puts the bag in the wallet.
The audio turns on, signaling
that the officer had manually activated his camera to record. Then, the officer
shows himself supposedly finding the wallet and the drugs inside of it, and
repeatedly telling other officers about it. “Just to let you know, sir, inside
his wallet, he has a little bag of narco,” Gaxiola said.
So what happened? The simple
explanation is that the officer apparently did not know that when he switches
on his body camera, it automatically records and saves the past 30 seconds,
although without audio.
Shields’s lawyer claims that the
officers outright planted the drugs to frame his client.
It’s possible, though, that the
cops tried to reenact the act of finding the cocaine for the cameras. But that
is still very deceptive — and when so clearly caught on video, it makes it hard
to trust the police officers with just about everything else they’re doing. It
makes a potentially credible case lose all credibility.
The LAPD is investigating the
incident. “The LAPD takes all allegations of misconduct seriously and, as in
all cases, will conduct a thorough investigation,” it said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time
something like this has happened. Previously, Baltimore police officers were
caught doing this — twice. That led the local prosecutor to drop dozens of
cases involving the officers.
According to CBS Los Angeles,
this is the first time that the media has seen LAPD body camera footage since
the force launched its program two years ago. It’s one hell of a debut.