Radley Balko, Patterico and Orin Kerr have information on the affidavit. Go read all three.

I read the affidavit and noted this part:

AS THE CRI APPROACHED THE HOME AND WENT TO THE FRONT DOOR THE CRI WAS MET BY “SAM”. “SAM” AND THE CRI SPOKE BRIEFLY AT THE FRONT PORCH. “SAM” THEN BREIFLY WALKED INTO THE HOME AT 933 NEAL ST. RETURNING WITH AN OBJECT HE EXCHANGED WITH THE CRI IN EXCHANGE FOR THE CITY FUNDS…

Note a few things. First, the affidavit does not affirmatively say that the affiant actually saw this happen—the interaction on the porch. Perhaps he did—perhaps he didn’t and it’s based on hearsay.

Second, if the warrant was issued on a no-knock basis because of the surveillance cameras the CRI said were in the house, consider a few things. The affidiavit says that “SAM” went into the house—it does not say that the CRI went into the house. So, how did the CRI know about the cameras? Did he look in the house? Had he been in the house on a previous occasion? How did he know that Sam closely monitored cameras?

Did the judge base the no knock component on the basis of the “closely monitored” surveillance cameras? If so, should she have asked these questions first?

Radley Balko updates on Kathryn Johnston. It appears that the confidential informant is claiming that he was told to lie about the drug purchase at Mrs. Johnston’s house.

From Radley:

What happens now? Do they throw the informant under the bus? Either way, it’s now pretty clear that this raid was a catstrophic failure.

Attack the informant’s credibility and you admit that you conducted a high-risk, forced entry raid based entirely on a tip from an informant you now say is unreliable. You admit you did no corroborating investigation. You admit you didn’t even send an officer to check to see if the informant was right about, for example, an external surveillance system. And all of this ineptitude led to the death of an innocent woman, not to mention to three officers getting wounded.

And that’s if the guy’s lying about the cover-up. If he’s telling the truth? Now you’re talking a major-league shit storm. If this guy’s telling the truth, not only did the officers originally investigating this case lie, but the officers investigating after the shooting then lied to cover it up. That means you not only have corruption problems with your narcotics officers, but you have problems with your internal affairs unit, the cops who are charged with keeping the other cops in line.

Someone has committed the crime of homicide under Georgia law.

Felony Murder – O.C.G.A. 16-5-1©

Felony murder occurs when a person causes the death of another person while in the commission of a felony. Under the felony-murder rule, malice (an intent to cause the person’s death) is irrelevant. The defendant need not have any intention to kill someone, the fact that someone died as a result of his felonious act is sufficient. Example: If Joe is robbing a bank, and a customer who is in the middle of the event suffers a heart attack and dies, it is likely that Joe will be charged with felony-murder.

Is giving a false statement in an affidavit or report to the police a felony in Georgia? If not:

Involuntary Manslaughter –According to Georgia law, there are two types of involuntary manslaughter. Neither type requires that the defendant actually intend to kill the victim.

“Unlawful Act” Involuntary Manslaughter – O.C.G.A. 16-5-3(a)

The first type of involuntary manslaughter is considered a felony. It occurs when the defendant commits a non-felonious crime, (a misdemeanor) which results in someone’s death. This is also sometimes referred to as “misdemeanor manslaughter”.

Who signed the affidavit for the search warrant? If that person lied, the level of homicide for which that person is responsible is above—depending on whether it is a felony or misdemeanor.

Then there is this:

“Criminal Negligence” Involuntary Manslaughter – O.C.G.A. 16-5-3(b)

The second kind of involuntary manslaughter is a misdemeanor. It happens when the defendant commits a lawful act in an unlawful manner which is likely to cause another person great bodily harm or death (in other words, another person’s death results from the defendant’s criminally negligent conduct). It is difficult to determine exactly what conduct is required in order to be considered criminally negligent. If it appears that a reasonable person under similar circumstances would have known that the act would endanger others, and the defendant committed the act anyway, then the defendant’s behavior is probably criminally negligent.

Go back to Radley’s statement:

Attack the informant’s credibility and you admit that you conducted a high-risk, forced entry raid based entirely on a tip from an informant you now say is unreliable. You admit you did no corroborating investigation. You admit you didn’t even send an officer to check to see if the informant was right about, for example, an external surveillance system. And all of this ineptitude led to the death of an innocent woman, not to mention to three officers getting wounded.

