Man sues American Airlines over identification, jail time
star-telegram.com
star-telegram.com
Also, start actually punishing such mistakes. Detective(s), judge, police, and American Airlines (everyone involved) should be severely punished for once. And for God's sake, stop assuming someone that hasn't gone through a trial is guilty -- what is this...
And for God's sake -- I know some other sibling commenter posted it too, but honestly just in case anybody misses it: Don't talk to the police. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE -- his situation could have been worse unfortunately.
A local law office with 1-2 lawyers and a few assistants; likely $1000-1500 that’s held by them to put towards any future requirements.
Larger firms range from $5000-25000 for an individual, but again, usually this money is held in a trust on your behalf and you can use it to pay down any bills or let them keep it and pay the invoices as they come.
Fees are usually not annually but an advance -- but you can have a law firm on retainer on an annul basis -- that is they are expected to deal with a particular legal volume for you annually -- different notion slightly.
A retainer would be expensive and unnecessary unless you know that you're at particular risk of arrest and prosecution, but it's not unwise to at least know the number of a well-regarded criminal law firm. Put their number in your phone, and a physical copy in your wallet — along with other emergency contacts (spouse, family members, etc).
If you don't think to ask, however, you're absolutely screwed after that.
Take notice: some of the people who (rightfully!) express outrage at this story will gleefully demand that all suspects of misdemeanors be imprisoned indefinitely without bail.
I don't know what to do about it, though.
A lot of us took an engineer oath upon graduation and there is a fiduciary relationship formed with the public in certain contexts -- outside the U.S. There are professional ethics regardless.
In the U.S. with the lack of regulation the topic is a bit hit or miss https://www.natlawreview.com/article/court-holds-engineer-do... vs e.g. some states which regulate the/any engineering profession.
More specifically: required to bend over, expose their anuses, and cough. In addition to having a good chunk of their retirement portfolios confiscated, and being required to do at least double the jail time that this poor fellow did.
Because this is America, after all.
>>>"After Lowe had been in jail for eight days, he was taken to a local judge. He still received no information about why he was there, he said. The judge told him his only options were to waive extradition — in which New Mexico would deliver him to Texas authorities — or wait for Texas authorities to pick him up. Lowe, unsure what the legal implications were of either option, waived extradition based on the court’s suggestion that he do so."
This is such a perfect application of the term "kafkaesque".
Also, is it weird that he was brought before a judge without having any sort of legal representation first, and that the judge was able to give Mr Lowe advice as to what to do? Imagining myself in his shoes, I wouldn't say a single word to the judge or anyone really before I had spoken with a lawyer, I don't care how long that takes. One wrong word and it's not hard to imagine his 17 day ordeal turning into something longer and more nightmarish.
It still would not be the same. They would have to be pulled out of their lifes randomly without knowing why and how long it will take.
Maybe a factor could be applied to account for that uncertainty. n * 17 days in jail, where n will only be announced after the fact.
Jails should be safe and clean, not traumatizing and filthy. The jail isn’t meant to be cruel and unusual punishment, but it has become that.
In his case there is no expectation of reform, so his punishment is not meant to educate him, it basically just does what needs to be done, without being cruel. In OP's case, I think it is reasonable to expect some conversion process. Having to clean the jail sounds like a good way to learn some humility.
They think the goal of prison is punishment, not rehabilitation, so recidivism rates are ridiculous.
I’d be saying things like “I don’t know why I am here”, “I’ve been in jail for 17 days with no explanation”, I want to talk to a lawyer… and so on.
As someone with a 'flagged' US passport (despite no criminal record nor violating US border related law) who is repeatedly been detained and thrown in a cell without even being arrested or charged with a crime, I've become quite accustomed to how agents of the state treat those under their detainment. The best strategy is to pretend like you don't give a fuck and that you enjoy the experience; then the agents lose their amusement with you and eventually grow bored of fucking with you. If you act annoyed they latch on to you and toy with it the way a cat toys with prey.
Sadly this guy made the mistake of thinking jailers are not psychopaths. Never give psychopaths an opportunity to see your weaknesses.
Who?
My comment was more about the hearing.
If your jailers keep you without explaining what you are detained for, or if that reason turns out to be incorrect, it aught to be a crime.
The guns and support they have give them the power.
The law does not always support them, but often does.
Watch the videos in the link and the corresponding lack of justice to understand what our reality is.
The constitution doesn't apply at the border. Maybe in theory it does, but in reality it doesn't. CBP Officers specifically told me "I consent to whatever happens afterwards when I cross the border."
[ Also been told once, me a US citizen with a passport, that they had decided not to let me in my own country. Was not let through until an HSI detective came to "make sure I wasn't ISIS." ]
You get no attorney. You can't contact anyone. You can't touch your phone, if you have one. You can be tossed in custody without any oversight, and without being mirandarized. I have been booked, finger printed, tossed in a cell as a US citizen who provided a legal passport and violated no laws. You can be tossed in a van, cuffed and shackled and driven wherever they like, including hospitals where they will try to convince doctors to anal probe you (this is a real example from my personal experience).
