8 ms·

> It is possible there is a reasonable explanation Ok, I'll bite, what could possibly be a reasonable explanation for excavating a man's anus half a dozen time

• thex86 13y ago
  What is shocking is, they conducted everything. I mean, why? It's like they really wanted the drugs to be there.
  • rcthompson 13y ago
    Well, I guess after you've unlawfully probed a person's anus once, you're kind of committed, and your best hope for avoiding a backlash is to justify it by actually finding something.
• rdl 13y ago
  I mean in that we have a news article from a biased (if biased in ways I generally agree with; I like Reason) news source, and a filing from one side in a civil case. I generally do trust police, and especially federal judges. Everyone involved in the drug war has gotten corrupted, and to some extent the lawlessness south of the border causes lawlessness in enforcing the law north of the border; Nietzsche and all that. So, before hanging people, I'd rather get more evidence. But on its face this isn't so much a miscarriage of justice so much as a string of felonies committed by law enforcement and medical professionals.
  • pavs 13y ago
    > I generally do trust police You probably never lived in NY.
    • rdl 13y ago
      I actually have a friend who became an NYPD officer (!!!) at some point last decade. Generally I've never had problems with individual police. I think the drug war is bad for a wide variety of reasons, and the militarization of domestic policing (mainly over drugs, and now terrorism) is bad for everyone (including the police), but it's not because I've personally had problems with police. I'm a white, upper-middle-class, works-with-USG/DOD, contracted in war zones, lots of friends in government/police, etc. person, so I have it exceptionally easy, sure. I've met bad individual officers, but it's rare, so yeah, I generally do trust police, based on my personal experience. One of the worst tendencies of policing organizations is the "thin blue line", so they need to take aggressive action in cases of internal abuse to overcome that.
      • jbl 13y ago
        The problem is that when things do go wrong, especially if you fit certain stereotypes, there seems to be little recourse beyond a costly court battle against an organization with far more resources than an individual (monetary and social).
      • icambron 13y ago
        > I'm a white, upper-middle-class, works-with-USG/DOD, contracted in war zones, lots of friends in government/police, etc. person, so I have it exceptionally easy, sure. It sounds like you get it at some level, but to make the point extra fine: this is privilege. When white middle-class guys (which includes me) say, "eh, they've always been nice to me, so I'm not sure what the big deal is", we're failing to care because it the problems don't affect us. A cop's not to stop and frisk me for no reason or kick down my door looking for pot or harass me for some trivial moving violation or throw me in jail on unreasonable charges to get beaten and raped every day. They're always nice to me. So it's easy to say, "cops are kinda great, and that one time my house got robbed they were ON it", and just never internalize the fact that for so many people, they're an armed oppressor working with official government sanction and little accountability. That it takes something as mind-blowingly outrageous as court-sanctioned rape to get our attention and we're still not quite willing to look the system in the eye and say, "man, this is just fundamentally broken"...well, that shows just how deep that privilege goes. Is it any wonder that bad cops and prosecutors (and, gulp, judges) feel empowered to do this kind of shit?
      • Amadou 13y ago
        I actually have a friend who became an NYPD officer (!!!) at some point last decade. Ask him if he's got any crazy stories about stupid shit other cops have done. Then ask him why he hasn't reported them for doing it. That's the real problem, a very real application of "one rotten apple spoils the barrel." The problem isn't so much the individual police who violate the public trust (there will always be bad apples as long as there are humans involved), it is all of the others who turn a blind eye to those violations. Those cops who never commit any overt violations but let other cops off with a free pass are the ones responsible for eroding public trust because they teach the public that it is an "us vs them" mentality. As a privileged white guy 99% of the time your interactions with the police will probably be just fine, but even you never know when that 1% bad apple is going to show up, but you do know his buddies won't do anything to hold him to account for what he might do to you. I think you probably understand this to some extent, referencing "the thin blue line" (the documentary of that name actually turned the phrase on its head), I just wanted to spell it out for anyone else who might not be familiar with the ironic definition of that term.
