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Alleged 911 ringleader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Except for the fact than I'm unalterably against capital punishment, I don't have a dog in this hunt.

But some folks who comment here, such as Will,  have requested a Gitmo trial vs. New York City trial thread ... or something like that. I don't understand the issue, except that some people want to make hay about it.

Here are the questions:

1) Should the Gitmo prisoners face trial in New York City, and why or why not? Please tell us what has informed your opinion.

2) If not, what should happen to them?

3) Bonus questions:

a) Is torture ALWAYS bad when it happens to U.S. citizens/armed forces? Please explain your answer

b) Is torture EVER bad when U.S. citizens/armed forces practice it on enemy combatants? Please explain your answer.

everydayshouldbesaturday.com

The Roanoke Cop has just returned from an extended vacation and he has responded to the post Hunting for Drunks and other Roanoke Police Hijinks that I put up awhile back. It attracted a whole bunch of responses on this blog.

His post is titled DWI Explained.

A couple thing here. First, he notes that:

The stories I tell here are all true but my purpose is not technical accuracy like my reports or testimony. My purpose is to illustrate the nature of my job in an educational and entertaining way.

Based on that, I'll assume The Roanoke Cop employs dramatic techniques that many writers (including me) use to make their stuff more interesting. As far as this writer is concerned, that is wise.

It doesn't necessarily mean that we make anything up. But at least in my case, it means we leave a lot of things out. There are many, many, many mundane facts that get in the way of a good story (or news column space limitations) that can be left out with distorting the tale.

Second, I'll say this: In the course of a 25-year-long career in journalism, I have read more than 100,000 pages of police reports. All of those were in Maryland.

And based on those, I have no small amount of admiration for The Roanoke Cop as a writer. He's good and there is no question about it. He's a freaking Hemingway among cops, most of whom are really rotten writers. (And by the way, I don't know his name and I've never met the guy).

Third, the most interesting thing about his most recent post is that he added a detail that was not in the original post. It is this: the driver they pulled over who WAS driving under the influence had an unworking headlight.

Here's the relevant portion of the original post:

We spotted a car as it passed us going the other way. I could see the driver hunched forward, right on top of the steering wheel. "There goes our drunk," I tell the rookie, who's driving. He turns around on the car and we catch up and watch a bit.

The car keeps riding the dotted white lane lane. He comes off it and then weaves back onto the line. We have seen enough and light him up. He stopped in a parking lot. The rookie makes contact and decides to get the driver out and run him through field sobriety tests. He does a good job putting the driver through the tests. It's been 5 months since I taught the DWI class in the academy but my rookie has maintained a lot of the knowledge. I interject some help once in a while but he didn't really need me.

The driver keeps telling us, "You got me, I'm drunk, we don't need to do these tests." We did the tests anyway but that will be a good statement for court.

And here is something Roanoke Street Cop wrote in the more recent post:

The stop of the DWI we arrested clearly shows his headlight out as we passed going the other way before we turned around on him. The traffic stops were all recorded from start to finish, including the last one that resulted in the DWI arrest.

For whatever purpose, that seems like a key difference that goes a bit beyond the boundaries of dramatic license.

I would urge you to compare the entirety of the two posts to ascertain for yourself whether I am taking anything out of context here.

Now it is entirely possible that he left it out because he goofed when writing up the blog post. I would bet you that, as a reporter, I have left out key details like that more than 100 times, only to have my backstop (a metro editor or copy editor) call it to my attention with a "Yo, Dude, you left this out and it needs to go in."

Almost always they were correct. Because we bloggers most often self-edit, we lack that valuable filter. That is most likely the case here.

On one hand, I am still glad they nailed that (male) drunken driver. Because I have two sober teen-aged daughters driving on our streets and I would not want either of them, or anyone else, injured by somebody like the arrestee.

But it raises the question anew: whether or not they had the legal authority to pull people over, were they targeting people that night for the purpose of helping a rookie bag his first DUI?

And it adds another: why did The Roanoke Cop leave a key detail like the unworking headlight out of the first account?