I've studied the court cases involving US citizens, including a woman who had her orifices brutally penetrated until they were raw by a doctor[0]. THe federal docket shows no real result, and that the CBP investigated themselves and determined they did nothing wrong.
In the end the courts don't give a fuck, and most Americans don't even have a passport. I'm quite sure a good 10% of Americans would go along with a proposal that said "We should allow border patrol to shoot any suspicious persons at our borders." Border and immigration are notoriously dystopian arms of the government, because citizens either have bigger concerns or just don't give a shit what happens there.
If you contact a lawyer regarding border abuse, they will basically refer you to the (swamped) ACLU, because they know it's a waste of their time to even try.
[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
Of course as a practical matter anyone crossing a U.S. border should understand the risk of arbitrary violence, deportation, detention, or having all your stuff taken.
Honestly illegal border crossers are the only ones who maintain their constitutional rights, because once they've crossed it is impossible to prove it unless someone actually saw them do it. I've read border patrol officers comment that if a US citizen is found at the border there's basically not much they can do unless someone caught them crossing in the act.
By the way, if you haven't seen it, you might like this old favorite of mine: "Born in East L.A." with Cheech and Chong, parodying Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFUFw1GH6ic. I was going to it's funny but in light of this discussion, maybe not. Not as funny, anyway.
Thanks for sharing.
That was great, thank you!
Or do they show the criminal justice system as staffed by noble individuals that, on the rare occasion they cross a line, it is done with the best intentions, and bad apples and mistakes are a rare exception?
The system they think is great is imaginary, not the system you actually have. Try and think things through before you so casually condemn people.
Honestly, I'd be worried that they'd just say "cool, that's nice, good for you." Probably better to be 100% explicit: "I am invoking my right to speak to an attorney" (as opposed to just saying you want to do something)
It happens every day, and in almost every case, there's literally zero recourse no matter how much money you have to throw at the problem.
If I had a magic wand, the DA's offices across America would review cases promptly, prosecute justifiable cases, and preemptively drop unjustified cases as soon as possible — and report truly questionable policing to a real oversight board, while actually charging and prosecuting police officers for genuinely bad policing.
In reality, in most jurisdictions, the DA's office often doesn't even look at most cases until the day of arraignment, months after someone's life has already been run through a ringer and they've spent tens of thousands on retaining a defense attorney (if they're lucky enough to afford one), not to mention therapy (again, if they're lucky enough to afford that). All too often they'll try to coerce a plea deal for a bad case, rather than simply dropping it — and people accept the offered deal, because the alternative is incredibly expensive, and incredibly risky.
As for holding police accountable for bad policing? Unless it's a case that garners the political will to prosecute (usually due to massive negative media attention), a ski holiday in hell is more likely.
However, Chesa Boudin's office swung way too far in the opposite direction, failing to even prosecute strong cases for real crimes that resulted in real harm. Eventually, the police gave up — why bother going through the effort of policing if the DA is just going to drop the case anyway? It's like writing code only to have `git` erase your entire branch when you `git push`.
I'm not a police apologist ("fuck the police" would find a spot on my top-100 playlist!) but Chesa Boudin absolutely deserved to be recalled.
Seems like they already hesitate to act.
They already hesitate to do protecting at their own peril, as evidenced by that recent school shooting.
In true life-or-death situations, instinct and training still kicks in.
But maybe cops should be hesitating before deciding to escalate a situation just because someone challenged them when they overstepped their legal authority.
I'd recommend this argument against, which does provide significant context:
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_education/publicat...
I'm OK with this; Blackstone's ratio applies here, too ("It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.")
Whenever an officer or public official exceeds his lawful authority, he should have liability same as any random Joe on the street for the same offense.
This sort of thing happens to thousands of people in the US every day, routinely.
1. make a policeman's professional licensing body and require all police to join it. (Take the police unions and turn them into that.)
2. Have the licensing body introduce the concept of professional malfeasance.
3. Make a simple regulatory statute where professional malfeasance as decided by that licensing body, creates civil/criminal liability.
Y'know — just like engineers!
The challenge is you're seeking to overturn the systems of violence with peaceful legislative action. This is a lofty goal with historically rare outcome.
They’re just bad at their jobs. There are no incentives really to be good at their jobs, and very few people are motivated to get them to do high quality work. Nobody wants to understand the complexity of a police force, people are either mildly annoyed or can only grasp a message that fits on a protest sign.
“Systems” should be a dirty word when it comes to discussing social issues, it’s just a catchall boogeyman for people who don’t want to understand complexity and often (as is done subtly here) an prelude to suggesting violence.
Police are as good as society forces them to be, marching in the street to abolish them doesn’t put any pressure on them to be better.
This is incredibly naive. In Los Angeles County, for example, there are deputy gangs[0]. That is, the police have their own gang within the department. Often they come from less fortunate backgrounds, but they’re still out to use their power for their own gain. It’s not just being bad at their jobs.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_County_Sheriff's...
Likewise, "complexity," as a reason that someone is wrong, yet completely unqualified by a less vague description of an actual error is a cop-out that should have no place in such discussions.
