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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

I was trying to decide if this was appropriate to post to hn. It shocked the conscience to the extent that people I know who are involved in government/mil/etc were discussing how they would have responded; it is basically rape under color of law.

Even more amazingly, it wasn't one officer alone by the side of the road in an ambiguous circumstance; there was a judge, a DA, multiple officers from several departments, two medical facilities, etc involved.

A civil suit is inadequate; state or federal criminal investigations should be forthcoming. It is possible there is a reasonable explanation, but an investigation is the only way to determine that.

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There are so so many things wrong with this situation i don't even know where to begin.

The judge granted a warrant, an almost facially invalid one (and it turns out, completely invalid for other reasons), but will still be immune from anything here.

The DA will be immune from anything here. The Officers will claim qualified immunity, and may or may not win.

At least there is supreme court precedent that should have put them on notice: Winston v. Lee - 470 U.S. 753 (1985)

"(a) A compelled surgical intrusion into an individual's body for evidence implicates expectations of privacy and security of such magnitude that the intrusion may be "unreasonable" even if likely to produce evidence"

Here, it wasn't even likely to produce evidence.

The doctor will certainly be sued for, among other things, battery, false imprisonment, etc.

(Looks close, they threw some other stuff in there. Here is the complaint: http://www.scribd.com/doc/181747773/Complaint-David-Eckert-v... )

The ironic thing is the whole expedition was to produce evidence for a criminal trial, so unless stuff gets "lost" everything will be well documented. If things do get lost, people pretty much need to hang.

The professional breaches of ethics are shocking and horrible, but the worst part of this is that it's bad test case for the legality of more and more invasive/dangerous bodily searches.

If the warrant was invalid to begin with, my concern is that a court won't be able to strike down the medical procedures as unconstitutional because the search itself was unconstitutional on simpler grounds.

I hope Eckert will win a civil suit, but my guess is that the worst part of this story will be the lack of deep constitutional scrutiny.

I am not a lawyer.

One way for the issues to get a decent amount of scrutiny would be in the officers' appeal of their loss of certification, and the medical workers' appeal of their loss of license.

The best outcome in my mind here is that the doctors lose their medical licenses permanently.

They are the professional that should have laughed the cops out of the hospital.

> The best outcome in my mind here is that the doctors lose their medical licenses permanently.

The best outcome, I would think, includes a number of people spending several years in federal prison for deprivation of rights under color of law (18 USC Sec. 242) [1], as well as any licensed professionals involved losing the relevant professional licenses.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242

Good luck ever finding a federal prosecutor who gives a crap about this rather than spending time making their bones on drug cases ...

Well, yes, "best" and "most likely" are two different things.

Of course, if punishing people for violating people's rights was something people were willing to actually hold politicians accountable for as much or more than punishing drug dealers, then US Attorneys -- always political appointees and usually also politicians -- would be much more concerned about it.

Accept-and-mutter-darkly just preserves the status quo.

"Accept-and-mutter-darkly just preserves the status quo."

I don't accept and mutter darkly, i just think the majority of the populace in the US is happy "as long as it doesn't happen to them", so i'm not sure much will change?

I would like to say that I'd be surprised if any court would find that the right not to be cavity searched without probable cause was not clearly established, but nothing surprises me any more.

Who knows what they'll find to be good faith these days. It's pretty sad at times.

Thanks for linking that. It appears that we've found the real reason the officers decided to put the man through this ordeal:

(Excerpt from complaint -- emphasis mine) 24. Plaintiff asked Defendant Rodriquez if he was free to leave, which Defendant Rodriquez contends that he found rude. 25. Defendant Rodriquez told Plaintiff he suspected Plaintiff of having illegal drugs in his car and proceeded to interrogate Plaintiff on the matter.

The officer felt that he'd not been shown correct respect by the victim and then decided to make him pay. To be honest, I'm not sure how much I blame the doctors in this fiasco, because I don't know what sort of legal protections are available to them if they were to refuse to carry out the invasive operations. Do doctors in the US typically have a legal counsel who can advise them if a warrant is valid, or what operations an officer with a warrant can demand? I know I'd have no idea if a warrant were valid, or what the officer could compel me to do.

A doctor cannot be compelled to do a body cavity search.

