Peter Watts has been convicted (with additions)

[pecunium]

I am disgusted, but not; sadly, surprised.

Backstory on Peter Watt's Arrest

The bare facts, as I know them, of the result

FOUND GUILTY
JUDGMENT OF CONVICTION ENTERED
REFERRED TO PROBATION DEPT.
BOND IS CONTINUED; HABITUAL
2ND TO BE REVIEWED W/PROS.

I am, in a very quiet way, pissed off. Antonin Scalia would say I have no right, a jury, duly constituted looked at the law, looked at the evidence and decided he had broken it.

Which is true, insofar as it goes. It, of course (this is Scalia), fails to account for systemic injustices which can exisit independently of the inherent justice of a law (and I don't think assaulting a cop, nor resisting arrest, shouldn't be discouraged).

I said pretty much all I want/need to say on the subject in the first post, but I'll hit the high points of how the system is stacked against anyone in Peter Watt's position.

1: The nature of things is that people tend to believe that people who are arrested are guilty.
2: Cops tend to be respected, and so given greater weight when they testify.
3: Cops are trained to testify.
4: Cops lie.

The last, I realise, is the most controversial. They have, after all, taken an oath to tell the truth. They are, by and large, honorable people. They are interested in the public good.

And... they lie. The evidence for it is overwhelming. Studies have shown it to be implicitly encouraged. Common sense tells us that those cops who shade the truth are more likely to have more of their case end with, "bad guys" getting what they deserve.

There is another thing, which I waited to list.

5: Cops have incentives to lie in cases like this.

Not only is there the question of just what they did (because if the accused didn't deserve to be arrested. If the accused didn't resist, then the actions of the cops are morally suspect, if not outright wrong).

Which is an incentive to lie, because they face personal exposure (lawsuits) and professional harm (sanctions). The 'system' also has incentive to favor them (lawsuits/loss of respect).

Juries also have an incentive to believe the cops. We don't like to believe the custodians of our liberty are capricious. We don't want to believe the only thing between us and a couple of years in prison is the whim of a cop.

My honest take, Peter Watts did committ an offense, one so egregious the Border Patrol couldn't stand to let it go; contempt of cop. He compounded the error by not taking his lumps and going quietly into the night. No, he maintained his innocence. That's a threat to the relationship we've been allowing cops to force onto us (there used to be jurisdictions where one couldn't be convicted of resisting arrest for a false charge; since the arrest was unreasonable. For good reason that no longer exists anywhere, but the flip-side it, it's a lot harder to get justice for wrongful arrests. There are also legal tricks by which cops can make some arrests disappear, I know this because I was arrested on a false complaint. The cops were, in that regard, blameless. But they so botched the actual execution of the arrest that the potential for me to have made a decent sum [after paying the lawyers] that they used a piece of the legal code to, "unarrest me". Never mind that the justifications in that part of the code didn't apply to me, and now there is an implication I was an habitual user of illegal drugs in my record. That's the price I pay for having an arrest, mostly, go away).

The real travesty here isn't the miscarriage of justice I think happened. It's not that cops beat him, and covered it up (which is what I think happened), it's that we, as a society, are allowing them, enabling them, and rewarding them (which only encourages them) to do this.

The upshot is... we have fucked things up. We are allowing cops to be even more arbitrary than their position as the arbiters of offense (not law, but if they choose not to arrest, then it's almost a given that no prosecution will take place) makes possible.

Honestly, if I were a foreigner... I don't know that I would be willing to travel to the States (absent a diplomatic passport). I don't think I can (dearly as I would like to see any number of people) really encourage people (even citizens of the US) to cross the borders. I don't like the idea that they only way to avoid becoming an example of how the cops treat people who don't "behave" is to meekly, abjectly, give them license to do whatever the hell they please.

(Peter's comments on this)

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

/bemusedoutsider here/

I'd like to hope there's a technological fix blowing in the wind. It was here when the cop brought a gun to the snowball fight in DC: A lot of people had video cams and recorded it from a lot of different angles and sent it to a lot of places, then adjourned to Starbucks and watched it all on the BBC.

