Free Republic

My name is Butch Housman. Months ago I wrote a letter to the editor of this newspaper. As a result, Federal Agent Thomas Chittum asked to move the trial of my friends Leonard and Tom Elliott to Frankfort and cited my letter as cause, claiming I had “polluted the jury pool.” I was named specifically before the court and was criticized for questioning both the mission of his agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, and in particular his case against the Bacon Creek Gun Shop. I didn’t realize I was such an influential scribe. In light of...

Published on HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com (http://hamptonroads.com) Man claims he broke into garage, was police informant CHESAPEAKE The case against accused cop killer Ryan Frederick relies partially on the accounts of burglars who may have been working as confidential police informants. A 21-year-old Chesapeake man said he and another informant broke into Frederick's garage in the Portlock section of the city in January to look for evidence of a marijuana-growing operation and told the police about what they found there. In an interview at the Chesapeake Correctional Center, Renaldo Turnbull Jr. told The Virginian-Pilot that he had been working with police...

A raid gone wrong: Time to rein in police SWAT teams Published: Friday, September 19, 2008 Marc Fisher The Press of Atlantic City 9/19/09 It's sad, of course, that Cheye Calvo's dogs were blown away, left for hours in two pools of blood on the floors of his living and dining rooms. It's unfortunate, to be sure, that Calvo's front door had to be burst open, that it was necessary to plant his mother-in-law on the floor, arms bound, a high-caliber weapon pointed at her head, or that his house had to be trashed, every drawer flipped over, his belongings...

...In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years. But in a nation...

Armed with a battering ram and shotguns, Buffalo police looking for heroin broke down the door and stormed the lower apartment of a West Side family of eight. The problem is that the Wednesday evening raid should have occurred at an apartment upstairs. And, that’s only the tip of the iceberg, according to Schavon Pennyamon, who lives at the mistakenly raided apartment on Sherwood Street with her husband, Terrell, and six children. Pennyamon alleges that after wrongly breaking into her apartment, police proceeded to strike her epileptic husband in the head with the butt end of a shotgun and point...

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians. Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law. But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out...

Police said yesterday they have cleared Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo and his family of any wrongdoing in connection with a package of marijuana that police intercepted en route to his home, leading to a violent raid in which deputy sheriffs killed the family's two dogs. Prince George's County Police Chief Melvin C. High delivered the news in a telephone call Thursday to Calvo, saying police and State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey determined that Calvo and his family were innocent victims caught up in a drug-smuggling ring. High exonerated the mayor and his family and expressed regret that they were...

4 gunmen bust doors, yell ‘FBI,’ loot home BY JACOB QUINN SANDERS ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE Two men kicked in the front door, splintering it near the bolt-lock. Two more kicked in a side door. All four had guns. It was 3 a.m. “FBI! FBI!” the men shouted, one pulling what looked like a badge out of his shirt before stuffing it back in. “Where’s your money?” Lloyd McCuien lay facedown on the living-room floor of his Pulaski County house — off Arkansas 365 outside Maumelle and within sight of Interstate 40 — surrounded by seven family members. “It took me about...

I saw the local police are angry about the swat team going into the Mayors house. Not only are they Friends of the mayor, the local Police Chief said that if one of his guys had been driving by when 5 heavily armed men in plain clothes and masks were kicking in the Mayor’s front door, they would have been fired on them thinking they were terrorists attacking the mayor’s home. Besides the shooting of dogs for no reason, which is bad enough, why do they have masks over their faces? Bad guys were masks so they can’t be identified...

Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo on the police raid on his home earlier this month: "The reality is that this happens all the time in this country and disproportionally in Prince Georges county and most of the people to whom it happens don't have the community support and the platform to speak out. So I appreciate you paying attention to our condition but I hope you'll also give attention to those who may not have the same platform and voice that we have." -snip- Here are a few excerpts from Calvo's letter to the Justice Department requesting that investigation:...