I think it's been well established at this point that anyone can be compelled to do anything by law enforcement. The supposed corrective mechanism comes after the fact so you're helpless in the interim. Take Mr. Eckert's case for example. What would have happened if he had started screaming in the hospital for someone to call the police? My money's on nothing. "Just a mental case, nothing to see here" they might say. You truly have no recourse in the moment.

The sad thing is, on average most people could be convinced to go along with this, to condone it, participate in, justify it.

One doctor didn't go along and claimed it was immoral. Good. Now what about the other ones? They are authoritarian followers. They love to submit to authority. They take great pleasure in telling others how they "served" and aided an investigation. Someone in uniform coming in and barking orders, and a line of willing "helpers" forms right away.

Authoritarian followers are very dangerous and there is a surprising high number of them in this country, from what I can see. It is surprising given the rhetoric about how freedom, individualism, respect for human rights and liberty. Those are always touted as foundational principles.

( For those wondering what I am refering to, it is this book/article by Bob Altemeyer http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians... )

Sadly perhaps, I sort of assume cops are corrupt already, I've just seen enough of corruption to kind of fall into that stereotype. It doesn't surprise me that they would want to abuse their power or would want to exercise sadistic tendencies given the opportunity. So that doesn't surprise me.

My present disgust is centered on the doctors and nurses who participated in this.

Kind of strange coincidence not too long ago we heard in the news about the doctors working with the CIA and the military that tortured prisoners.

Doctors are someone most people usually trust. But if you talk to people from other countries, you often hear how they distrust doctors. Ok, that sounds strange at first. They could distrust politicians, police, the military, but it is really sad when one stops trusting doctors. This is why though, because they have seen doctors do immoral things, they have seen them kill their relatives and harvesting their organs, or taking bribes to save lives, or refusing to treat people who have participated in anti-government protests and so on.

Are we headed the same way?

EDIT: grammar clarification and I can't spell

I don't know how much of a solution it is, but I think there could be some bureaucratic/authoritarian pushback against this kind of thing if the American Medical Association more stringently enforced its ethics rules relating to the Hippocratic Oath. As a baseline, medical procedures should be for the benefit of a patient and performed with their consent, otherwise they are inappropriate and a breach of professional ethics.

This is already enforced stringently in one very narrow domain: licensed doctors cannot assist states in either conducting, or even planning the preparations for, their processes of death penalty by lethal injection. This has caused them some practical problems, because they basically have to get amateur doctors to give advice. The AMA's rationale is that executing someone is not a legitimate medical treatment, and definitely doesn't have consent. But this principle seems like it should apply more broadly than the fairly extreme case of actually executing someone.

The AMA and other relevant organizations have been turning a blind eye to the torture of POWs by the United States. To date, no doctor who has tortured prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has been sanctioned, where they should rightfully be stripped of their licenses and put into prison.

I don't know of any case where a doctor has actually participated in an execution, but it seems doubtful whether anything would actually happen to them.

This is practically a modern day Milgram experiment, but substitute fake electric shocks with real anal penetration. Pretty shocking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

they have seen doctors kill their relatives and harvest their organs

Oh man, I shouldn't ask..

.. but I'm going to. Link to more info?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/08/16/212585522/chi...

Apparently they're ending the practice next year.

See here, there is an organization formed that tries to bring awareness to the issue:

http://www.dafoh.org/evidence/

I don't want to reveal more detail about a particular case as it would reveal too much about me.

Google on your own about such cases, there were some in Brazil, Russia, China is more well known one, also this is a recent case :

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/14/family-girl-died-i...

The sad thing is, on average most people could be convinced...

Speak for yourself.

I think civil liberties issues are some of the most important things we can be discussing. The hacker idea involves bending rules of all sorts, and to do that involves understanding those rules and how the game is played.

Furthering the appropriateness of having the discussion here is the fact that other venus are more appropriate to other aspects of hacker culture, and the dearth of content available otherwise. (We have github or twitter for technical discussion, and success stories and productivity articles are essentially naval-gazing)

The gory anal rape aspect of it is what made me pause; I agree about the 4A issues themselves.

> It is possible there is a reasonable explanation

Ok, I'll bite, what could possibly be a reasonable explanation for excavating a man's anus half a dozen times?

What is shocking is, they conducted everything. I mean, why? It's like they really wanted the drugs to be there.

Well, I guess after you've unlawfully probed a person's anus once, you're kind of committed, and your best hope for avoiding a backlash is to justify it by actually finding something.

