“Testilying” is a term that police officers use to describe false testimony they give in court so that an otherwise illegal search or arrest can be justified.  It’s hard to tell how common the practice is, but it’s much more common than most people want to believe.

This New York Times report is telling.  First, we don’t know how many illegal searches and arrests take place because, as Federal Judge John Martin observes, “We don’t have statistics for all the people who are hassled, no gun is found, and they never get into the system.”  These are low-visibility state offenses that we might call state misdemeanors.  They happen all over but more often in the poorer neighborhoods.  Who would go to the trouble of consulting a lawyer for an illegal 10 minute police stop and pat-down?  How many lawyers would bother to take such a case if someone did walk in off the street with such a complaint?

Next come the cases where the police find contraband and go to court with a fabricated story in order to try and get a conviction.  In a system where such conduct goes unpunished, it’s safe to say we’re going to get more of it.  And the cops who skirt the rules are likely to rise through the ranks faster.  After all, they have many more arrests to their credit than their peers.

Note the utter indifference of the police and prosecutors to reports of testilying.

Kudos to the New York Times for this “revealing glimpse” of our troubled system.  For some related Cato work, go here and here. 

Drew Carey and our friends at Reason have produced a great 25 minute documentary about the Corey Maye case.

For additional background on the Maye case, go here.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a legal permanent resident who was arrested because he shared a common name with a suspected illegal immigrant. It illustrated how the E-Verify program would foul things for legal workers, a prominent subject of this paper.

Here’s another story of legal permanent resident mistreatment. This illustrates how overblown terror fears can cloud officials’ judgments and foul things for . . . well, everyone.

It seems that a woman in Florida asked her relatives in Monterrey, Mexico to ship her the birth certificates of two relatives who want to apply for their Mexican passports at the consulate in South Miami. At the behest of U.S. Customs and Border Security, the envelope is being held by the United Parcel Service in Louisville, Kentucky until she identifies herself further.

Asked to explain, a CBP spokeswoman in Washington asserted the U.S. government’s right to examine everything entering or exiting the country and said, “Identity documents are of concern to CBP because of their potential use by terrorists.”

This is a terrific example of poorly generated suspicion. In our paper on predictive data mining, Jeff Jonas and I wrote about how suspicion is properly generated in the absence of specific leads: “[T]here must be a pattern that fits terrorism planning . . . and the actions of investigated persons must fit that pattern while not fitting any common pattern of lawful behavior.”

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A TV News helicopter filmed Philadelphia police officers as they repeatedly kick three suspects as they lay on the ground.  Go here to see the video clip.

Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey says 5 officers have been taken off street duty because of their actions.   Why are those 5 not under arrest for battery?

Philadelphia authorities reportedly hope to identify the other police officers involved in the incident.  Hope?!    If the Commissioner can’t or won’t issue an order to come forward or face dismissal by the close of business, there are deeper problems with the police department.

Faced with the prospect of years in prison, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, known as the “D.C. Madam,” committed suicide on Thursday. Her pursuers and prosecutors should be ashamed of themselves.

Running a house of prostitution is not a distinction most of us would wish for our daughters. But it’s a vice, not a crime. That’s a crucial distinction in a free society. So far as we know, she never murdered, raped, assaulted, robbed, or defrauded anyone. Like any broker, she brought together willing buyers and willing sellers. And for doing so, she was convicted–not actually of prostitution but of “racketeering” and money laundering — and faced up to 55 years in prison, though prosecutors estimated that her sentence would likely be “only” four to six years.

Palfrey was indicted after a three-year joint investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Postal Service. Apparently they couldn’t catch her cheating on her taxes, but her employees mailed her cut of the proceeds in money orders, which led to racketeering and money laundering charges. As with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, apparently a fishing expedition into money matters turned up something far more headline-worthy.

But really — a three-year investigation of a prostitution service? Are there no real criminals? Are there no terrorists? Before, during, and after 9/11, the Justice Department ran a 13-month investigation of a brothel in New Orleans. At least 10 FBI agents were involved. As Jonathan Turley noted, “Only the FBI could go to the French Quarter and find only a dozen prostitutes after a year of investigation. Given the roughly one-to-one ratio between agents and prostitutes, the FBI could have produced a hundred times this number by simply having agents walk down Bourbon Street.” What a ridiculous waste of money and manpower.