A prosecution is in order.

(Link to George Statutes)

Radley Balko is reporting that the police found a small amount of marijuana in Mrs. Johnston’s house. Moreover, if you look at the story, which covers a public statement from the police chief, you will see something very interesting.

Earlier reports quoted members of the police force claiming that undercover officers purchased narcotics in her home earlier that day. Now, in the story linked in the first paragraph of this post, the Police Chief admits this:

Chief Pennington said the case was built on a drug buy by a confidential informant, who claimed he purchased drugs inside Johnston’s home.

This is outrageous. How dare the police, in the span of a few hours, get a no-knock warrant based on this—with no time for other meaningful investigation!

If it is proven that the informant actually gave Mrs. Johnston’s address as the location of the buy, he should be prosecuted for the appropriate level of homicide. The governmental entities involved and the individual police, prosecutor and judge who set this in motion should be forced to give restitution—and should lose their jobs for abusing the trust of the public. There should be no qualified immunity in this case—or any other like it.

P.S. I’d like to know if Mrs. Johnston’s fingerprints were found on that bag of marijuana; also whether rolling papers or other paraphenalia used to smoke it were found. The department has already given out false information about who allegedly made the drug buy. Its credibility is suspect on the issue of how the marijuana came to be in her house.

William Grigg, at Pro Libertat, writes about how it is unfair to compare SWAT teams gone wrong to cowboys.

I particularly like this part:

But unlike today’s opportunistic paramilitary police operators, Earp – the Shootout behind the OK Corral notwithstanding – resorted to gunplay with commendable reluctance. On most occasions he out-thought and out-maneuvered the bad guy, and his preferred method of dealing with an armed suspect was to “Buffalo” him – approach him from the blind side, grab his gun hand, and stun the subject by clubbing him with the butt of his revolver.

This reminds me of how Texas Ranger Leander McNelly, with the aid of less than 20 Rangers stood down 200 Mexican soldiers and additional assorted Banditos to recover cattle stolen by the latter. He used his wits to accomplish the recovery.

It makes me wonder whether our present police forces possess half of the good sense, finesse and intelligence possessed by the old “cowboys’. The truth is, they don’t have to. They can just get a battering ram and beat down a door.

As William Grigg puts it:

If the police were genuinely concerned about a drug deal at Mrs. Johnston’s home, and they were convinced that the dealer was on the premises, why the hell didn’t they simply stake out the home and wait?

Why was it necessary to deploy a paramilitary squad to kick down the door?

My best guess is that the department was reacting to the perverse incentives created by Federal counter-narcotics assistance. A military-style raid, after all, would underscore the magnitude of the “crisis” in Johnston’s neighborhood, thereby keeping federal money flowing.

Of course, Wyatt Earp and Leander McNelly weren’t angling for Federal grants back in those days.

I write about all this at my blog, Texas Advance Directives Blog.

I have been reading R.J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law. I am now on the second volume. I’m obsessed. I relate everything back to what I am learning in these books.

For instance, Radley Balko has been writing about Kathryn Johnston, the 92-year old woman killed by a SWAT team in Atlanta serving a no-knock search warrant. Radley, has performed a yeoman’s job in pointing out the travesty of these SWAT teams serving warrants. Read his whole site.

First, this lady was killed for allegedly shooting and hitting three SWAT officers as they broke down the door and entered the house, using a rusty revolver. If this lady was no criminal, in my estimation she had every right to use deadly force against someone breaking down her dooor in the middle of the night. I don’t believe that she had the duty to ascertain that they were police in that instance—though if she knew prior to firing her gun, she had no right to fire at them.

Patterico, whom I enjoy reading, has criticized Radley’s position on this case. I don’t usually post about fights between bloggers, such as the Glenn Greenwald “sock-puppet” story Patterico had going for a while. Here I side with Radley Balko.

It truly concerns me that a practicing prosecutor such as Patterico would say this in one of his comments to his own post:

“May God forgive this old lady for firing on 3 cops who were, from all available information, just doing their jobs.

Because of her actions in firing on officers, she’s now getting to find out whether that forgiveness is available.”

