The Prince George beating scandal expands, with even more official misconduct:
After the iPhone video of McKenna’s beating emerged, investigators subpoenaed 60 hours of surveillance video from the College Park campus police. The only video police couldn’t manage to locate was the one from the camera aimed squarely at the area where McKenna was beaten. Funny how that works. Campus police claimed that a “technical error” with that particular camera caused it to record over the footage of the beating. As public pressure mounted, police later found what they claimed was a recording of the lost video. But two minutes of that video were missing. Coincidentally, those two minutes happened to depict key portions of McKenna’s beating. The kicker? The head of the campus video surveillance system, Lt. Joanne Ardovini, is married to one of the cops named in McKenna’s complaint.
This looks really really bad.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in Maryland, officials tried to prosecute a man for recording a police officer making an overly aggressive traffic stop. (Don’t they realize how bad this looks?) And it turns out that they had no case:
In fact, under Maryland law what Graber did isn’t actually a crime. For a recording to be illegal, one of the parties being recorded must have a reasonable expectation of privacy. A cop, acting as a cop, with his gun drawn, while standing alongside a public roadway, has no such expectation. On April 15th, Graber was released and the charges against him were dropped. As he told Miller, “The judge who released me looked at the paperwork and said she didn’t see where I violated the wiretapping law.”
But that didn’t stop the police from jailing the man for over a day and searching his home. Worse:
Graber was harassed, intimidated, illegally arrested, and jailed for an act that clearly wasn’t illegal. According to Graber, the name of the judge who signed off on the raid of his parents’ home doesn’t appear on the warrant. As Graber told Miller, “They told me they don’t want you to know who the judge is because of privacy.” If true, that statement is so absurd it’s mind numbing. A judge issued an illegal warrant for police to invade the private residence and rummage through the private belongings of a man who broke no laws, and we aren’t permitted to know the judge’s name in order to protect the judge’s privacy?
The authorities in Maryland are out of control.
(Via Instapundit.)
UPDATE (9/28): Four months later, the charges against Graber have been dropped.
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