> The police aren’t the arm of a ruling class abusing the less fortunate (much though some want to believe this).
While I can't say for sure that there's a causal relationship between pay-to-win courts, rich people given an express lane to lawmakers and in general a society fundamentally built on the notion that wealth affords power, and the police bias against poor people, I believe that this is the level you have to consider the question at.
That is, the problem can't fully be explained by looking at the police force only but is the result of the police interacting with other authorities and reacting to policy. Normally you would call these interacting bodies "systems" and say that the problem is "systemic" but I guess that's a foul word.
What is this even supposed to mean? A prelude to suggesting violence? Is that when you don't actually suggest violence but the word 'prelude' is used to make someone fill in the blanks to reinterpret it that way?
It's quite rich that pointing out state violence results in factually incorrect accusations (not to mention personal insult implying I'm not going to "understand complexity") as an attempt to turn the tables and make me sound the violent one instead of the systems that cause innocents to be maimed and killed by police actions.
Yeah, police gangs in LA exist (including those showing police officers glorifying killing) 'but they're not representative' of the problem. No the real problem must be 'preludes' to non-existent suggestions of violence.
>They’re just bad at their jobs.
And it is ever so convenient that they are bad in their jobs in ways that result in the disfavor of the disadvantaged, poor, and certain minorities. I'm sure that does not result in relatively better treatment for those in elevated positions of power (such as high level elected officials, who we don't dare call the 'ruling class'). No these are just happy accidents that are not at all guided by those in elevated positions of power (but not the 'ruling class'!).
This kind of thing works better with skilled professionals which police are not. Plus, nobody wants engineers to build bridges that fall down, plenty of people want police to be abusive and belligerent… to groups of people they don’t identify with.
This, 110%.
It will be useless for the same reason Internal Affairs is useless. The line of "We investigated ourselves and found no wrong-doing" will continue.
Police are buddies with the District Attorneys which are buddies with the judges. The result is nobody wants to prosecute police officers.
I believe unions already tend to kick out union members who don’t accept union-appointed lawyers and instead attempt to litigate their own cases. This wouldn’t be much of a stretch from that.
Whereas a professional licensing body is a separate legal entity from the people the body licenses; and the government can regulate (control, manipulate, coerce) the licensing body without getting tangled up in laws about what the government can or cannot do to protected classes of people.
(The FBI, in its role of being external federal auditors for police corruption/malfeasance — but with no power over police departments, only the power to charge individual officers with federal criminal acts if that applies — is essentially the best the federal government can do.)
But if there just happened to be a private-corporation licensing body operating in multiple states (and thus performing “interstate commerce”), which police officers in those states were already members of… well, then the federal government would be perfectly within its rights to regulate that corporation! As long as they kept it at arm’s length, and didn’t attempt to nationalize it.
The result is cops who feel like they have the freedom to do what is necessary, and a licensing body that will only select quality cops.
The NSW state government appoints the Chief Commissioner of the LECC – but by law, they must appoint a (serving or retired) senior judge. The other Commissioner is also appointed by the government, but the Chief Commissioner has a veto over the government's appointment of the Commissioner, and by law cannot be a serving or retired police officer – http://www8.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/nsw/cons...
It seems to be actually effective – at least sometimes – in going after police misbehaviour, for example: https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/are-you-going-to-attack-...
Although in other cases maybe it has not done as good a job: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-20/nsw-police-watchdog-k...
And some view it as overly lenient: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/06/nsw-p...
Still, I wonder what would have been the outcome in those kinds of cases if they had happened in the US?
You also don't have a right to refuse to answer a police officer generally, such as when they're asking you questions as part of booking you (do you have health conditions they need to know about, for example), and furthermore, during (say, a threshold inquiry or administrative detention) police are legally allowed to treat you refusing to answer them as guilty behavior.
To be clear, in very simplified layman's terms: threshold inquiry = "Hi there, can I ask you a few questions?" and administrative detention = a traffic stop, or "Hi there, come over here, I have some questions to ask you." The primary difference between TI and AD is that in a TI the police ask, and in AD, they order. If you're being ordered to do something, yes, You Are Being Detained, and no, you are not Free To Go. IANAL, etc etc and this shit is annoyingly complex, so please do your own research, folks.
Kafkaesque....try this on for size: thanks to the Berghuis v Thompkins USSC ruling in 2010, it is no longer sufficient to remain silent. You now have to specifically state you wish to remain silent when you are Mirandized.
I wish I were making this up. The court flipped Miranda on its head almost completely. Prior to v Thompkins, the state had to prove, with high standard of evidence, that you had willingly waived your right to remain silent. Now remaining silent isn't enough...and aying anything is taken as an immediate implied waiver.
At the very least, please refer to this helpful reference from the ACLU, who are also staffed with actual lawyers who know what they’re talking about: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/stopped-by-police
However, HN is a place where we prefer to explain why someone (or something) is wrong instead of just saying that they are wrong with no further justification.
At the very least I’m more likely to believe the unqualified assertion from a lawyer.
But seriously, most people that aren’t a lawyer are very likely to IANAL on the internet, the ones claiming to be one (especially on HN) are more likely to actually be.