But the waste is not the worst aspect of this outrage. Even if there were no criminals and no terrorists to hunt down, it would be wrong to harass, arrest, prosecute, imprison — and hound to death — people who are violating no one’s rights.

There’s a nightmarish intersection of old prostitution laws and modern financial regulations. Palfrey was investigated on suspicion of tax evasion and then convicted of “racketeering” and “money laundering.” But she was no racketeer; she was one woman with some employees or contract workers. Spitzer’s bank accounts were being monitored, as apparently all our bank accounts are, under post-9/11 laws allegedly designed to turn up evidence of terrorist financing or other nefarious activity. And boy, did they find something sinister — a married man having sex with prostitutes.

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Good column on the seizure of 400+ children from the FLDS ranch in Texas. (HT: Volokh).

As I said in this Cato podcast,  I think it is telling that no young adult or child has been found saying “Thank you so much for rescuing me!  It is nice to be in a place where I am not beaten up!”  The absence of proof is now considered evidence of massive “cult” brainwashing.  If a child says “I love my parents and want to go home,” it means he has been brainwashed by the “cult.”  And if a child says “I like my foster parents a lot.  They give me candy and the video games are awesome,” it means the child’s actual parents are unfit.

State authorities talk a lot about rape and forced marriages, but 300 children are ages 4 and below.  They should be sent home because there is no evidence of abuse.  All the boys should go home because there’s no evidence of abuse.  As for the remaining girls, they have been held for 3 weeks already … the judge should give the police one more week to present evidence or they should be going home too.   The investigation can continue, but 3+ weeks in custody is enough already.  

When it comes to separating children from the parents, the burden of proof must be borne by the state. 

Much as I hate to rain on my colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo’s understandable happiness at the decriminalization of personal consumption/possession of small amounts of drugs, this doesn’t exactly represent a ray of hope in Argentina’s otherwise gloomy policy mix.  Not because I believe in the War on Drugs – I can’t imagine anybody at Cato does – but because it was a court that reached this decision instead of a policymaking body.

Imagine the outcry if the U.S. Supreme Court simply decreed a policy it didn’t like to be unconstitutional – I know, with Justices Stevens and Kennedy at the apogee of their powers, it’s not a far stretch.  Better yet, recall the poison the Court injected into our legal and political systems when it short-circuited the political process by inventing a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (again, I’m not saying anything about the underlying policy arguments).

So it is here: Instead of having the Argentine Congress change the law, the nation’s Supreme Court (by a vote of 4-3) simply decreed that criminalizing drug use is unconstitutional.  Reports are still sketchy, but this sounds like precisely the kind of judicial fiat developing (or any) countries need to avoid if they want to strengthen the rule of law.

Good editorial in the Wall Street Journal yesterday regarding the dismissal of Joseph P. Brandon. 

The piece notes how federal prosecutors are able to pressure CEOs like Warren Buffet to throw certain executives overboard in order to avoid a dubious federal indictment. Cato adjunct scholar John Hasnas is quoted in the piece, noting that companies will do almost anything to avoid the accusation that they are being “uncooperative.” Hasnas is the author of the Cato book Trapped, which shows how the government is increasingly coercing business executives to take unethical actions — such as discharging employees who have done nothing wrong.

More here.

Unable to post bail for a robbery charge, a nineteen year-old man spends his days and nights in the city jail awaiting his trial.  Then his mentally deranged cell mate beats him up and rapes him.  Prison guards rescue the man after dithering for two hours.  

Some people believe that prisons are supposed to be hell-holes.  That will help to discourage bad people from commiting crimes in the first place.  Wrong.  Some people need to be incarcerated, but they don’t deserve to be brutalized. 

More here and here.

Federal prosecutor wants a federal judge to order citizens to stop talking to the media about a case.  In extraordinary circumstances, a judge can order the attorneys in a particular case to stop talking to the media … but a censorship order to other people?!  Even if the judge promptly rejects this request, we should all be troubled that this was even attempted.  This prosecutor should be shown the door right away.

More here, here, and here.   

