From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Sun Jun 16 2002 - 00:55:48 MDT
Harvey writes:
> What happened in this case is that the police arrested the man within
> hours after the bomb exploded. He was a member of a radical
> environmental group that was planning an anti-logging demonstration, and
> they reasonably thought that he made the bomb himself and was
> transporting it. However, the police arrested him first and tried to
> conduct an investigation to prove he was guilty later. After weeks of
> investigation, they couldn't find any evidence and finally dropped all
> the charges. They then blamed the FBI for giving them faulty
> information, while the FBI in turn blames the local police. Either way,
> the man was arrested before any police investigation was performed and
> before any evidence was gathered.
One thing I don't understand is this. Suppose these people had been
stopped by police before the bomb went off, and the trunk was opened
in the course of the stop, and the police found a pipe bomb there.
Wouldn't that have been enough by itself to justify arresting them?
Aren't pipe bombs illegal in California? If the trunk were full of
drugs the driver would certainly be arrested, and the same thing seems
like it ought to be true for other contraband.
Of course it may turn out in such a case that the driver didn't know
what was in the trunk, or at least he can convincingly claim that, and
in that case the charges may eventually be dropped. I think something
like that happened here.
But note, according to the Times story, the jury deadlocked on the
question of false arrest. They were not able to agree whether the
police had reasonable cause to arrest the plaintiffs at that time.
That issue was left unresolved.
What the jury did find is that the police had defamed the defendants,
presumably by describing them as incompetent, bomb-carrying eco-terrorists
who had blown themselves up instead of their targets. That is wrong,
and it is pretty stupid as well on the part of the police. First, it
is the D.A. who should be making such charges, and this case never got
to that point. Second, the police are always supposed to say "suspect"
and not "criminal". I'm amazed that cops in the 1990s would make such
a serious blunder. Usually they go too far in the other direction and
say things like "the suspect fled after robbing the bank", which actually
incriminates the guy who they arrested while they are trying hard not to
do so.
A problem with the "wait to gather evidence" approach is that sometimes
police have to make arrests in the immediate aftermath of a crime.
Otherwise the perpetrator may flee. If someone was injured in what
appears to have been the commision of a crime, they are in the hospital,
and they are about to be released, then the cops have to decide, do
we arrest them or do we let them go and maybe never see them again.
Apparently in this case at least some members of the jury felt strongly
that the cops had made a reasonable decision based on the information
before them (and some felt equally strongly that they had not).
I think we can all agree that what the jury did agree on, which was
defamation, was wrong for the police to do. That is really what this
decision was about. The issue of the arrest was not decided. The jury
got a lot more information about the circumstances than we would get by
reading the paper, and I don't think we are in a better position than
the jury to second-guess the cops' decision.
Hal
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