Around 10 a.m. on a Friday in October 2018, 14-year-old Jade McMurry was confronted by two police officers, Kevin Brunner and Alexandra Weaver, at the door to the apartment in Midland, Texas, that she shared with her parents and her 12-year-old brother. Jade, who was homeschooled and in the midst of her online studies, did […]
From McMurry v. Weaver, decided Friday by the Fifth Circuit (Judge Carolyn Dineen King, joined by Judge Jim Ho and Irma Carrillo Ramirez): In October 2018, Plaintiff-Appellee Megan McMurry resided in a gated apartment complex in Midland, Texas with her daughter, Plaintiff-Appellee J.M., (then age fourteen) and son C.M. (then age twelve). J.M. took classes […]
The New Orleans City Council is considering an ordinance that would allow the city’s police department, in the name of fighting crime, to use real-time facial recognition technology to find and track people as they move about the city. As The Washington Post reported last month, New Orleans police had already been secretly receiving real-time […]
Early on a Wednesday morning in October 2017, FBI agents terrorized three innocent people, including a 7-year-old boy, by breaking into their home in Atlanta. The agents tossed a flash-bang grenade, rousted the two adults from the closet where they were hiding, manhandled and handcuffed one of them, and threatened them with guns before discovering […]
Penny McCarthy is not now, and has never been, Carole Rozak. Yet in March 2024, half a dozen U.S. marshals accosted McCarthy in the front yard of her Phoenix home, insisting that she was Rozak, who was wanted on a warrant for failing to comply with parole conditions after she was released from a Texas […]
A short excerpt from the long Gervin v. Florence, decided yesterday by the Eleventh Circuit (opinion by Judge Robin Rosenbaum, joined by Judges Nancy Abudu and Charles Wilson): DeShawn Gervin has not been a model citizen. But he did do at least one thing right. As Gervin’s sole condition of probation, a Georgia court kicked […]
On a Friday night in March 2023, Sean Horan called 911 to report that Michael Mendenhall, who runs a staffing agency out of a converted townhouse on Blake Street in Denver, had threatened him with a baseball bat. Based on nothing more than Horan’s one-sided account of a confrontation at Mendenhall’s townhouse, police officers arrested […]
From a decision by Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui (D.D.C.) in In re: Search of One Device and Two Individuals (decided last month but just released Tuesday): The videos [of the arrest] showed the defendant and [Redacted] on top of each other, falling down the stairs while being tackled by police officers. While they all were tumbling down, […]
From a decision by Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui (D.D.C.) in In re: Search of One Device and Two Individuals (decided last month but just released Tuesday): The videos [of the arrest] showed the defendant and [redacted] on top of each other, falling down the stairs while being tackled by police officers. While they all were […]