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Facing 16 Years In Prison For Videotaping Police
krou sends this snip from the Maine Civil Liberties Union: "The ACLU of Maryland is defending Anthony Graber, who faces as much as sixteen years in prison if found guilty of violating state wiretap laws because he recorded video of an officer drawing a gun during a traffic stop. ... Once [the Maryland State Police] learned of the video on YouTube, Graber's parents' house was raided, searched, and four of his computers were confiscated. Graber was arrested, booked, and jailed. Their actions are a calculated method of intimidation. Another person has since been similarly charged under the same statute. The wiretap law being used to charge Anthony Graber is intended to protect private communication between two parties. According to David Rocah, the ACLU attorney handling Mr. Graber's case, 'To charge Graber with violating the law, you would have to conclude that a police officer on a public road, wearing a badge and a uniform, performing his official duty, pulling someone over, somehow has a right to privacy when it comes to the conversation he has with the motorist.'" Here are a factsheet (PDF) on the case from the ACLU of Maryland, and the video at issue.
Yep, if you live in a two party state, you need to get on your representatives to change the law. The problem is just as this illustrates: EVERYONE involved in a conversation has to be informed and often to consent to the recording. If not, it is illegal. While obviously it is the easiest for the police to abuse this, normal citizens can too. You see a gang banger beating the crap out of someone, you covertly film it, his attorney presses to have you criminally charged. Or you have a boss who screams racial slurs at people your record that on a tape recorder and then the boss find out and has you charged.
A one party system is a much better way to go. That means one person in a conversation , the person recording, has to be aware a recording is being made. Nobody else needs to be told. This means you can't just record anything, you can't sneak cameras in to your neighbour's house, but you can put them in your own. You can't place a tap on a random phone but you can record your own calls, and so on. You can record things you are involved in (such as having a camera on your person), property you own, etc.
Do that, and then police, or anyone else, can't pull this shit.
I actually read an article about issues like this, and it seems different states have different wording in their wiretapping statutes. In some states, the audio part of the recording is what's illegal (many cellphones and pocket cameras record audio when they record video with no way to turn the microphone off). In other states, there's an exemption if it's obvious to all parties that what's happening is being recorded (local Channel 5 reporters with 50-pound cameras talking into a huge mic.) or if it's taking place in a public area (no privacy in public, remember?) but it seems judges are ignoring the public area exemption in cases like these.
If you have such a video, submit it to your local news station with a note requesting anonymity, or use a Youtube account created and accessed via TOR. If the police confiscate your camera/phone, you can sue and successfully get it back.
One thing I do wonder: how is it not a violation for cops to have dashboard-mounted cameras that record audio and video constantly, yet a brief cellphone video of a pulled-over cop is a violation.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Many (most?) employers now ask if you've merely been arrested...
In all the countries i live in, you can answer no to such a question regardless (its also illegal to ask it in the first place). Only the police have the information and its not public and it will not be on your criminal record.
Ironically having a record in the countries i live is also not such a death warrant for jobs either. Generally people are prepared to believe you turned over a new leaf--even if its just about a book of new leafs.
But its not all peaches and sunshine. In particular if it goes to trial, that is a matter of public record. One guy got news headlines that he knocked up a little girl and was a dirty pedo, with a "unrelated" picture next to his mug shot of 5year old girl playing in a new playground on the front page. He was fully acquitted since the girl in question was 15 and he meet her in a bar (drinking age back then was 20) and she acted 20 claiming to have a office job etc. The Judge/jury said there was no way the defendant could have reasonably expected that she was underage.
It didn't matter. In the end the fully acquitted and innocent guy had to change his name and move countries.
So I do agree. There is a very real social cost with an arrest, one that cops generally don't pay. And they wonder why so many of us don't respect the uniform.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
I'm sure that the founding fathers would have had an amendment of the constitution that guaranteed against what is going on right now.
People should also focus on how unnecessarily dangerous that traffic stop was.
Why did off-duty officer feel it was necessary to endanger his own life, the motorcyclist and the life of the motorists in the nearby vehicles? His weapon was drawn before he announced that he was a police officer. Somebody who would have chosen fight over flight could have caused a serious altercation. IANAPO, but why couldn't the officer have recorded the details of this obvious lawbreaker and reported it to a marked unit to take care of traffic violations?
I'm hoping there are other details I don't know about, but the video evidence seems to indicate an investigation of the officer's conduct would be prudent.
This is the gazillionth story I've heard of Maryland cops wantonly abusing their power.
The most blatant one I've heard happened to a coworker of mine from Bethesda in about '98. His car had been stolen and was reported to the police about a month prior to the incident. The police had actually recovered his vehicle and he had picked it up at the city impound lot earlier in the week.
On a Friday night, he was pulled over while riding with a friend. The cops ran to his car with guns drawn, pulled the doors open, dragged them out of the car, forced them to the ground, and kicked the crap out of them. All the while they were both of course shouting that this was their car and trying to show ID etc.
After they were both beaten into submission, the cops did eventually look at the car papers and ID, and then verified with their dispatcher that the car had been recovered that week, after which they simply drove away. I believe there were exchanges of something along the lines of "you have no proof of anything".
