Child Porn Charges Dropped Because Investigators Cut-And-Paste Wrong Info Into Warrant Requests

from the simple-errors-cause-bigger-headaches dept

This could have happened to any civilian, but it happened to a sheriff's deputy. While investigating a former Danes County (WI) deputy for sexual assault charges related to his inappropriate relationship with a convict (state law makes this a sexual assault crime even if consensual, because of the supervisory role deputies have), investigators came across child porn images stored on his computer.

The detectives acquired two warrants: one to search Deputy Jeffrey Hilgers' home for evidence of his relationship with the inmate (now out on probation) and one to search his computer for more child porn. But they screwed up. The end result: all seven child pornography charges have been dropped.

Child pornography possession charges against a former Dane County sheriff’s deputy were dismissed Wednesday after a judge ruled that there was a fatal cut-and-paste error on a search warrant that led to the discovery of the illegal images on the deputy’s computers.

Dane County Circuit Judge John Markson ruled that in fashioning a search warrant for the home of former deputy Jeffrey C. Hilgers, 43, investigators inadvertently used a paragraph which stated that they were seeking child pornography, and not one specifying a search for evidence of an illicit relationship between Hilgers and a woman who was serving a jail sentence at home on electronic monitoring.

Hilgers is still possibly on the hook for second-degree sexual assault charges, but everything related to the child porn discovered in his possession has been vanished away. The judge called the error "insurmountable." Details matter, and it makes no difference that it was someone in law enforcement facing these charges. The judge recognized that it was the sort of error anyone could make.

“I do think that likely what happened was a result of cutting and pasting by using a warrant from a different case that involved child pornography,” Markson said, agreeing with an explanation for the error provided earlier by Deputy District Attorney Michelle Viste.

Anyone could have made this mistake, but that doesn't excuse it. People are wrongly jailed due to procedural errors. And people walk away from criminal charges for the same thing. Our nation's law enforcement officers wield a considerable amount of power -- especially when coupled with government prosecutors. But this power must be constrained if justice is the desired outcome. Not every warrant is its own special snowflake, but if prosecutors want the acquired evidence to hold up in court, they need to be sure those below them have been diligent in their work.

A second-degree assault charge is all that remains -- something that seems extremely odd considering the former deputy and former inmate are now married. (For now...) But the more damning charges no longer exist because someone decided to boilerplate the warrant app using wording borrowed from another case. Warrants may be largely similar but each case is unique, and if the words "probable cause" are going to be worth anything, unfortunate situations like these need to happen. Otherwise, every warrant will become boilerplate and the "probable cause" used to justify the search will be nothing more than taking the (sworn) words out of someone else's mouth and using someone else's alleged misdeeds to justify the search of another person's property.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, cut and paste, dane county, jeffrey hilgers, mistakes, warrant

DOJ Falsely Claimed That Reporter James Rosen Was Involved In Bombings In Trying To Hide Fact It Spied On Him

from the whoa dept

Okay, here's one that's just crazy. A few weeks ago, lots of folks, including us, covered the story of how the Justice Department claimed to a court that reporter James Rosen was "an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator" in a leak of some State Department info concerning North Korea. He was none of the above. He was a reporter, but the DOJ was abusing its power in order to spy on his email and phone records, to try to find the source of the leak. Soon after that, it came out that the DOJ had been working overtime to make sure that the details of the surveillance of Rosen's communications was held under seal.

However, some are noticing an odd statement in the DOJ's filing to try to keep the case under seal. In what is likely a case of an overworked DOJ lawyer just cutting and pasting from a different attempt to keep some surveillance a secret, one of the motions to keep the search warrant sealed falsely claimed that Rosen was involved in a bombing, rather than just disclosing information on North Korea. Somehow, if the DOJ can't even read its own motions to seal that carefully, you have to question if they really "considered alternatives less drastic than sealing," or if they were happy that throwing in key words like "responsible for the bombings" despite the case having nothing to do with bombings, only helped to keep it secret that they were spying on a the communications of a reporter, almost certainly in violation of the DOJ's own guidelines, and potentially in violation of the Constitution.

Filed Under: bombing, cut and paste, doj, james rosen, lying to court, prosecution, reporting, typos, under seal

Are Domain Disputes Suffering From Arbitrators Arbitrarily Cutting & Pasting Decisions?

from the that-doesn't-sound-good dept

JJ sends over this post concerning some troubling evidence that folks from the National Arbitration Forum, who are involved in domain name disputes, have been doing an awful lot of cutting and pasting from earlier decisions in creating their new decisions, leading to nonsense text being included in the decisions, and raising some questions about the outcomes of certain rulings. For example, the article discusses how the company Woot won a domain dispute for the domain name wooot.com, and the domain was supposed to have been transferred to Woot. Instead, the domain was canceled, and some of the text of the decision talked about AOL and a totally unrelated domain name iaol.com.

In an era of cut & paste simplicity, perhaps this isn't too surprising, but when you go to the trouble of going through an arbitration hearing, you would at least like to think that the decision has been considered carefully -- not sloppily cut and pasted from earlier decisions with apparently little or no review.