David Simon has done it again. First, he created the best show on television, The Wire.  Then, he and his co-writers wrote a passionate critique of the drug war in Time magazine, urging jurors to vote their conscience in certain cases. That article has, in turn, sparked a debate over at the Defending People blog. A Texas prosecutor started the debate with an anonymous post against jury nullification. The prosecutor went so far as to say that anyone advocating jury nullification could be prosecuted in Texas. David Simon just cheerfully joined the fracas. 

Previous coverage here. Cato co-published the most comprehensive book on this subject, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine by Clay Conrad. For shorter works, go here, here, and here.

Yesterday, in addition to announcing its decision in the Medellin case (which I blogged about here), the Supreme Court heard argument in two cases relating to the War on Terror. 

First, in Munaf v. Geren, two U.S. citizens (also citizens of Jordan and Iraq, respectively) held captive in Iraq by U.S. forces — as part of Multi-National Force-Iraq, which may but should be a key determinant – challenged their detention and potential transfer to Iraqi authorities for what they fear will be torture as part of criminal prosecution in Iraqi courts.  This seems to be an easier case than Boumediene, a case argued in December wherein Guantanamo detainees challenge their containment and the military commissions by which they are to be tried.  (My colleague Tim Lynch blogged about that case here and here, and also filed an amicus brief.) 

Whatever hope the detainees had was probably dashed by the incoherent presentation made by Northwestern Law School Clinical Professor Joseph Margulies on their behalf.  As Lyle Denniston of SCOTUSblog put it, “when several Justices of the Supreme Court tell an attorney they do not understand his argument, and they do so because the argument was, indeed, fundamentally confusing, the chances of winning may be significantly reduced.”  Ouch.  Margulies turned what should be relatively straightforward issues into a convoluted maze, and those of us in the audience were not the only ones shaking our heads.

The second argument, and the one relating to the title of this blog post, involved the prosecution of the guy who was caught smuggling explosives into the U.S. from Canada in an attempt to blow up LAX at the turn of the century.  (Is it ok to use that expression for the 1999-2000 period yet?)  In United States v. Ressam, Attorney General Mukasey exercised the AG’s historical (but not much used of late) prerogative to argue before the high court, defending the 10-year additional prison term slapped on the Milennial bomber for “carrying an explosive” while “committing a felony” — the felony being lying to the border guard.  Having learned from Margulies’s example, Mukasey did a workmanlike job and sat down with 14 minutes remaining in his allotted time.  The case will turn on some rather technical statutory analysis which I’ll spare you, but it was refreshing to see an appellate advocate who was clearly not there to hear his own voice.

I just came across this letter I wrote to the editor of the Washington Post.  Sadly, the editor declined to publish it.  Since the Supreme Court just heard oral arguments about the D.C. gun ban and the meaning of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller, it remains relevant:

On January 5, we learned that District officials filed a brief with the Supreme Court [”Gun Law Prevents Harm, D.C. Argues,” Jan. 5] defending the city’s gun ban on the grounds that: the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms; the ban “does not deprive the people of reasonable means to defend themselves;” and “less restrictive approaches would not be adequate.”

Fifteen pages later, Colbert I. King [”Outfoxed In the District,” Jan. 5] wrote of the “conditions that threaten the quality of life of all who live in this city: criminals roaming the streets in search of human prey; an apathetic and complacent government workforce; nonproducers ensconced in high places; and elected leaders who fall for snow jobs.”

Draw your own conclusions.

A California woman was shot to death as she pleaded with emergency dispatchers to come and help her. Her death will not make the network news programs this evening, but this is the latest reminder that we must take responsibility for our own safety and not rely on the police. 

Bill Masters, a libertarian and sheriff of a Colorado county tells the residents of his county, “It is your responsibility to protect yourself and your family from criminals. If you rely on the government for protection, you are going to be at least disappointed and at worst injured or killed.” 

Gun control puts honest citizens in the position of having to choose between protecting their lives or respecting the law. What kind of government would do such a thing? 

More on gun control here and here.

A site for community review of police officers called RateMyCop.com gets the benefit of the “Streisand effect” today. For a period of time, it was shut down by its web registrar, GoDaddy.com, most likely because of law enforcement complaints about being subject to public oversight.

