…for videotaping a policeman and interviewing National Organization for Marriage wackaloons with a dildo. His appeal has been denied so he’s expected to turn himself in to serve the remainder of his sentence…a few weeks.
What has happened to American journalism? A reporter gets arrested for mocking some walking talking dildos with a small plastic version, yet the apologists wanking on the opinion pages of the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal, performing for the pleasures of the bankers and other bloated pigs who’ve been fucking over the country, get off free. As long as we’re arresting journalists, there are a few articles by Friedman and Brooks that are true crimes…and hey, shouldn’t Arianna Huffington be doing hard time for poisoning the left wing press and turning it into a joke?
If I remember correctly, the original arrest was due to Murphy allegedly being rude to the police officer and for disrupting a “religious service” (or a similar term). Seriously. Anti-gay rallies apparently are treated the same as Sunday Mass as long as it is actually beneficial to the bigots. Apparently they changed their reasoning later on. That seems…interesting to me.
Super bonus points in that the police took the camera and when Murphy got it back, the footage that might’ve vindicated him was all fucked up.
This isn’t just a sad day for journalism. It is also an illustration of religious privilege and police exploiting their power. It’s a small, relatively innocuous example of one of the many failings of our legal system.
It seems that they only go through the motions of freedom and justice for all but it is the privileged that get to make that determination of who get’s to exercise their rights
are we a police state yet?
uncle frogy.
That story made me think of the Star Spangled Banner lyrics – something about freedom and bravery – nothing to do with modern America.
Well, we can all sleep better for a few nights knowing we no longer have to spend the energy worrying about how we were going to spend that surplus of tax dollars that are now being consumed to keep this dangerous criminal off the streets. 15 days of incarceration for obscene language? That makes total sense, since we all know how clean-mouthed people are after they’ve been in jail for a while.
*puzzled*
Isn’t the question, what has happened to the legal system?
Well, he walked out of his community service, so there’s that. But my previous point still stands.
But, but, but, what if a little girl saw that plastic penis? We can’t let children see sex treated as if it was just a normal part of life, they might start thinking that it IS just a normal part of life! Will someone PULEEZE think of the children!!!!1!!!1!!
/snark
I wonder how many of these NoM-nuts what off to lesbian porn…
whack*
Appeal again. Freedom of speech is a constitutional issue; he can take this to federal court if need be.
Even if he already served the 15 days, it’s worth the appeal; wrongful imprisonment lawsuits can pay upwards of $2,500 per hour.
Disorderly conduct is almost always a bullshit charge.
(Buffalo cops arrested me for disorderly conduct once. I could tell stories.)
unclefrogy wrote:
Don’t be silly. America is the home of the free, with a greater proportion of its people incarcerated than any other country, and the land of the brave, where people live in gated communities with private security and carry concealed weapons. It can’t be a police state – it says so in your national anthem.
Of course, I got the order of land/home free/brave wrong.
Uh, PZ? That link goes to an anal porn page. With graphic pictures. I’m at work. That was a shock.
It would be really cool if somewhere in police training the information about having no more right to privacy as anyone else in while in public. It’s especially important in the case of people with a badge, gun, authority and a +1 in “trustworthiness” stat to be subject to filming and photography in public, lest documentary evidence of abuse of power would be laughingly thrown out of court with the person who filmed it facing fines or imprisonment. It’s disturbing how many cops just assume they are special snowflakes that can’t be filmed in public and they will fucking assault you if you try, and you’ll get in trouble for it.
Here’s an interesting little gadget that has apparently just come onto the market:
Eye-Fi mobi
If I were a journalist, or protester, or just a citizen who was interested in photographing the cops doing what it is cops do when the state feels a bit threatened, I would be using one of these things to upload the images as I take them, via a nearby wifi hotspot to a server far away, or, better yet, right onto my editor’s desktop (or my lawyer’s drop box). They can take your camera and take the card and mess it up all they like, but the images have already flown the coop.
Aw, heck, I wanted it to help Reduce My Electrical Bills With The Technique Power Companies Hate like those awesome pop-up ads the site’s hawking!
[meta]
Anri, ads?
(What ads?)
Hrm…
Oddly, I originally, briefly, parsed the sentence above as: he had interviewed some National Organization for Marriage wackaloons who happened themselves to have a dildo, and I thought to myself ‘Huh… Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of this organization… Or mebbe he just happened to meet a few of ’em on the way back from a perfectly defensible–if, sure, perhaps somewhat at odds with the sort of image you generally get–visit to a sex shop… Anyway… Umm… Interesting…’
And then I felt, briefly, kinda let down. Though don’t get me wrong; the actual performance art here was good, too, now that I’ve got this all worked out.
Anyway, Murphy’s quite right about just what is genuinely obscene, here.
That link after the article, title “Shorter Ian Murphy”, leads directly to a porn site. Those of you at work be careful. ~wjs
Umm… Re this porn thing: both these links point to the Buffalo Beast‘s site. They’re an alt weekly out of Buffalo, NY… And I see no porn, and the ads I’m getting in their margins with the few browsers I tried are all pretty much general audience, and I use no ad blocker
I’m thinking of a few possibilities for folk getting other stuff. The one I guess Ed or PZ might want to look to, tho’, is the occasional popup ad thing that does seem to happen at FTB in some browsers (I see them on mobile, sometimes), and maybe something more than a mite racy has wound up in that pipe? So some folk are getting this stuff in a popup over the Beast as they go there?
I’ve clicked on it three times now and it just takes me to another article on the Buffalo Beast web site.
Police abuse? There’s an app for that.
http://www.aclu-nj.org/yourrights/the-app-place/
I don’t understand how you have freedom of any kind, let alone freedom of speech and freedom of the press, in a place where it is illegal to record the police. Hell, it should not only be legal, it should be mandatory. Audio, video, photography, everything the police do and say should be recorded. And any such recordings should be given special protection against search and seizure. Say the police can only keep a copy, not the original. Or special legal consequences exist for any recordings that are damaged and recordings must be made available to defendants or plaintiffs at any time, in an appropriate way. This is all a bit tricky to enforce technically and be safe, but some protection ought to be there on principle.
But making recording the police is a crime? WTF?
I have recently changed my opinion on surveillance cameras for use by law enforcement. I think we should have as many cameras in public places as possible: with all footage viewable by the public at all times and any losses or problems with the footage requiring some serious documentation to demonstrate that such loss was not intentional for cover up purposes. They need to know we are watching.
@mikeconley – This also makes a case for Google Glass.
I don’t understand how you have freedom of any kind, let alone freedom of speech and freedom of the press, in a place where it is illegal to record the police. Hell, it should not only be legal, it should be mandatory.
Yes! And how much “freedom” do we actually have if it is illegal to be “disorderly”. That’s such a stretchy word.
Ah, don’t get me started on the Buffalo police.
My father, who is a fairly law-and-order Nixonian Republican, can tell you how useless they are. They come into the coffee shop where he and his fellow retirees congregate, sit for hours, and when they get a call, don’t actually check anything out, just radio back 15 minutes later and say, “Everything’s clear.”
But that’s Buffalo for you, where the “in-crowd” get whatever they want and everybody else flees the area en masse.
Bitter? Me?
gussnarp@25: This also makes a case for Google Glass.
I’m afraid I’m with Chris Clarke on that: keep that shit away from me.