    • TruthElixirX 13y ago
      Or is white. Or is rich. Or just hasn't had the chance to be on the wrong side of an enforced law yet.[0] [0]http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.asp...
    • Osiris 13y ago
      I have two brothers that are police and I still don't trust them, though I wouldn't do anything at a traffic stop to provoke an officer.
  • rpedroso 13y ago
    Part of me wants to believe that the police had some kind of evidence beyond "clenching his buttocks". I don't think any amount of evidence could justify a cavity search, but I'm willing to wait for the judicial side of the story before I finalize my judgement on this matter. It seems so mind-bogglingly impossible that a judge would grant an invasive search warrant on something blatantly circumstantial.
    • chrischen 13y ago
      Whatever the evidence was... it turned out it was wrong.
    • dinkumthinkum 13y ago
      What evidence could justify this? Short of evidence of a nuclear weapon, I can't possibly see where you are coming from.
      • rpedroso 13y ago
        I said explicitly in my post that "I don't think any amount of evidence could justify a cavity search". However, we know for a fact that a judge signed a search warrant for a cavity search. "Clenching buttocks" seems like such an arbitrary basis for an invasive search warrant that I suspect there may be more to this story.
  • Segmentation 13y ago
    > I generally do trust police There are scum in every occupation. Police don't get a free pass. They're flawed humans like the rest of us. Go watch The Wire. You'll be more understanding.
    • ekianjo 13y ago
      Yeah but they carry guns and have power over you if they want to. That doesn't make them at all like the rest of us, and they should be exemplary in the way they deal with taxpayers.
      • nitrogen 13y ago
        ...they should be exemplary in the way they deal with taxpayers. I really didn't want to comment on this article, but I must object to the use of the word "taxpayers" where "human beings" would be much more appropriate.
        • ekianjo 13y ago
          My choice of word was intentional, since the police is financed by people's taxes on their work and consumption, therefore people should be treated as "clients" by the Police, and not threatened in the absence of any good reason.
          • nitrogen 13y ago
            I object to the word because it implies that those who pay more taxes deserve more protection, while those who pay no taxes (children, the elderly, the poor) deserve none.
  • sillysaurus2 13y ago
    I'd rather get more evidence. In general I would agree. But this stuck out for me: the warrant was only valid in Luna County, where Deming is located. The Gila Regional Medical Center is in Grant County. That means all of the medical procedures were performed illegally and the doctors who performed the procedures did so with no legal basis and no consent from the patient. In addition, even if the search warrant was executed in the correct New Mexico county, the warrant expired at 10 p.m. Medical records show the prepping for the colonoscopy started at 1 a.m. the following day, three hours after the warrant expired. If that's true, then it seems there's no possible way to play devil's advocate. Hopefully the legal system will dish out some justice for him. It's incredible that they were able to find doctors who went along with it not once, not twice, but five times plus a forced colonoscopy.
    • Amadou 13y ago
      Hopefully the legal system will dish out some justice for him. For him with dollars and for the rest of society by putting everyone else involved in the unemployment line, if not prison.
      • vacri 13y ago
        "lock the bastards up!" is how you get this kind of situation in the first place; making everyone so afraid to put a foot wrong that they'll do what the person with the badge tells them. Not to mention that destroying a professional career that takes ten years to start on one misstep is harmful to the medical system itself - why is the slogan always "lock the bastards up" and so rarely "train them better"? The former is a post-facto lose/lose, the latter win/win.
        • zentiggr 13y ago
          This case involves basically a serial rape, by licensed medical personnel. Short of the death penalty itself for all of them, I see no punishment that is too severe. Making a very very public example of them is plenty of deterrent value for future "medical professionals" who may be dragged (or otherwise) into any further situations like this. The firing and blacklisting of every law enforcement officer involved, and yes, up to and including the chief of police, is again a solid push back against this sort of abuse of power everywhere. Too bad the judge won't see anything but perhaps a slight remembrance of this circumstance when the next election comes. His name should be posted at every polling place, end of story. Tired, so damn tired of these stories.