I mean in that we have a news article from a biased (if biased in ways I generally agree with; I like Reason) news source, and a filing from one side in a civil case.

I generally do trust police, and especially federal judges. Everyone involved in the drug war has gotten corrupted, and to some extent the lawlessness south of the border causes lawlessness in enforcing the law north of the border; Nietzsche and all that.

So, before hanging people, I'd rather get more evidence. But on its face this isn't so much a miscarriage of justice so much as a string of felonies committed by law enforcement and medical professionals.

> I generally do trust police

You probably never lived in NY.

I actually have a friend who became an NYPD officer (!!!) at some point last decade. Generally I've never had problems with individual police.

I think the drug war is bad for a wide variety of reasons, and the militarization of domestic policing (mainly over drugs, and now terrorism) is bad for everyone (including the police), but it's not because I've personally had problems with police.

I'm a white, upper-middle-class, works-with-USG/DOD, contracted in war zones, lots of friends in government/police, etc. person, so I have it exceptionally easy, sure.

I've met bad individual officers, but it's rare, so yeah, I generally do trust police, based on my personal experience. One of the worst tendencies of policing organizations is the "thin blue line", so they need to take aggressive action in cases of internal abuse to overcome that.

The problem is that when things do go wrong, especially if you fit certain stereotypes, there seems to be little recourse beyond a costly court battle against an organization with far more resources than an individual (monetary and social).

> I'm a white, upper-middle-class, works-with-USG/DOD, contracted in war zones, lots of friends in government/police, etc. person, so I have it exceptionally easy, sure.

It sounds like you get it at some level, but to make the point extra fine: this is privilege. When white middle-class guys (which includes me) say, "eh, they've always been nice to me, so I'm not sure what the big deal is", we're failing to care because it the problems don't affect us. A cop's not to stop and frisk me for no reason or kick down my door looking for pot or harass me for some trivial moving violation or throw me in jail on unreasonable charges to get beaten and raped every day. They're always nice to me. So it's easy to say, "cops are kinda great, and that one time my house got robbed they were ON it", and just never internalize the fact that for so many people, they're an armed oppressor working with official government sanction and little accountability. That it takes something as mind-blowingly outrageous as court-sanctioned rape to get our attention and we're still not quite willing to look the system in the eye and say, "man, this is just fundamentally broken"...well, that shows just how deep that privilege goes. Is it any wonder that bad cops and prosecutors (and, gulp, judges) feel empowered to do this kind of shit?

I actually have a friend who became an NYPD officer (!!!) at some point last decade.

Ask him if he's got any crazy stories about stupid shit other cops have done. Then ask him why he hasn't reported them for doing it.

That's the real problem, a very real application of "one rotten apple spoils the barrel." The problem isn't so much the individual police who violate the public trust (there will always be bad apples as long as there are humans involved), it is all of the others who turn a blind eye to those violations.

Those cops who never commit any overt violations but let other cops off with a free pass are the ones responsible for eroding public trust because they teach the public that it is an "us vs them" mentality. As a privileged white guy 99% of the time your interactions with the police will probably be just fine, but even you never know when that 1% bad apple is going to show up, but you do know his buddies won't do anything to hold him to account for what he might do to you.

I think you probably understand this to some extent, referencing "the thin blue line" (the documentary of that name actually turned the phrase on its head), I just wanted to spell it out for anyone else who might not be familiar with the ironic definition of that term.

This isn't an issue that's particular to police. Go into a restaurant and have an average meal? The waiter isn't going to start harping on how crap the chef is. Call up tech support for your five-figure software? They're not going to dump the devs in the shit for your problem. Presenting a unified front to outside forces is usually necessary for employment, and something that we do innately as humans anyway. Given how thoroughly whistleblowers are destroyed, it's hard to fault someone for not calling a colleague out on relatively small matters.

Edit: I don't mean the article when I say small matters

This isn't an issue that's particular to police.

It is particular to police in that they are entrusted with greater responsibility than pretty much any other organization in the country. Their standards of accountability need to be proportional to that responsibility.

Given how thoroughly whistleblowers are destroyed, it's hard to fault someone for not calling a colleague out on relatively small matters.

That's circular reasoning -- Given how corrupt they are, it is no wonder that no one on the inside stands up to the corruption.