I don’t fault the officers who were attempting to serve the warrant (unless evidence pointing to their fault arises), but for a practicing prosecuter to make such a statement as the one above, seems indicative that Patterico believes that a prosecutor’s duty is to the police rather than to justice. Assuming that Mrs. Johnston was merely reacting to what she perceived as a criminal threat—and not intentionally targeting the police to protect her “stash” (if one existed), it is quite evident to me that a gross miscarriage of justice has occurred.

Patterico and the Fulton County Prosecutor rest justification on legalism. According to the Fulton County Prosecutor:

a preliminary review of the case shows the officers “had a legal right” to search the home.

That is a statement regarding legalism. I am more concerned with justice.

If we are to determine whether there was justice here, numerous questions need to be answered. For instance, upon what does the search warrant rest? What facts were given to justify that this warrant be issued as a “no-knock warrant” which necessarily entails a violent entry? The facts, if revealed will, in part, give an answer to the question of justice.

But, then we must examine the credibility of the person giving the facts. There has been a claim that undercover officers averred that a young black male sold them drugs at Mrs. Johnston’s address a few hours before the warrant was served. Does this justify the no-knock warrant?

Well, what evidence was presented to the Judge that the young black male lived at the address, stored drugs on the premises and had a propensity for violence? What information was known to the police and given to the Judge regarding the owner of the propert—Mrs. Johnston? Was the informant who averred the “facts” an honest person who had a track record for giving accurate and truthful information. Did the Judge use care and diligence in ascertaining the facts and risks before issuing a warrant to be served in the manner it was?

We will probably never know about most of the above. For instance, Radley Balko has written extensively on these cases and the protections that informants have been given—even in instances where they have given false witness.

I wrote the following in an e-mail to Radley Balko, which incorporates some of the things I have learned from Rushdoony:

I simply could not believe that, as a practicing prosecutor, Patterico said the following in a comment to one of his own posts:

“May God forgive this old lady for firing on 3 cops who were, from all available information, just doing their jobs.
Because of her actions in firing on officers, she’s now getting to find out whether that forgiveness is available.”

He has forgotten that his job as a prosecutor is not to side with the police, it is to uphold justice. The police are not above the law—though the immunity granted them allows them to act as if they are.

It is particularly disturbing to me that he is making religious references in this comment. Does he not realize where the requirements of due process and for punishing the bearing of “false witness” originated? It is contained in the discussion regarding the ninth commandment in Deuteronomy and again in Matthew. Yet, we have laws that protect informants for bearing false witness as you have discussed many times in your posts on SWAT teams. Patterico seems to support this.

Patterico should review the requirements for “due process” as laid out in great detail in Deuteronomy. There are strict requirements for evidence and witnesses before a life can be taken. There was a woeful failure to determine the facts prior to taking the life-threatening action inherent in the violent serving of a warrant at Mrs. Johnston’s home.

When a SWAT team serves these no-knock warrants in a violent manner, only a person with no common sense would fail to recognize the great odds that some one will be hurt or killed. Thus, it is my position that in the Johnston case we have seen a great miscarriage of justice in that the police failed to acquire sufficient evidence to determine who was going to be the ultimate subject of the violent entry into Mrs. Johnston’s house, and whether she possessed the character and propensity to intentionally kill police officers.

In my opinion, the police rebelled against God’s law and the Constitution (regardless of the legalistic interpretations made by the Courts). They applied legalism (the warrant and attendant procedure) as opposed to justice as laid out in our Constitution and in God’s law.

It is my position that God has warned us time and again of the dangers of legalism over justice—he sent his Son, in part, to make this point. Yet, in our hubris and denial of our duty to “love one another”, which to me involves the keeping of the second tablet of the Ten Commandments (Thou Shalt Not Murder, Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness etc), we create results such as the death of Kathryn Johnston.

Assuming that Mrs. Johnston was merely protecting her home and not targeting police officers, if the police are not held accountable for her death, another sacrilege against justice will occur.

It is of concern to me that Patterico chooses to spout religious-infused statements without reference to the principles of Justice as laid out by the God he invokes.

Keep doing what you can in this area. You are revealing the weaknesses in our present system of justice—such as the hubris and weaknesses of those charged with administering justice—including prosecutors like Patterico.