(The “Streisand effect” is the phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove information from the Internet backfires, causing it to be more widely publicized. The term refers to a 2003 incident in which Barbra Streisand sued a photographer and Web site in an attempt to have an aerial photo of her house removed from a publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs. The lawsuit made the photo very popular.)

In 2002-2005 I documented in some detail what today’s Wall Street Journal editorial referred to as Eliot Spitzer’s “consistent excesses as Attorney General.”

A January 2003 piece on “Spitzer’s Shakedown” revealed the fatuous nature of his inquisition against Wall Street.

In 2004, there was Spitzer’s ridiculous “Mutual Fund Fee Fantasy.” In 2005, in “Trial by Press Release,” I unraveled Spitzer’s flimsy case against the insurance brokerage arm of Marsh & McClellan.

Shortly after one of these articles appeared I received a phone call at home from an investigative reporter with one of the largest New York newspapers. He prodded me for quite a while to find out if I had been influenced or bribed by one of the companies Spitzer had attacked. Did I know anyone at, say, Merrill Lynch? (Nope). Do I own stock in the company? (Not then, and I’m currently shorting financials.)

I explained that nobody has accused me of any breach of integrity since I began writing in 1971. Besides, it would be very expensive to bribe me, I joked, because I had accumulated more money through investing than I know how to spend. I asked the reporter where he had gotten this very bad tip. He told me he had been contacted by Mr. Spitzer’s office. Hardball was their favorite game.

What follows is an unpublished February 2005 speech I gave to some small group in D.C. (which paid me less than half what Gov. Spitzer apparently spent for far less entertainment). Excerpts later appeared in my “Trial by Press Release.”

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IMHO, the best show on television is HBO’s The Wire.  Now the writers and producers are taking their passion to the pages of Time Magazine, where they rail against the injustices of the drug war and call for jury nullification. (HT: Radley Balko’s Agitator).

Cato co-published the most comprehensive book on jury nullification in 1999.

For additional background, go here, here, and here.

A new report, One in 100, from the Pew Charitable Trusts is drawing attention to the remarkable growth in the U.S. prison population. The Washington Post reports: “With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second.”

I do not think our prison population should be some function of the overall adult population in the United States. But, still, when the freest country in the world is locking up more people than a much more populous totalitarian state, policymakers ought to pause and ask themselves this question: Do so many Americans really need to be kept behind iron bars? I addressed that question in a Washington Post article a few years ago — just as our prison population was breaking the two-million-prisoner mark. The short answer is no. 

The subject is not that complicated. Social engineers thought that a ban on drug use would work. It has not. Federal and state drug laws are broken millions of times each and every month. The social engineers have tried increasing the penalties and stepping up enforcement in order to “send messages.” The courts and prisons are busier than ever, but the drug trade continues to thrive.  

When the prisons are overflowing in certain jurisdictions, the system starts backing up and the police will focus on the most violent offenders and only the “major drug traffickers.” In the jurisdictions where there is some extra prison bed space (such places are few and far between), the police can “crack down” on (low level) drug dealers and users. Given that reality, one must recognize the folly of the conservative policy prescription, which basically is: Let’s build some new prisons. The liberal policy prescription of “home monitoring” and “drug treatment” do not address the core problem. 

The costs of incarceration are keeping the most zealous drug warriors in check because they cannot persuade enough people to spend whatever it takes to enforce the law against the possession and ingestion of an arbitrary list of substances. The course we are now following is nothing but a series of stop-gap measures — i.e., the police will ignore some drug dealing, the judges will send more people into drug treatment (whether they need it or not), and the wardens will have the inmates set up cots and bunk beds in the cafeterias and exercise rooms at night. 

For additional Cato work on this subject, go here.

Federal agents investigate, arrest, and prosecute local law enforcement agents on a fairly regular basis.  Unfortunately, state and local police rarely investigate, arrest, and prosecute federal agents.  I suspect the locals are just intimidated by the FBI, Secret Service, IRS, etc.  When something suspicious or questionable happens, the feds tell the locals something to the effect of “Back off.  We’ll handle this ourselves-internally.” 