Now, my friend should have gotten a lawyer, but where he messed up was that he & his dad went to the police station to complain, which got them basically nowhere. Actually this was also about the time he left our mutual employer and we haven't really discussed it since, so I'm not sure how it turned out in the end.
Really? Anything that involves interstate commerce can immediately be classified as federal. And it's easy to classify anything has having an effect on commerce.
I did not say "I didn't do anything." I said "I was facing five life sentences plus 105 years for an offense no one had ever been jailed a day on before. " And that is absolutely true. In fact, I filed my own 2255 collateral attack and the judge issued a sua sponte ruling (in violation of Greenlaw) using Gonzalez v Raich, a 9th Circuit medical marijuana case, which states that the Government can regulate noncommercial INTRAstate activity in which it has an interest. (See Wickard v Fillmore.) No "special circumstance.." the Feds just need to have an interest in you.
As for only "robbery with a gun" being an example of a life sentence requirement, that's bollocks. Feds operate on a very strict numerical system, (even though Booker says it's all advisory.) See this table? All you need to do is get up to Offense Level 37 with a few priors and you're gone forever. Or get a few 924(c) counts, the third of which puts you away for life, mandatory. There are white collar guys who are doing life because their dollar amounts are high. Bernie Madoff didn't use a gun, did he? How about Jeff Skilling? A guy who sells small amounts of drugs three times does 20 years, mandatory because of 18 USC 851.
You can do life for conspiracy. If I call you and ask "hey want a pound of blow?" and you simply say yes, you can be indicted on a pound of blow..at least 15 years. No blow needs to exist. Happens every day.
Just cause you have a pal who happens to work for a PD doesn't mean you understand just how unjust the system is. Actually, at the spot I served, I never saw a single inmate who claimed to be innocent.
I'm just suggesting people be very careful.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
At first, your comment, and its moderation, baffled me and left me speechless.
You're advocating the annulment of privacy laws, implicating that who doesn't has something to hide and is afraid of some unspecified threat.
Either you have never listened to the arguments of privacy advocates, or you've dismissed them. In the latter case I'd be real interested in the train of thought that lead to that dismissal.
If all you were referring to was the right to privacy for officers on duty that's a whole different thing of course..
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
Just fyi, Americans have very little right to privacy when their in a public place, witness the recent lawsuit Girls Gone Wild won. ACLU will win this case either directly, if the judge follows precedent, or on appeal, if this judge is corrupt.
We'd prefer the police department ended up paying Anthony Graber some settlement for malicious prosecution of course, but who knows.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
He also drew his gun while in the car, and brandished it at the guy before identifying himself as a police officer.
They must do things different where that boy's from. One of the things that was drilled into my head in Journalism school was that you can take pictures of anything you can see from a public street. The Maryland law is unconstitutional, and citizens of Maryland have the right and responsibility to violate that unconstitutional law. But you know, that's not the thing that bothers me the most. The thing that bothers me the most is the 'Traffic Stop'. Here in Florida and in many other states, we have a right to carry concealed weapons with a permit. The man in the video did not identify himself as an officer. There was no reason to think he was anything other than some freak with a case of road rage. I could easily see someone drawing their weapon on that officer and killing him. Someone needs to review basic traffic stop techniques up there.
My old room mate called in a domestic violence incident at his apartment complex a few months ago and it was a young cop and his fiancée. After a few hours they came pounding on his door asking him questions and he told them to come back later because he had to work in the morning. A few days passed and he went down to his car and found his antenna bent off and it was keyed, so he called the cops again and said he thought it was the wife beating cop, who was still living in the apartments. His insurance paid for the repairs but he wanted to get the hell out of there, so he setup a webcam from his balcony overlooking the parking lot while he looked for a new place. A week or so later he got 4 still images of the cop walking over to his car and kicking it, throwing up his hands and than kicking it some more. He turned over the images to the cops and he said the first thing they asked was if there was audio, because if there was he was going to be charged with a wiretapping crime, they were so serious they were grinning, he said. There wasn't any audio, long story short but there is a major aversion to even recording wife beating cops off duty cops running amok that is how this law is used to cover up crimes performed even off duty.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Actually, that's a slam-dunk defense right there! If the car behind him was recording, the helmet recording is completely moot, because the officer knew he was on tape. Yes?
Lie:
It wasn't 82.
The video clearly states 69 mph on the cop pass.
Misrepresentation:
The cop didn't pull him over.
An out of uniform cop in an unmarked car cuts him off. Gets out. Draws the gun. Tells him to get off the bike. It appears to be a car jacking. Only when Anthony starts trying to back away does he identify himself as state police.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Himself. Motorcycles have a lot of speed, high acceleration and maneuverability, little mass, and very little between the rider and the road. If he'd met another vehicle at 127mph, the other vehicle would be operable with a dent, and this video would've ended with road pizza.
Stupid driving? Extremely. Dangerous to those around him? Not really.
Here in my state, what the cop did would be called 'threatening with a deadly weapon'.
Here's a useful phone app someone into phone apps should write. When you push one emergency button, the phone starts taking video and audio and uploading it in real time to a server, which then immediately sends the video someplace where it can't be deleted. (Sending it to YouTube, Wikileaks, the ACLU, and CopWatch might be overkill, but it would work.)