I’d need some research to back that up, but since I am lazy I’m going to go with my gut on this.
I, for one, am glad otterley pointed it out. It’s an effective caution and prompted me to consider it critically. Given the OP cited case law and therefore sounds somewhat informed, I can understand the urgency of the caution, and I think otterley is (skillfully) balancing that caution against their ongoing responsibilities due to what I’m telling you.
"You have the right to remain silent during a traffic stop." Yeah. Sure. You try that and let me know how it works out for you...after your car has been disassembled, all its upholstery ripped, and put in impound. After you are released from jail exactly 47.9 hours later, or charged with "interfering with the duties of a police officer" or "obstruction of justice" or "causing a public disturbance (which may or may not be dropped by the DA. Or thrown out at your hearing the next afternoon, by the judge.)
"If your rights are violated while being arrested, take notes" - with what, exactly? The pen and paper the people who violated my rights gave me? These people live in a alternate reality.
The ACLU has no concept of what constitutes practical advice for dealing with abusive police or the issues the vast majority of Americans face when stopped by an officer...like ending up in jail and missing work the next day, your car destroyed, and being summarily fired for failing to show.
Congrats! You are now unemployed, with an arrest record, probably your name in the newspaper police blotter, and a bunch of legal expenses from the trumped-up charges.
But hey, you followed the advice of an organization that will do absolutely nothing to help you after you followed their instructions and it caused you to end up unemployed, in debt to an attorney, with no wheels...then homeless because you missed your rent.
I don't think a single person at the ACLU has ever had to worry about having enough money to buy groceries, lived one paycheck away from missing rent, or worked a job where if they didn't show up for a shift on time, they were fired.
You’re mixing up a number of distinct concepts and problems. The ACLU’s advice is not meant to insulate you from lawful investigatory procedure. It’s meant to help minimize the likelihood that you will be convicted of a crime and to maximize the likelihood that unlawfully-obtained evidence will be suppressed at trial.
They say in the U.S., “you can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.” This is true. You can assert your rights, but it’s best not to interfere or say anything other than “I do not assent to search” during the initial encounter. But you might be arrested, taken to jail, etc. Does it suck? Yes. But if I have no other choice, I’d rather spend a week in local lockup while everything gets cleared up than a year or more in state prison (and potentially the loss of other rights afterwards) because I got convicted of a crime.
Sometimes there is just no way out of a bad police encounter here. I wish there was, but the best we can do as a society is vote to change the laws around policing.
Finally, keep in mind that your perspective may be distorted by the news, in a sort of reverse survivorship bias. For every instance of police abuse during an encounter, there could be 10 or 100 where asserting one’s rights leads to no dramatic episode at all, and where the ACLU’s advice led to a conflict-free outcome. You don’t have the full picture, and it’s best not to draw conclusions with certainty if you’re not an expert. (Even experts usually temper their analyses.)
However there's always been a big gap for me because, I mean, obviously there are some times where it makes sense to talk to police.
* The cops knock at your door, your neighbor has been murdered, were you at home last night and did you hear anything? And you were and you did but if you go all ACLU and say nothing while carefully keeping the cops out of your home, you're withholding information that might catch the real killer and in any case now the cops might be a lot more interested in you.
* The cops want to search your trunk at a traffic stop. If you hand them your keys that can be interpreted as consent. However if you don't, it's obvious they will drag you out of your car and beat you, take your keys, maybe plant some drugs or a gun because you got all uppity, and lie about it all later. So why not just hand the keys over and save yourself the trouble?
Etc. I feel like all the pamphlets and so on don't really get into these real situations.
Here we go again with that troubling word at HN: “obvious.” Best to strike that from your vocabulary; things you might think as obvious both rarely are so, and often much more complicated than you think.
What you’re describing is a situation that does sometimes happen in the worst cases, but by no means is it normal or frequent relative to the number of ordinary police encounters every day. These episodes make the news because they are out of the ordinary (“newsworthy”). If they happened at every stop, they wouldn’t be reported in the news.
Do these things happen? Sure, and they are awful. But they are by no means standard procedure and they are unlikely to happen to you. And if it does, lawyer up right away.
My fault for sloppy wording. I was supposing for the sake of the hypothetical that the police made it obvious to you personally that they would attack you if you fail to comply.
In any case the ACLU-type advice of "stay silent and don't consent to anything" assumes some strange middle ground, where the cops in front of you are hostile enough to be actively fishing for something to arrest you for, but not hostile enough to just beat you, plant stuff and lie. And, further, that I, a random person who rarely deals with the cops, will be able to correctly sense what sort of encounter I'm having, against police who do this dozens of times a day, who are very scary, and who might be specifically trying to trick me.
Or just to rephrase what you said, the ACLU-type advice is great if you're the sort of person for whom awful police encounters are unlikely and who can lawyer up right away if things go wrong.
https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1534192090111889410
Basically, that we should be just as shocked and appalled when it happens to guilty people as well!
Suing a government entity is a very long and costly affair, and is fraught with difficulties.