I think you're misreading me. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be held to a higher standard of accountability. I'm saying that presenting a united front is something that is a very human trait - and further saying that of course people aren't going to step forward when whistleblowers get the axe.

If you want to fix issues with the police, the first thing you have to understand is that there are humans behind those uniforms, humans who have spent a significant part of their life getting there. Being part of a skilled occupation is not something most people can just toss aside casually, hence why small offences get overlooked. If you can understand the motivations and psychology of the people doing the wrong thing, you have a wider array of tools at your disposal than "I have a really big stick here if you make a wrong step".

As for the circular reasoning bit - not at all circular, given that I'm not saying 'free pass'. If you want to break the cycle, change the culture. You do that by making it a point with the people cops answer to; make them give whistleblowers better protection. Changing the culture is difficult, but if you want serious change, that's the way to do it.

I hate to even say it but ... there were a set of trials that occurred in Europe in the middle of the last century. It seems like you would have been pro-defense ...

Nice Godwining, given that I've already clarified an hour ago (in response to Amadou) that I was not defending their actions, but trying to better understand motive to stop this happening again.

Thanks for calling me a Nazi for trying to better understand how people are motivated, by the way. I suggested improving protections for whistleblowers as a way to prevent this kind of situation in future. Clearly I instead should have been demanding permanent imprisonment (or even the death penalty) for specific people I don't like, all without a nod towards a fair trial. Then I wouldn't be like a Nazi at all!

> works-with-USG/DOD, contracted in war zones, lots of friends in government/police, etc.

You're part of the problem. Seriously, these people stick by their own--it's the rest of us poor bastards who get the shit end of the stick.

I think groups like Law Enforcement Against Prohibition are pretty clear on things like the drug war being both wrong and unconstitutional, and essentially racist in origin and perpetration.

Or is white. Or is rich. Or just hasn't had the chance to be on the wrong side of an enforced law yet.[0]

[0]http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.asp...

I have two brothers that are police and I still don't trust them, though I wouldn't do anything at a traffic stop to provoke an officer.

Part of me wants to believe that the police had some kind of evidence beyond "clenching his buttocks".

I don't think any amount of evidence could justify a cavity search, but I'm willing to wait for the judicial side of the story before I finalize my judgement on this matter. It seems so mind-bogglingly impossible that a judge would grant an invasive search warrant on something blatantly circumstantial.

Whatever the evidence was... it turned out it was wrong.

What evidence could justify this? Short of evidence of a nuclear weapon, I can't possibly see where you are coming from.

I said explicitly in my post that "I don't think any amount of evidence could justify a cavity search".

However, we know for a fact that a judge signed a search warrant for a cavity search. "Clenching buttocks" seems like such an arbitrary basis for an invasive search warrant that I suspect there may be more to this story.

> I generally do trust police

There are scum in every occupation. Police don't get a free pass. They're flawed humans like the rest of us.

Go watch The Wire. You'll be more understanding.

Yeah but they carry guns and have power over you if they want to. That doesn't make them at all like the rest of us, and they should be exemplary in the way they deal with taxpayers.

...they should be exemplary in the way they deal with taxpayers.

I really didn't want to comment on this article, but I must object to the use of the word "taxpayers" where "human beings" would be much more appropriate.

My choice of word was intentional, since the police is financed by people's taxes on their work and consumption, therefore people should be treated as "clients" by the Police, and not threatened in the absence of any good reason.

I object to the word because it implies that those who pay more taxes deserve more protection, while those who pay no taxes (children, the elderly, the poor) deserve none.

I'd rather get more evidence.

In general I would agree. But this stuck out for me:

the warrant was only valid in Luna County, where Deming is located. The Gila Regional Medical Center is in Grant County. That means all of the medical procedures were performed illegally and the doctors who performed the procedures did so with no legal basis and no consent from the patient. In addition, even if the search warrant was executed in the correct New Mexico county, the warrant expired at 10 p.m. Medical records show the prepping for the colonoscopy started at 1 a.m. the following day, three hours after the warrant expired.

If that's true, then it seems there's no possible way to play devil's advocate. Hopefully the legal system will dish out some justice for him.

It's incredible that they were able to find doctors who went along with it not once, not twice, but five times plus a forced colonoscopy.

Hopefully the legal system will dish out some justice for him.

For him with dollars and for the rest of society by putting everyone else involved in the unemployment line, if not prison.