So Arizona officials deserve some credit for pressing ahead and treating Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Corbett like any other suspect.  According to the local prosecutor, Corbett’s story does not hold up and sufficient evidence points toward his guilt.  If that is indeed the situation, this case should be simple: Prosecute.  The fact that the victim didn’t have a visa in his pocket does not matter.   It also does not matter that Corbett had a federal badge in his wallet.

The Arizona officials did mess up one important aspect of this case.  Why is this matter in federal court?  Well, I already know why because this typically happens in these rare circumstances when a federal agent is prosecuted.  The more precise question is: Why didn’t the Arizona officials object to the transfer to federal court?   One news story alludes to juror bias, but that does not hold up.  Where are the jurors in federal court coming from?  Rhode Island?  The issue isn’t really rural vs. big city either because, again, if you name any big city in Arizona, there are going to be Arizona courts there! 

The thinly veiled reason for the removal procedure is that the state process is supposedly rigged/biased against the federal agent.   Arizona officials should have recognized this and defended their justice system instead of just rolling over. 

Agent Corbett has a right to a trial — like any other person accused of a crime.  The point here is that he would have had the opportunity to argue self-defense in the Arizona state courts.  And if he is convicted but thinks his trial was unfair, he can appeal and try to persuade a higher court with specifics.  This case belongs in state court, not federal court.  

Tuesday the Supreme Court declined to review the ACLU’s challenge to the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP), the NSA’s post-9/11 foreign intelligence-gathering initiative whose critics labeled “domestic spying.”

This case shows the interplay of the foundational legal doctrine of “standing” with one of the privileges courts recognize as being more important than allowing full discovery of information during the litigation process – and it also shows the proper relationship between the political and judicial branches in our constitutional system. To maintain a legal claim a plaintiff must show that he was injured in a unique and concrete way. Here, a motley crew of plaintiffs – who also included the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), journalist Christopher Hitchens, various lawyers, and others – cannot demonstrate that they have been harmed in any but a generalized, speculative way by the TSP. They simply have no idea whether their international communications had been monitored.

While the plaintiffs previously argued that they were denied the opportunity even to find out about possible violations of their civil liberties because the relevant evidence is classified, the lower court correctly ruled that the government’s “state secrets privilege” prevented the dissemination of this information that, if disclosed, could compromise national security. Further, the state secrets at issue here relate to foreign intelligence, involving the monitoring of cross-border communications of people suspected of affiliation with a foreign enemy. As Justice Robert Jackson (commonly cited by those who would curtail executive authority over intelligence gathering) wrote in 1948:

The President, both as Commander-in-Chief and as the Nation’s organ for foreign affairs, has available intelligence services whose reports neither are nor ought to be published to the world. It would be intolerable that courts, without the relevant information, should review and perhaps nullify actions of the Executive taken on information properly held secret. Nor can courts sit in camera in order to be taken into executive confidences. But even if courts could require full disclosure, the very nature of executive decisions as to foreign policy is political, not judicial. Such decisions are wholly confided by our Constitution to the political departments of the government, Executive and Legislative. They are delicate, complex, and involve large elements of prophecy. They are and should be undertaken only by those directly responsible to the people whose welfare they advance or imperil. They are decisions of a kind for which the Judiciary has neither aptitude, facilities nor responsibility and have long been held to belong in the domain of political power not subject to judicial intrusion or inquiry.

Ultimately — and wherever you put the dividing line between executive and legislative authority — this case is just such a disagreement over policy that should be handled in the political branches, rather than as unnecessary litigation in the courts. Much like disputes over high tax rates, immigration enforcement, earmarks, and a host of other issues now being debated by the presidential candidates, the TSP presents a classical political (not legal) question. The plaintiffs were not more affected by the policy than other Americans, so their recourse, as ACLU legal director Steven Shapiro (no relation to me) correctly noted, is to petition Congress (and the executive). Ironically, this is exactly what the ACLU and its allies already did successfully, contributing to the political pressure that led the Bush administration to shut down the program in January 2007. For good or ill, this is the way our democracy is supposed to function.

Via Hit and Run, the article from the February 7 Rolling Stone that Ben Friedman blogged about recently is now online. “The Fear Factory” discusses multiple cases where the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces have brought cases against defendants who “posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything.” Crucially, the story illustrates how information about the JTTFs’ activities are shrouded behind claims of secrecy.