Suing a company is MUCH easier by comparison. Unlike governments, companies tend to be very sensitive to bad press, and thus much more likely to yield to legal pressure.
Therefore, your most promising tactic is to use the suit against the company to build a war chest and establish official records of fact that can then be drawn upon in the longer government campaign.
Derek Chauvin is getting the dogshit sued out of him now because he exceeded his duty and no longer qualified under sovereign immunity.
Sovereign Immunity does indeed apply to the government itself, as well as heads of state and representatives of that government.
It’s a superset of qualified immunity and absolute immunity.
I'm hoping they'll get a massive payout and use some of it to launch a case against the authorities who allow such injustice to go unchecked.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit....
AA needs to pay. First thought is some overly enthusiastic AA security person going way too far in doing the identification that they should be leaving to law enforcement.
The police willfully caused it to continue.
There is also the very real possibility of retaliation if I were to attempt to follow up with any sort of complaint process. This is a department that is notoriously infested with gangs. They have sent deputies to threaten a FBI agent, "lost" a FBI informant in their jails for weeks, etc.
Availability of judges and the staff to move people and so on?
Surely you’ve experienced situations where staffing impacted things…
We can debate small perturbations and shifts in employment, but I am not at all convinced this is the reason for majority of the COVID excuses. Especially for a judicial process where people's employment is pretty much secure and hasn't had that much of an impact. Nurses? Sure. Package delivery? I can give them the benefit of the doubt. I see a disproportional number of things are out of order because of COVID. We can act in good faith for a while, but to me it has started to raise my cynicism.
They are interested in what makes their lives easier, which is to pack people into cells and wait for the notoriously slow justice system to sort things out. There's no consequences for mistakes, so there's no incentive to improve.
It should be shocking to the core that anyone, innocent or guilty, would be subject to these conditions. But police just aren't interested in improving them.
I don't deploy it lightly, but the reason I've come around to ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) has nothing to do with the personalities of individual officers (many of whom are quite nice people). Instead, it's an acknowledgement that every officer subjects people to this sort of treatment as a matter of course. They cannot avoid treating people inhumanely with the current incentives.
Anecdotal evidence hints that that may be part of their training. I was held in line for check-in for checking in in LAS for about 1h, prevented from speaking with somebody at the actual check-in counter, all because I couldn't provide proof on my phone that I had uploaded COVID documents to the VeriFly app (which wouldn't allow me to upload said document because the first leg of the trip back to Europe was through UK which lifted all restrictions). The AA staff person threatened to call security if I tried to move ahead and speak with the check-in counter staff and instead told me to wait until he sorted out things.
After a few exchanges like that where I was in retrospect way too polite and complying, he smiled and told me that I'm stuck there and there is no way I'm going to fly home.
At the end of his shift, the next person was super polite and wanted to help me, but it was too late since the check-in window was closed.
I can only describe this behaviour as sadistic. It seems to me that this person had been told that his job was to make sure order was upheld and he used that as an excuse to exercise power over other people.
You might also consider disputing the charge on your credit card. In the end, you presented yourself for check-in and were unjustifiably barred from the flight through no fault of your own.
I just wanted to share my anecdote for the human angle: some people enjoy exercising power over other people. It's not dissimilar to issues that the police force faces, although I would expect an airline to be better placed at rooting out this kind of bad elements from their workforce.
People held in jail are wards of the state. It is utterly unacceptable that people being held in jail have to fear for their physical safety. It is utterly unacceptable that people being held in jail have to fear sexual assault. It is utterly unacceptable that jails do not take appropriate precautions around communicable diseases. It is utterly unacceptable that people being held in jail are treated disrespectfully by jail staff.
People being held in jail pending a hearing have been convicted of no crime. Jails should be safe and comfortable. Jail staff should be held to the highest standard.
It looks like society disagrees, I'm astonished how nearly every "hero" in every TV show hints at "sexual assault" when someone goes to jail, does not want to talk etc. as something the person deserves.
People are very afraid of crime and will support anything happening to other people if they think it might reduce that.
1. The word "bail" doesn't occur in the story anywhere. Even if he were to be extradited, he would have to be offered bail, especially after he waived extradition. Why was no bail offered?
2. Being informed of charges against you is one of our most basic constitutional rights. Why didn't this happen?
2. Now, I'm not saying that some horrible local bureaucracy couldn't have put this man through this, but if that's the case, why is his lawyer only suing AA? There are like a million civil rights violations in this story as it is told - it's difficult for me to understand why a lawyer wouldn't go after those responsible for those violations.
Again, I'm in no way saying I don't believe what happened to this man, but I would like to understand more of the missing details in this story.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22054162/michael-lowe...
I'm not doubting that this actually happened, but again, why isn't the lawyer suing the NM jurisdiction, too?
That intentional backdoor has been used to oppress and re-enslave America's black population via unjust laws, incarceration and forced labor ever since that bloody civil war ended. There's a reason prisons in the South make their (predominantly black) inmates pick cotton, and it isn't because that's cost effective. Prison labor is a direct reinstatement of the former slave labor system, and many prisons in the South were formerly slave plantations.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
That was just the first result from searching for "letters of secession"
Saying the civil war is not about slavery because the invasion was about responding to Confederate belligerence is like saying that someone who died with Covid-19 actually died from heart failure. You might be technically correct (most people's hearts fail when they die), but it's at best pedantic and at worst disingenuous.