I don’t know if Radley is a religious man—but as he is a Libertarian—I think that he would be very interested in reading Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law. Through these books, I have learned how small a sphere of influence God intended civil government to have. I do not believe that God approves of the leviathian that civil government has created to wage the War on Drugs. I believe that, under His design, a drug dealer who disrupts a neighborhood would be dealt with by his family or community—and expelled if he persists in conducting his business in a manner that is harmful to his neighbors. But, that is a topic for another post.

Go read about it at my blog, Texas Advance Directives Blog. The behavior of the hospital was appalling.

What if I showed you a video featuring a number of police officers surrounding a supine Pro-Life protestor in front of an abortuary? What if the police officer was angrily and repeatedly demanding that the demonstrator get up and leave while almost simultaneously tasering the protestor? What if the protestor was audibly and loudly praying as the police officer was giving orders causing the officer to become more and more frustrated as a result? Would you think that the repeated tasering was a good idea in such circumstances? And what if a bystander, disgusted with this performance by the police officer asked for the identities of the officers and was, in turn, threated with a tasering himself?

Turn the facts around. What if a student, angry at being asked to identify himself in the library that he pays for, in part as a student, engages in protest—not by trying to assault the police officer—but by, like the pro-life demonstrator—going limp and supine while he yells about what he believes his rights to be and how they are being violated? What if he is repeatedly tasered while being ordered to get up? What if a bystander asks for the officers’ identities and is threatened with tasering himself? Was that right? Patterico has the whole story.

During my last year of law school and first year out, I worked in a D.A.’s office—prosecuting after receiving my license. Before I worked there, I thought that police officers were like Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. I’d read the cases about violations of civil rights—but that wasn’t real to me yet. The cop on the street was still Marshal Dillon to me. Remember how Marshal Dillion always used reason and persuasion, when possible, before resulting to force and violence?

Then, one day, I was exposed to bantering among officers about their methods of “attitude adjustment”. “What is that? I asked. “That’s when a smart ass needs a beat down.” replied the officer. Note, his emphasis was on the “smart ass” part, not breaking the law. My illusions were shattered.

I see great value in tasers. However, it appears to me that the officers in the case discussed at Patterico were replacing common sense and persuasion with the taser. There was no probable cause of a crime in this instance. The police were not witnessing a robbery or other emergency. They were confronted by a kid who, as a law abiding citizen, felt offended at being treated as some sort of suspect who needed to reveal his identity. Rather than recognizing this and dealing with it in an intelligent and humane way—the officers resorted to inflicting pain to accomplish compliance. The taser becomes a crutch in such instances.

I will never agree with such methods in the absence of physical danger to an officer.

In 1974, I was a freshman at Texas A&M and a member of the Student Conference on National Affairs. SCONA hosted Dr. Friedman as a speaker at its annual conference.

I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Friedman and to shake his hand. I got so excited about it, that the minute he walked away, I began to hyperventilate. I had to sit on a bench and put my head down for a few minutes. Later, while attending a cocktail party in his honor, my friends watched me like a hawk in the event I repeated my earlier performance.

I never got excited about rock stars—in fact, I fell asleep during every rock concert I attended in my youth. But Milton Friedman? He was bigger than the Beatles to me.

Thomas Sowell writes about his personal experiences with Dr. Friedman in the Wall Street Journal today.

Gary North wrote about him earlier this week.

I don’t understand what this thing is about asking for apologies from people for what they say. Why are people asking for an apology from John Kerry?

I don’t care whether Kerry was making a joke or not, it is quite obvious, and always has been that he is a total and arrogant snob who considers members of the military and anyone who is not of his social set to be beneath him. If somebody makes a racist joke—simply because it is a joke—do we assume that they don’t have racist thoughts? Jokes aren’t funny to people, unless the people think there is a grain of truth in the joke.

Kerry proves that he thinks we are stupid by claiming he wasn’t talking about members of the military—but was talking about Bush. Even if he was talking about Bush—he was also talking about the kinds of people “stuck going to Iraq” as well.

In my opinion, requests for apologies should be confined to those to whom one is related, friends with or someone worth it. Kerry fits none of those requirements—except to the Democrats who realize what Kerry had done to them.

To heck with apologies. He’s a putz and a snob—like the rest of the liberal ex-hippie Democrats.