The FBI has launched a review of the violent law enforcement raid of the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo in Prince George's County last week that resulted in the deaths of the family's two dogs. The agency has begun "reviewing the events that occurred at Mr. Calvo's residence," said Richard J. Wolf, spokesman for the FBI in Baltimore, which has jurisdiction over federal civil rights investigations in Maryland. (snip) Courts across the country in recent years have ruled that it is almost always unacceptable for police to kill pets in the course of searching a home. Cases in...

Berwyn Heights' mayor is expected today to ask federal officials to investigate possible civil rights violations stemming from last week's raid of his Prince George's County home by police officers who shot and killed his two dogs, his attorney said. Mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, will ask for a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry during a 2 p.m. news conference today outside their Berwyn Heights home, said Timothy Maloney, their attorney. "They're going to call for the Justice Department to come in," Maloney said. Calvo's home was raided by the county Sheriff's Office SWAT team and narcotics...

Guest Commentary by Laurie Roth This week I thought I would lose my mind when I heard of the horrifying decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals against Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean. So many of us who had followed this case for the last few years were hoping that once all the evidence had finally been heard, unlike with the first trial, that justice would be done. Wrong!! Justice was not done!!! You may recall in the first trial that the illegal alien, drug thug Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, who brought 743 pounds of marijuana over our border was...

BATFE: Any Semi-Auto Can Be A Machine Gun by Larry Pratt On July 2 I went to jail. Happily for me, I left right away. Sadly for David Olofson and his family, he had to stay, and will have to stay for 30 months in the Federal Correctional Institute in Sandstone, Minnesota. Why is the federal government incarcerating an Army reservist from Berlin, Wisconsin who has 16 years of service, a mortgage, a wife and three kids? They convicted him for knowingly transferring an unregistered machine gun. Since the case was brought by the rogue agency -- the Bureau of...

An outspoken Long Island gun owner's home was raided by Nassau County detectives, who seized two dozen weapons he lawfully owns just one day after Rep. Carolyn McCarthy's office made a 911 call about him.

Police in St. Louis seized cars, then freely drove them for months at a time. Perk extended to troubled daughter of police chief. Cars seized from motorists are being used as the personal rides of police officers and their relatives in St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigative reporters uncovered the scandal while tracking down how Aimie Mokwa, 33, daughter of Police Chief Joe Mokwa, ended up driving vehicles registered to St. Louis Metropolitan Towing and its subsidiaries. Like many cities across the nation, St. Louis has adopted an ordinance giving police officers the ability to grab automobiles from people...

The makers of a Channel 4 documentary which claimed that global warming is a swindle misrepresented the views of some of the world's leading climate scientists, the media watchdog is expected to rule next week. In a judgment at the end of a 15-month enquiry, Ofcom is expected to censure the channel over The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast in March last year. The film sparked outcry from environmentalists and led to a complaint from a group of senior scientists about apparent errors, distortions and misrepresentations. It is thought that complaints about privacy and fairness from the Government's former chief...

'The conviction of David Olofson is a gross miscarriage of justice' A Wisconsin man today surrendered to federal authorities to begin serving a 30-month prison term for having a broken rifle, prompting the Gun Owners of America to issue a warning about the owner's liability should any semi-automatic weapon ever misfire. "A gun that malfunctions is not a machine gun," Larry Pratt, executive director of GOA, said. "What the [federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] has done in the [David] Olofson case has set a precedent that could make any of the millions of Americans that own semi-automatic...

Josh Raykin had never spent even a night away from his parents. That is, until Arapahoe County snatched the 8-year-old from his home after an abuse allegation that social workers dragged their feet investigating. The ordeal began while Josh was playing outside one day before dinner in April. A neighbor knocked on the door to tell his dad that police had come to take Josh away. The strawberry-blond kid with pale blue eyes was born in 1999 after Michael and Melanie Raykin tried for 15 years to conceive. Michael, a courier, and Melanie, a hairstylist, work extra hours to send...

The question isn't whether a Pembroke Pines police officer was justified in fatally shooting Vincent Hodgkiss in his home early Thursday morning, or whether illegal drug activity was taking place there. The real question is this: Was a paramilitary-style dawn raid the best way to go about serving a drug-related search warrant?