When we get little recorders, even just voice, that can send everything to our LJ or whatever as it happens, then it won't need a crowd.

[urox.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid we still need a crowd. Police have been known to take away devices, lose them, damage them, and other ways of destroying evidence that need more than one person watching.

[elainegrey.livejournal.com]

Thanks for passing on the sad news.

[wetdryvac.livejournal.com]

Peter's response is well stated, and I have of late been finding myself suggesting to foreign friends that the risk of visiting the states is increasing to an unacceptable level - that email will do for now. This simply reinforces that. Not much useful to contribute on my part, sadly. I don't even begin to know how to address this beyond passing the word.

[spiritualmonkey.livejournal.com]

I believe it's the NYPD who are credited with coining the phrase "testilying (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testilying)".

Contempt of cop indeed.

As someone

[skip-hunter.livejournal.com]

in the field....go for broke AFTER. I know that there is no sane logical reason that you cannot ask questions or inquire or use your rights at the moment. But at the moment, unless you have a friend filming it, you lose. Shouldn't be that way, but it is.

Re: As someone

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Skip.... that, right there is the problem about which I'm complaining; cops are expecting us to act the way one acts when facing a potentially violent thug: do what they say, and you won't get hurt.

Even that isn't always enough to prevent getting hurt.

That's not acceptable.

Re: As someone

[elisem.livejournal.com]

What if you can't understand what they say?

I'm hard of hearing and I lip-read a lot. Mike was always terrified for me (but hid it, mostly) when I traveled alone, especially crossing borders, in case somebody official should order me to halt when I wasn't looking at them and didn't see what they said.

That so could have been me, or a lot of other people. Because apparently even asking them to repeat themselves would be a felony.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The impression I got was that he was convicted of "not obeying the lawful orders of a police officer."

And the jury sent back questions to make sure that they understood the law right. And the judge sent back answers.

And the jury was told that, if a police officer punches a person in the face a bunch of times, and that person is wobbling back and forth and stunned, and while the person is stunned and can't react, the police officer tells that person to do something, and the person who can't react doesn't do that thing, then that person has disobeyed the police officer, and is therefore guilty of the felony of disobeying a police officer.

And the jury shrugged and said, "Okay, that's what happened, so I guess he's guilty."

[eagle]

Most people who serve on juries have absolutely no idea they have any other options in that situation, and take that duty very seriously. For which I guess I have to have some respect.

Personally, I'm very aware that, on a jury, I do have other options, which probably means that I'll never end up on a jury as there is a reasonably large collection of laws (nearly all drug possession laws, for instance) for which I would never vote to convict.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The fact that you're aware of this makes it less likely that you'd be picked to serve on a jury. Jurors who know things like that are unpredictable, and the judge, defense, AND prosecution are all uncomfortable with having that degree of unpredictability in the trial.

[eagle]

Exactly. And I'm not willing to lie about my understanding of jury nullification or my intentions in such a situation just to get on a jury and exercise those rights, so basically I would only get on a jury in cases where it's very unlikely such things would be relevant (simple robbery, that sort of thing), or if the lawyers involved were incompetent at jury selection.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

(Here via Making Light, btw.)

...if the lawyers involved were incompetent at jury selection.

I used to do legal blood alcohol analyses for the State of Wisconsin, and my boss actually made it onto a jury once...a drunk driving case. So she's sitting up in the jury box, and the defense attorney has an expert witness come in; she knew him. Seriously. This defense attorney hadn't asked the prospective jurors if they knew any of the witnesses, or if they'd ever testified in court. So it can happen.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I'm not really terrified, but I'm sufficiently disquieted by events like this -- situations in which enforcement officers clearly over-react and this is accepted by a judge & jury -- that if I ever again left the United States it would probably be permanently. (Not that I expect to find an English-speaking country that now has the level of personal freedoms mine used to have.)

In the course of the past five years, I have graduated from being "hard-of-hearing, with electronic aids that sometimes whistle" to the exalted status of "deaf as a fence-post". Whenever dealing with an enforcement official I am faced with a high probability of failure to obey a lawful (spoken) order. A jury might (or might not) acquit me, but the possibility that I'd be beaten &/or tasered is simply too high to accept.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

They certainly lied about the choking thing. Couldn't get Watt's on that, so they had to get him on something. Elsewise they might have lost face. Also, I suspect the judge was complicit.