The experience reported here is absolutely normal for underclass people.
Not sure why people like to say this
Though to me, whenever I have been there, especially California, it looks more like the American South before the Civil War, with poor people doing bad jobs (people with broken arms at the cash register, Mexicans doing hotel rooms or people 70+ years old packing groceries) and rich people in big cars driving around with an oversized cup of coffee. There is the rich elite and the servants.
So this is why people say this.
The changeover happened in the early 1970s. The Powell Memorandum spells out the political program enabling it. Starting in the '70s, while the GDP has continued ever upward, middle income leveled off, and has barely risen since. All of the difference has been carefully diverted into the pockets of the 0.1%. Now the US has many billionaires and many, many millionaires, and "the rest", who are what is called a "managed population", our apparent collective consent to all this carefully curated.
Rebelliousness is channeled carefully into increasing the divide. The radical increase in fortunes of billionaires over the past four years is always blamed on something about COVID, not on very deliberate policies enacted by the government in power at the time.
Do you need more? Because there's more. Political corruption. Prison recidivism. Military spending at the cost of supporting education, healthcare, housing. Increasing limits on speech. (A state just said that men have to dress like men if they are performing for kids.)
Edit: because we still haven't addressed the Flint water crisis. Because we still have starving children despite producing more food than we can eat. Because care for even routine medical procedures can bankrupt a family.
Now make a list of things that make the US a developed nation rather than a “third world country”.
60 years ago I'd have a huge list. But we sorta stopped caring and we've been costing on that historical success.
I mean, this article.
You'd never experience injustice like this in any of my countries. It is the stuff of a second rate third world country, not at all becoming of a developed one.
We also generally don't need to fear random gun slaughter. I've not once worried about that for my children when at school etc, only errant drivers and pm25 pollution enters my mind.
> surveillance cameras caught the suspect boarding a flight headed to Reno. American Airlines reported the theft to DFW Airport police,
Why is AA reporting thefts from airport stores to police? Does AA have retail stores?
> American Airlines identified Lowe as the shoplifter seen in the surveillance footage
Why is AA involving itself in identifying shoplifters?! Providing footage I understand, but ID'ing?
Our media and politicians are quick to portray deplorable conditions in Russia et al, but it happens right here all the time.
I've had a couple family members and friend experience such treatment, including losing employment while it was getting sorted out. It's awful and needs more attention to change this.
(Scandinavia is as close to an ideal that I can imagine, though I know American society is so focused on antiquated notions of revenge and punishment that it's going to be a long time coming to view these as places of rehabilitation and reintegration than of violent, dehumanizing retribution. The state has a duty to ensure humane and dignified treatment for everyone in its care.)
Instead of having the threat of jail time in a harsh environment, prisoners see it as a resort and a break from the criminal life they are living with full access to almost anything and they even have leave(!?) multiple times during their stay.
Inmates have access to Playstation, Xbox, Netflix etc and better food than the schools serve to our children.
Jail time is a joke as well, armed robbery 2 months, rape 3 months, assault 2-4 months, murder 4 years (with good behavior) and if they commit multiple crimes they get a discount(!?).
I would prefer the harsher variant because now we have an influx of criminals from other places in the world where they have real punishments and they probably just laugh when they get sentenced here.
Someone who cannot safely be in normal society still deserves basic dignity
A prisoner doing time for assault and kidnapping has the audacity to complain about things like this. It is a mockery to the victims that have had their lives ruined by this individual.
Punishment must have a deterring factor to it, imprisonment is just a joke in Sweden right now.
See https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
My story.
I was living in Utah and a City police department in Idaho had a larceny warrant out for my arrest.
Why? Before I had moved to Utah, I lived in Idaho. I drove a friend to another friends house and dropped them off. I later picked them up again. He didn't have a license or a car. Unbeknownst to me, allegedly, he stole a laptop when they were at the other persons house. The plates for my vehicle were written down and filed in the police report as a detail. The police report was clear that I didn't commit the theft, the other person did, but I drove them. The detectives were supposed to come get my statement and used my vehicle registration to call me and investigate. Someone got lazy and they put the arrest warrant out on me as the owner of the vehicle.
Two years later, I'm driving to work one day and I get pulled over for a missing taillight and as they run my information, they find I have a warrant for Larceny theft for something over $2,500 out of Idaho. They throw me in Jail and keep me for four days. I was a naive and unexperienced "kid" (21 years old) thrown into a rough environment where others really had stolen cars, had hard drug problems and violent offenses and Utah was just waiting for as long as they wanted to extradite me back to Idaho. The environment was shocking to me. Insinuations of violence if I didn't give another "kid" my pillow, extreme anger and extreme homophobia everywhere.
I couldn't get arraigned or get in front of a Judge since it wasn't a warrant out of Utah. My family in Idaho retained a lawyer, the lawyer interviewed the person who filed the police report and she knew who stole it and knew it wasn't me and she even told the police as much which cleared my name and got the warrant squashed and got me released.