"lock the bastards up!" is how you get this kind of situation in the first place; making everyone so afraid to put a foot wrong that they'll do what the person with the badge tells them.

Not to mention that destroying a professional career that takes ten years to start on one misstep is harmful to the medical system itself - why is the slogan always "lock the bastards up" and so rarely "train them better"? The former is a post-facto lose/lose, the latter win/win.

This case involves basically a serial rape, by licensed medical personnel. Short of the death penalty itself for all of them, I see no punishment that is too severe.

Making a very very public example of them is plenty of deterrent value for future "medical professionals" who may be dragged (or otherwise) into any further situations like this.

The firing and blacklisting of every law enforcement officer involved, and yes, up to and including the chief of police, is again a solid push back against this sort of abuse of power everywhere.

Too bad the judge won't see anything but perhaps a slight remembrance of this circumstance when the next election comes. His name should be posted at every polling place, end of story.

Tired, so damn tired of these stories.

Tired, so damn tired of these stories.

If you're tired of these stories, then, perhaps, look to similar cultures that don't have them with the frequency the US does. You'll find that they don't see 'lock them up and throw away the key" as the answer to most transgressions. Rehabilitation and retraining keeps people as productive members of society, rather than lifelong imprisonment in which they become permanent burdens.

And now you're firing the Chief of Police for not having a pat answer when 'cornered' (article's term) by an investigative reporter. You're baying for blood because he didn't spout something off-the-cuff when he possibly didn't have all the details? And people wonder why public figures play their cards close to their chest. Not to mention that it can be a miscarriage of justice if the defendants don't get a fair trial because of something said by a public figure with authority over them. Similarly the judge's original warrant may have been justified given the information presented at the request.

As someone else in this thread mentions, what we have here is one side of the story. It happens again and again and again that the Internet Righteous Machine goes berserk over a one-sided story without bothering to verify.

Making a very very public example of them is plenty of deterrent value for future "medical professionals" who may be dragged (or otherwise) into any further situations like this.

Yes, because the 'deterrent' mentality is working so well for the US so far, what with the incarceration rate five times higher than any other western nation, highest in the world.

I'm not saying these guys shouldn't be punished at all, but the hysteria of your "fuck them all" response is hardly realistic or just. Let them be found guilty in a court of law, of rape and of inappropriate warrants and whatever else. But keep your head about you when discussing legal issues. Being dispassionate doesn't mean being uncaring.

No, lock them up. Who cares about their careers? They raped this man repeatedly and had nerve to bill him for it. Your view is just inane.

I guess I was more commenting on the general sentiment that rises when stories like this pop up: "destroy the perpetrators, then we can all feel sated" instead of "what's the best way to prevent this happening again"

Prevention is generally ineffective, because it's usually done through regulation. How would you even prevent something like this? I could see creating a law against this specific case, but that would be for a very limited corner-case. I generally don't like the "prevent every bad thing possible" approach to rules and laws, since there's so much to regulate. It's easier to punish bad behavior.

Because of drugs. And how much drugs could this guy even have in his anus if he was doing something criminal?

Think of all the resources (money) involved here. Now think of all the resources involved in trying to defend these actions. Now think of all the other things we could do with those resources.

> I was trying to decide if this was appropriate to post to hn.

Posting it to HN is fine.

The problems are the terrible quality of some comments, and the lack of downvoting of shallow unthoughtful nonsense.

I'm also in awe over the number of people who played along. This reminds me a little of the film Compliance, which I happened to see last night. I think humans are very susceptible to stories. Once a narrative gets rolling, people seem to just act out the part they invent for themselves inside whatever they perceive the story to be. The story has a life of its own.

All that aside, I thought there was little about police behavior that would surprise me. This surprised me a little. Butt-clenching as probable cause? Seriously?

>Once a narrative gets rolling, people seem to just act out the part they invent for themselves inside whatever they perceive the story to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0wHeekgPqk

I am curious if there is any research related to this idea: "Once a narrative gets rolling, people seem to just act out the part they invent for themselves inside whatever they perceive the story to be".

I guess the Stanford Prison Experiment would be a prime example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

"Twenty-four male students out of seventy-five were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. Certain portions of the experiment were filmed and excerpts of footage are publicly available."

It reminds me of : http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3025

Sorry, the characterization in the comic is a bit aggressive, but I find the objections raised there sensible.

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