I travel to places where cops are just as authoritarian and brutal as they are in the US. More so. I visit Singapore from time to time. Seriously, if you're telling people to stay away from the US because of this, you ought to compile a fill list of safe/not-safe places. I think most of the world is unsafe by that definition, though.

That said, I think a campaign taking aim at the US tourist industry by repeating the unvarnished facts of this case could do enough damage to scare the shit out of well paid airline, hotel and other tourism lobbyists. I have no qualms about using this incident both to get the conviction overturned, and to make as sure as we can that this sort of thing never happens again. It'd take a concerted effort by people much more well placed and connected than I am, but it could be done.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I don't think he was. Peter thinks he was as fair as he could be. Complicit would probably have made the other charges more sticky.

And yes, I've travelled to places more draconian. Oddly, I didn't worry in the same ways. More to the point... we pretend to be better than this, and that isn't the case; which is why I feel this way. No one thinks Singapore, or Russia, are havens of fair policing.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

A further difference between the US being a police state, and other places being police states:

I live HERE, not THERE. And this is the country that I, as a citizen, am responsible for. While it's a nice thing to help try to bring justice to overseas brutal police states, it's not really my responsibility.

But I live in the United States. If the United States is a brutal police state -- it's my fault.

[shadowflyer.livejournal.com]

It isn't bloody well mine. I did not vote for the goatfsckers who created this. I have cajoled, chastised and browbeaten the goatfsckers I did vote for to stop it - to no avail.

Outrage fatigue has set in bone-deep. I'm laying plans to leave the country.

[muttering-ogre.livejournal.com]

Do you refrain from calling the goatfsckers "we"?

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

If I didn't have to travel to the US for work, I probably wouldn't now. What happened to Peter, and the whole security theater thing, makes it all very uncomfortable. Which is a shame, because there are so many wonderful people and places that I would then miss out on.

I wonder if the tourism industry has suffered at all in recent years? Someone must have figures...

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

It's been a news item fairly frequently. Yes, the tourism industry has suffered.

[tnh.livejournal.com]

I'm with Elise on this one. The standard used for "failure to comply" was not reasonable. I can't tell you how many times I've had to ask police officers, airport checkers, security personnel, etc., to repeat things two or three times before I could figure out what they were saying; and even then, I've sometimes had to ask them for a more detailed explanation. This doesn't make me a problem or a special case. It makes me one variety of normal. The system cannot assume that anyone who doesn't immediately comply with an order is defying that order.

I'm very polite about asking to have stuff repeated. I'm also very apologetic, and I get more apologetic with every repetition that doesn't work. Now, as it happens, I actually do need to have them slow down, speak clearly, and explain what they mean. It's legit. But I'm also aware that by reacting that way to people who bark orders at me, I'm guaranteeing that our interaction is going to cost them extra time and effort, and they're not going to look like they're omniscient and in control. I will not reward them with instant obedience to their barked orders. It's not an emergency. They shouldn't be behaving like that.

Cops have an incentive to lie

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry to be so late to the party. I haven't visited as lately as I should.

When I was in college, I once committed the crime of driving a POS car (I was a college student, after all, but had committed no driving infraction that I know of) through Old Town Pasadena, an area where a conservative community has a special reason for having its panties in a twist about keeping out "undesirables." (Terry can probably attest to this bias, but for people who have never lived in the L.A. Metroplex, Old Town Pasadena has become the place for upwardly mobile people to hang out, walk around, and generally feel "safe").

The policeman pulled me over, then seemed to exhibit shock that such a Sweet Young Thing could be driving a POS car in that neighborhood. I actually got an apology for being pulled over, then was allowed to continue along my way.

I've never trusted the police since. If being a Sweet Young Thing overcomes safe driving of a POS car in a neighborhood where only bright, shiny, expensive cars should be on the roadways, I can only imagine what happens in other parts of the country to people who aren't so ostentatiously innocent.