The company I worked for let me go without cause. Right to work state - Utah. The situation made them uncomfortable.
Of course, no repercussions for a false warrant. I was in jail for four days, I lose my job, during the arrest they impounded my vehicle and I have to pay fees to get it out. I'm fortunate my family had the means to retain a lawyer and get the warrant squashed but if it wasn't for that luxury, I likely would have been there for at-least another week as Idaho took their sweet time to send a Sheriff to Utah to come pick me up.
There really should be reform for the criteria required for a warrant and the criteria and timeframe for extradition. It should be a crime to imprison someone for four days or two weeks without being arraigned even if extradition is involved. It's 2022, can't extradition be required within 24-hours? We have planes and that expense would hopefully encourage a police department to be smart about the warrants they place.
I wonder if I could have won a civil case for the shoddy police work leading to my legal expenses to get me out and my lost wages but didn't have the means to pursue it against the City Police Department. I licked my wounds, moved on and didn't really think about it again until this article.
While I recognize the impact to this one man was serious, and I hope he gets the help and support he needs to recover, we need to stop thinking about these one off failures in the system and start looking at what our prisons and policing do to everyone who passes through their custody.
You might think you can convince the authorities to see reason, but you're wrong. If they were reasonable people they would be in a different line of work. This is a problem to be fixed by a lawyer. You can afford it. You can repay debt when you're alive and free.
Would shutting up have resulted in less jail time?
After he got out of jail, he "decided to find a lawyer. After weeks of searching for one he could afford, Lowe retained Palmer."
What should have have done that while in jail?
That's how a justice system should work, but that's not the reality. In fact, there never should have been an arrest warrant issued with such a weak "case" comprised entirely of exculpating evidence.
What he should have done was stop speaking immediately, use the first available opportunity to call family, a friend, or anyone else capable of securing a competent defense attorney, and retained their services.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to find a competent criminal attorney even when you're not in jail. If you unexpectedly find yourself in jail, you have no access to any resources other than a payphone, and whatever phone numbers the desk officer allowed you to copy out of your phone. All your outgoing calls use an exploitative collect-call system that charges obscene amounts and requires the receiver to listen to a robo-caller greeting — and set up an account with a credit card — before they can accept your call.
If you received a random call from an unknown New Mexico number, with the caller ID of "Quay County Jail", would you even answer? If you answered, and heard a robocall announcement asking if you want to accept a collect call from an inmate, would you even wait for the message to finish?
> What should have have done that while in jail?
He should have found a lawyer as soon as he could — but that's easy to say when you're not experiencing the incredibly dehumanizing reality that is our criminal "justice" system.
And every system enabling you to challenge your detention is going to be built with the knowledge of the sort of system it's working within. I live abroad now and in the system here defendants who lie about their innocence will face greatly lengthened sentences, so most people not only don't bother lying, but actually have to reenact their crime for police. But of course the obvious problem there is that it greatly increases the risk for challenging any arrest when you actually are innocent, though for a case like this (where there was 0 argument whatsoever that he was guilty) - that would obviously be a better system.
Is there a tech solution here ? I used to have an obi device that bridged pstn and voip lines and would do call forwarding. I suppose I can set up a DID number that can then patch to a real connection. The main issue would be automating the "accept collect call" part and avoiding abuse.
Talking will never, absolutely never, result in anything but more jail time. There is absolutely zero benefit for you to answer police questions past basic things such as identifying yourself/things like showing license/registration at a traffic stop. At no point would talking ever make your case better.
Also, it should be seen as a torture situation: they are professionals that will throw the full arsenal at you, including delaying your requests as long as they can get away with (I assume there can just lie about getting you a lawyer and have your requests memory holed. BTW do you even have rights to one depending on what form they took to keep you ?). They can put physical and mental pressure on you for days and days, and your only path is to shut up, if you’re not willing to give them what they want. And at no point you can afford to break down.
Overall, that’s a stacked game I’m not sure you can really win depending on how dirty they want to play it, except if you get external help that they couldn’t shut down.
https://twitter.com/facebookvillain/status/13661666082684354...
It reads like something written by Kafka (no, not the queue)!
It's easy to say don't talk, it's another altogether when you're surrounded by people whose entire profession includes getting people who don't want to talk, to talk.
This case highlights about a dozen different horrific government abuses and systemic injustices, yet the airline is the organization he's most likely to get any sort of restitution from. That in itself is a sad state of affairs.
So basically, NEVER TALK TO POLICE!
Or so we’re told. You guys need to get your shit together, this is pathetic
Now consider: there are hundreds (if not thousands) of people just like him, going through the exact same thing, right now. Their only differences: the overwhelming majority are poor and brown, and not all survive[1].
But guilty or not, nobody should have to endure what he experienced in a so-called civilized society, there is no way such experiences would help people reform, if anything, it would serve as a strong indication that there indeed is no right or wrong in the world, that the establishment is not deserving of respect and that the real priority should be avoid getting caught.
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec
Because of this post on HN, I've set up a monthly donation.
