Civil Liberties are indispensable because sometimes the government gets it wrong

Does anyone remember the anthrax attacks that happened in the weeks following the attacks of September 11, 2001? I sure as hell do, because literally everyone in my line of work (clinical laboratory sciences) got looked at very closely. We will not soon be forgetting how quickly we became suspect after our decades of service to the public and, in many, many cases, service in the military in the Medical Officer Corps.

The government really dropped the ball on that one and still haven't caught the culprit(s). They did manage to ruin the life and career of one academic, though. Now they have settled with him, to the tune of $5.8 million dollars.


From MSNBC:

The Justice Department on Friday agreed to pay more than $5.8 million to Steven Hatfill, the former government scientist once branded by the Justice Department a person of interest in the deadly anthrax attacks of 2001. The legal settlement to Hatfill, in cash and an annual payments, signals the end of a civil lawsuit Hatfill brought against the Justice Department and FBI, accusing them of violating his privacy rights by improperly leaking sensitive information about the anthrax investigation to reporters.

"I think it's a gratifying end to a very sad chapter in [Hatfill's] life and that of the FBI and DOJ,” said Hatfill’s lawyer, Thomas Connolly, of the Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis law firm in Washington, D.C. “I'm hopeful that the settlement is punitive enough that they will learn their lesson" regarding the treatment of future suspects in high-profile criminal cases, he told NBC News.

The settlement language tries to give the government a figleaf by stating that it "should not be construed as an admission of liability or fault on the part of the FBI or Justice Department" but only an idiot will believe it. Lots of us remember the attorney general naming former Army scientist Steven Hatfill as a "person of interest" in the anthrax attacks, we remember that the FBI agents and Justice Department officials leaked key details about the case to willing reporters, according to depositions provided in Hatfill’s civil suit. The FBI kept the pressure on Hatfill by conspicuously tailing him in public, with one agent in an unmarked car once running over his foot. We also remember the resulting media trial as the first anniversary of September 11 drew near.

Hatfill deserves at least as much compensation as he received. And the government officials who leaked the information should face federal civil rights charges. And I would be saying that even if I didn't take Mr. Hatfill's experience so very personally on so very many levels.

And the fact that the government, spurred on by a 24-hour news cycle that encourages speculation and false accusations, gets it so spectacularly wrong so freakin' often (Richard Jewell, anyone?) is exactly why it is so important to jealously safeguard our remaining liberties.

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Who Let The Dogs Out? The Hounds Of Hatfill and the Federal Rules of Evidence

(Cross-Posted From Emptywheel)

On Marcy Weeler's most recent post on the sordid persecution of Steven Hatfill by the Ceney/Bush DOJ, I made a mostly flippant comment on the dogs in the Hatfill case:

What if Hatfill is just a pig and leaves pizza crusts around everywhere he goes and the dogs are smelling that? What are the customary industry standards for certification of anthrax sniffing dogs anyway; and who sets and regulates them? Or is this just some “wonder mammal” like Lassie or Flipper or something? Was there video of the searches with the wonder dogs? Because there sure should have been. Or are these yet more video items of evidence that have been “misplaced”? What was the nature of the dog’s response? Did it emit a “plaintiff wail” like Nicole Simpson’s Akita? (Great trivia: Nicole’s Akita was named “Kato” too). I don’t see how the dog(s) here meet any evidentiary standards for admissibility or reliance by a court.

Despite it being mostly in jest, that comment had what I consider to be a critical, if not the critical, point in it. From what it appears, the only bit of "evidence" (and I use that descriptor loosely here, and in the generic sense, because I don't think there was any proper evidence at all) against Hatfill that served as the basis for identifying him was that the dogs had alerted.

We all saw, in the tragic case of the late Richard Jewell, the horrendous and deleterious effects of a defective identification on an individual for an infamous crime. It is simply unconscionable to hang such a collar on someone without substantial credible hard evidence. And, quite frankly, the aura and implications of the anthrax case were, and are, far worse that the Atlanta Olympic park bombing. An entire nation was brought to a standstill and was trembling from a terrorist act that was capable of being repeated anywhere, at any time, in the country via the mail. So the United States government better have a pretty strong case before it implicates someone such as Hatfill in such a crime.

What substantial and credible hard evidence was the identification of Hatfill based on? Well, as has been previously discussed, he had worked in the bio-agent/anthrax field, had the technical expertise and, according to profilers, the personality to do the anthrax deed. The government indicates that he may be one of 50 or fewer people who had the skills to do it and had access to the strain. Then you add in allegations of violence in his past and ties to South African apartheid militias, and you can certainly understand why he was being looked at. While such information is not all entirely innocuous background, it is certainly nothing more than circumstantial and does not inculpate Hatfill; the only alleged link of Hatfill to the actual crime with the anthrax letters, at least that we are aware of to date, was the dogs. That's it; there is nothing else. What are the standards for admissibility of dog scent

There's more: "Who Let The Dogs Out? The Hounds Of Hatfill and the Federal Rules of Evidence" >>