UPDATE: The first comment to this post is from The Roanoke Cop himself.

How dare she mouth off to a police officer, huh?

So what if you're only 4 feet, 11 inches tall, and female, and you're up against a big, burly deputy who caught you going 15 mph over the limit.

If you give him any guff, you DESERVE to be tasered, right?

Kathryn Winkfein collected a $40,000 check from Travis County, Texas, earlier this month. Though an internal police investigation found the officer did nothing wrong, the county offered that amount because, supposedly, it was cheaper than fighting her lawsuit alleging excessive force.

But, according to the Associated Press, she'll never give lip to a police officer again:

A 72-year-old Texas woman who was Tasered during a traffic stop when she dared a deputy constable to use the stun gun said Tuesday that if she got pulled over again she would say nothing.

In an interview on NBC's "Today" show, Kathryn Winkfein acknowledged that she lost her temper during the May 11 confrontation and that if she had to do it over, "I would just not say anything, not react."

...Her attorney, Thomas Tourtellotte, said his client twice offered to sign the ticket being written by the officer.

"He could have easily said: `Let's step over here, let's sign the ticket, and we can all go down the road,'" Tourtellotte said."

everydayshouldbesaturday.com

A regular reader who writes that his father's an ex-Roanoke cop feels no small measure of outrage over a recent post on Roanoke Street Cop:

The rookie really wanted to get a DWI while with a field training officer. We set out to find one, hunting by stopping every car we found with a problem. Got a few cars stopped for stuff like headlights not working or poor driving behavior, but no drunks. Usually these folks are informed about the equipment problem on their car and let go without a ticket. We move on quickly to the next car.

We spotted a car as it passed us going the other way. I could see the driver hunched forward, right on top of the steering wheel. "There goes our drunk," I tell the rookie, who's driving. He turns around on the car and we catch up and watch a bit.

The reader writes:

"It's a real insight to how they think and operate.The latest one is about how they wanted to find a DUI bust for a rookie that he was training. So they pulled over people time and time again for basically trumped up reasons until they found one. This of course is illegal, you must have probable cause to stop someone."

I have to admit I have mixed emotions about this one, folks. On one hand I'm glad they got this drunk off the street. He could have injured or killed somebody, and because of this arrest he didn't.

On the other had, it's a bit unseemly for police to go "hunting" for drunks because an eager newbie trainee is anxious to bust his cherry on a DUI arrest.

It sounds like they pulled over a whole bunch of people who they otherwise wouldn't have bothered to stop, just so the trainer could please the trainee.

What do you think?

President Barack Obama is slowly but surely nominating judges to vacancies on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals who could alter the balance of the most conservative federal appeals court in the nation.

This is the court whose justices recently (and narrowly) upheld the legality of a Botetourt County deputy's search of a private home in the middle of the night for a wayward 16-year-old girl who had lied her parents about where she was going that night.

That search ended with the deputy yanking the covers off a 10-year-old girl in her bedroom and shining a flashlight in her face, asking the worried step-dad whether the girl was his daughter.

The dissenting judges in that 5-4 decision practically begged the Supreme Court to take that case.

The Associated Press reports:

Five of the nation's 20 open circuit judgeships belong to the Richmond, Va.-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The vacancies - fully a third of the court's 15 judgeships - make the 4th Circuit more ripe than any other federal appeals panel for a fundamental shift in ideology, and greatly increase the odds that the court will undo some of its recent rulings.

Obama started his makeover of the court with the nominations of U.S. District Judge Andre Davis of Maryland, whose nomination to the circuit bench by President Bill Clinton died in the Senate, and Virginia Supreme Court Justice Barbara Keenan. Should they win confirmation, Democratic appointees will outnumber Republicans 7-5 on the 4th Circuit, with three more vacancies.

. . . With Democrats in control of the Senate and its Judiciary Committee, filling the rest of the vacancies should be easier for Obama. That would be a relief for the 4th Circuit's sitting judges, who rely on help from visiting or semiretired judges to handle their caseload.

The court's (bad, in my opinion) decision in the Botetourt search case is here.