The finest treatment you can get, right there.
Has American Airlines said if they departed from their established procedures here, would be interesting to know. Because if they say they departed from established procedures that's really bad for them in court, but if they complied with their established procedures then they would have a reason why those are their procedures which they would have to say.
hmm, well we have this procedure of telling the police who to pick up so as to protect the privacy of all our other passengers - that won't go very well for them in court either because big time they're liable.... sure doesn't look good for American Airlines
What probably happened was they provided a single passenger instead of the whole manifest due to human error. Of course the police should have actually confirmed there was only a single passenger and it wasn't a mistake.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22054162/michael-lowe...
It was a search warrant, not a subpoena.
If an innocent man goes to jail, the penalties should be so profound that it hurts. They should be levied a billion dollar penalty and I would say even that would be generous.
Nor is the American Justice system innocent, their handling of the situation was terrible, likely criminal.
AA replied with a single passenger.
Police should have realized right away this was an error and re-requested the manifest. Stills from surveillance footage (included in the actual complaint another poster linked to) show multiple people boarding the plane.
The was this article is written is very bad journalism, AA (obviously) didn't know anything about the theft in a completely unrelated store, and didn't report it. The only thing they did was replied to a subpoena incorrectly. This article makes it sound like AA was doing their own investigation into a crime they knew nothing about.
Had some less egregious shit happen to me (border patrol lied and said a dog determined there were drugs up my ass). Got strip searched, taken to multiple hospitals across the state of Arizona against my will based on utterly fabricated 'probably cause' for attempted warrantless search of my body cavities. Cuffed and strutted and talked down to by doctors who called me a druggy purely based on entirely fabricated evidence, spending nearly a day in lobbies of hospitals while health care professionals ignored HIPAA and patient consent laws to do the bidding of border patrol. Looked up the court cases, a woman in identical situation was even raped by the doctors in every orifice on the same accusations and she didn't get jack.
Step A when you've been wronged by the state is to find the most proximal private entity and put them through the ringer. In this case that's AA. The state will protect itself and even if you succeed you'll need to move afterwards.
-------------
To the person who asked for link of the woman:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.azd.985...
Supposedly everybody wants to come here.
It might have sounded like a corrupt third world country before we had ready access to information other than what the local newspaper and encyclopedia could provide. But now that the individual has the tools to consider the bigger picture, this sounds exactly like the United States that I've been hearing about for well over a decade. Much of that I've become aware of right here on HN.
> Looked up the court cases, a woman in identical situation was even raped by the doctors in every orifice on the same accusations and she didn't get jack
Do you have a link to this?
What was going on with the justice system here? Of course AA is a component in the events that lead up to his arrest, but surely our justice system should not just arrest people on AA's word and not provide any recourse. Why are we putting shoplifters into a jail cell for 17 days _even if you knew they were shoplifters_. How does a judge look at this situation and determine that this person is a flight risk?
There are so many points where humans could have intervened and stemmed the damage, but didn't.
If you are still ignorant enough to believe that, I have 1024 bridges to sell you in the tri-state area.
If society wants things to be better, repeating how we think things should be over and over is helpful! It's better to have a place to go, rather than just declare we are not in the right place.
Guess I'm a bit naive.
The article indicates that AA inexplicably identified the victim alone as the perpetrator, rather than sharing the passenger list with police. One imagines they'll be facing many, many millions in damages for such negligence.
I imagine that AA is not doing something out of malice. Maybe everyone who is arrested claims they're innocent, but if you're going to put someone in jail for 2 weeks you better have good evidence! Yeah, maybe it's annoying, but so what? Everyone has to do annoying shit for work.
Have you ever interacted with American cops? They are on average completely useless, either unwilling or unable to follow their job description. Some of it isn't even any individual officer's fault (training is a joke, no performance standards, dysfunctional culture). But the end result is that they don't make up a high-quality set of civil servants, even by the not-very-high standards of American civil servants.
“ sent police a single passenger’s information”
That almost reads like they sent the wrong data and someone interpreted it as IDing him as the perpetrator.
I wonder who decided it was an ID.
I don’t have a problem with AA paying here but there is a lot to this story that just raises new questions.
There is recourse against the government. But it's long and winding and expensive.
A private airline is under different constraints. I'm surprised AAs' lawyers let it get this far without settling. (Unless the plaintiff jumped the gun, in which case he likely gave up his strongest card.)
There are so many points where humans intervened and ensured the damage was inflicted!
In a situation where multiple parties have wronged you, you can bring suit against any of them. In this case, the State has immunity and the individual at AA likely doesn't have enough assets to be worth suing. That leaves AA potentially holding the bag.
The idea that a simple accusation immediately results in rather extreme punishment is the real problem, isn't it?
Seems like the current US legal system is optimizing for false positives.
I’m a little confused here. Just sending that … someone had to decide that they were the same person and pass that on to an attorney right?
And then at the hearing did he ask any questions/ for a lawyer?
Not blaming the guy, just wondering about how this played out.
Was there any specific that American (and United, I suppose), did differently from other airlines that enabled the attack?