This is no way to do law enforcement - or to secure a free country.

Disturbing video clip here of government agents employing forced nudity against a prisoner.

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The New York Times has a fascinating article explaining how bail bondsmen are a uniquely American, quasi-private element of the criminal justice system:

…posting bail for people accused of crimes in exchange for a fee…is all but unknown in the rest of the world. In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant’s bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror — a form of obstruction of justice. …Other countries almost universally reject and condemn Mr. Spath’s trade, in which defendants who are presumed innocent but cannot make bail on their own pay an outsider a nonrefundable fee for their freedom. “It’s a very American invention,” John Goldkamp, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, said of the commercial bail bond system. “It’s really the only place in the criminal justice system where a liberty decision is governed by a profit-making businessman who will or will not take your business.” …Bail is meant to make sure defendants show up for trial. It has ancient roots in English common law, which relied on sworn promises and on pledges of land or property from the defendants or their relatives to make sure they did not flee. America’s open frontier and entrepreneurial spirit injected an innovation into the process: by the early 1800s, private businesses were allowed to post bail in exchange for payments from the defendants and the promise that they would hunt down the defendants and return them if they failed to appear. …The system costs taxpayers nothing, Mr. Kreins said, and it is exceptionally effective at ensuring that defendants appear for court. …According to the Justice Department and academic studies, the clients of commercial bail bond agencies are more likely to appear for court in the first place and more likely to be captured if they flee than those released under other forms of supervision.

Libertarians sometimes get accused of being utopians because of occasional debates about the degree to which things such as roads, defense, and law enforcement can be handled by the private sector. But this article is a great introduction to a thought experiment: Imagine if America’s private bail system did not exist and one of Cato’s legal experts proposed privatization of whatever system the government had created instead. That proposal doubtlessly would be condemned as utopian, unrealistic, impractical, and unworkable. Fortunately, that impossible idea has been successfully in place for about two hundred years. Just something to keep in mind the next time a statist tells you that something only can be done by government.

I share Tim Lee’s disagreements with our colleague Roger Pilon’s WSJ op-ed. Roger received far less gentle treatment elsewhere. I’m impressed, as usual, with Tim’s depth on the FISA law and the FISA debate.

This stir reminds me of a broader problem that pervades debates on anti-terror policies. Many perfectly intelligent public policy experts still lack a sound understanding of terrorism as a strategy. This degrades their ability to conceive of counter-strategic responses, causing them to promote ideas that would not help and that would even hurt our efforts to control terrorism.

In early January, I presented at a conference held by the International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts, the Italian branch of the 1995 Nobel-Prize-winning Pugwash Group. The topic of the conference was “Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Human Rights.” I have done some work on the privacy implications of technical anti-terrorist efforts, of course, and am increasingly (and necessarily, it seems) focusing on terrorism strategy and counter-strategy. I presented on both and learned a great deal from the perspectives represented at the conference.

Though I don’t feel fully expert yet, I’d like to share some more detailed thinking about terrorism and counter-terrorism strategy. I hope more people will put their thinking into this kind of context.

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Atilla Yayla, the courageous leader of the Association for Liberal Thinking in Turkey, who has spoken at the Cato Institute and taken part in Cato conferences and programs, has been found guilty of allegedly insulting the founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The 15 month prison sentence was suspended.

Background from my previous blog posts here and here.

The New York Times ran a piece on Friday on the likely direction for freedom of speech in Turkey, “Turkey to Alter Speech Law,” which focuses on Atilla’s case.

Atilla is a brave man and a friend of the liberty of everyone. Please write to the Turkish Ambassador in your country, respectfully (please) requesting that proceedings be undertaken to void the sentence. Here is the info for the Turkish Embassy in the USA.

Government agents are rarely prosecuted when they violate the wiretapping laws.  Instead, the government uses those laws against the people!  Massachusetts police, for example, arrested a law student who used his cell phone to record a drug arrest. 

It is bad enough when a cop loses his temper and makes a false arrest.  It is much worse when prosecutors calmly decide to press forward with the case and set a legal precedent.