Filed Under: arbitration, cut and paste, domains

Retired Telco PR Exec Who Sent XYZ Corp. Letter To FCC Insists He Wrote It

from the uh-huh... dept

We've already written about how a former PR exec from what became AT&T has been outed as the guy who sent a letter to the FCC where he forgot to take out the boilerplate XYZ Organization that was almost certainly left there by the AT&T lobbyists who wrote the letter for him. However, one of our commenters noted that MediaPost spoke to the guy, Bob Sells, who insists that he wrote the letter with the XYZ part included:

Sells, a 77-year-old retired public relations executive in Little Rock, tells MediaPost that he often writes letters with placeholders and fills in the correct text later, but overlooked the reference to XYZ in this case.

Really? I'm really trying to give this guy the benefit of the doubt, but I can't come up with a single explanation for why he would write "XYZ Organization" when writing a letter himself from a group of people he supposedly represents. If you're the one writing the letter, on behalf of your supposed organization, why would you include "XYZ Organization"?

Filed Under: astroturfing, bob sells, cut and paste, lobbying, net neutrality
Companies: at&t

Guy Who Signed 'XYZ Corp.' Astroturf Letter... Worked As Telco PR Person For Nearly 3 Decades?

from the funny-how-that-works... dept

So, remember last week when we wrote about how anti-net neutrality lobbyists from AT&T had crafted astroturf letters for various "special interest groups" to sign -- but someone forgot to remove the boilerplate "XYZ Organization" in the first paragraph? We also noted that there was little evidence that the group -- the Arkansas Retired Seniors -- actually existed. However, Matt Cutts did a bit of digging and found that the name of the guy who signed the letter -- Bob Sells -- appears to have worked in PR for Southwestern Bell for 28 years (there appears to be only one Bob Sells or Robert Sells in Little Rock). Southwestern Bell, of course, became better known as SBC. SBC, of course, became AT&T after it bought the old AT&T and took on its name. So, if you're an AT&T lobbyist and you want to convince the FCC that "seniors" are against net neutrality -- and you don't want it to appear to come from AT&T employees -- who better to go to than an ex-employee? Still, next time you get a former employee to shill for you, remember to replace the bogus XYZ Organization you left for him in the text of the letter you sent him.

Filed Under: astroturfing, bob sells, cut and paste, lobbying, net neutrality
Companies: at&t, sbc, southwestern bell

Dear Lobbyists: When Crafting Astroturf Letters, Remember To Do A Search & Replace On XYZ Corp.

from the just-a-suggestion dept

We were just talking about how one of the worst tricks of DC lobbyists is to get various special interest groups to send letters on your behalf, even though those are really written by the lobbyists themselves. The quote in that original article that highlights the practice shows how it works:

"You go down the Latino people, the deaf people, the farmers, and choose them.... You say, 'I can't use this one--I already used them last time...' We had their letterhead. We'd just write the letter. We'd fax it to them and tell them, 'You're in favor of this.'"

Indeed. Well, it looks like in the process of faxing and telling a senior citizen's group what they were in favor of, AT&T's anti-net neutrality lobbyists forgot to do a bit of searching and replacing. Karl Bode points us to a hilarious letter filed with the FCC about net neutrality (pdf), officially on behalf of the Arkansas Retired Seniors Coalition -- the exact type of group often used in these astroturfing campaigns -- which suggests that someone didn't proofread the letter first: Right in the first paragraph, it looks like the Arkansas Retired Seniors (or perhaps the lobbyist directly) forgot to change out the boilerplate statement: "XYZ organization shares this concern." XYZ organization, huh? Here's an editing tip for AT&T's lobbyists: when crafting such letters with boilerplate language that's supposed to get changed at a later date before being sent off to the FCC, you should highlight that text in a different color. Saves embarrassing mistakes like this one.

In researching this further, Karl also can't find any other evidence that the Arkansas Retired Seniors exist. Separately, he found another mistake by the lobbyists when it sent a different anti-net neutrality letter from Grumman Shipbuilding (ship builders against neutrality?). This one wasn't as egregious, but the lobbyists forgot to remove the header info that says "Governor/PUC Letters to FCC on Net Neutrality" with the neat little classification system the lobbyists use: "Letter 2: Specific to Investment and Employment." Wonder what the original header for XYZ organization was?

Filed Under: astroturfing, cut and paste, lobbying

UK Court Attacks Cut-And-Paste Boilerplate Lawyering

from the legal-documents-shouldnt'-be-cut-and-pasted dept

One of the results of the word processing era is just how easy it is to simply cut-and-paste things, and perhaps no profession has made more use of this than lawyers. We've seen it where lawyers include the name of the wrong defendant in a lawsuit, for example. Now, a court in the UK has slammed some lawyers for practicing boilerplate cut & paste lawyering, noting that a drafted contract was so meaningless at points that it's clear the lawyer who drafted it had no idea what parts of it were talking about. The court noted "malapropisms, poor uses of terms and drafting errors" all of which "made interpretation of the agreement difficult."

In fact, it was so extreme that the judge actually looked to figure out what was most likely meant between the two original parties, rather than what the actual contract says. This is pretty rare, as most courts tend to default to the actual text of a contract, rather trying to get into what was meant, as that opens up all sorts of questions. Yet, in this case, what was actually in the contract was apparently so terribly written that the court decided to go in the other direction.

Filed Under: contracts, cut and paste, lawyers, uk

Expensive Patent Attorneys Know How To Cut & Paste, But Not Search & Replace

from the get-your-money's-worth dept

Well, it's a mistake plenty of folks are bound to make eventually, but that doesn't make it any less amusing. Joe Mullin has a short post about a big time patent law firm that has launched two recent patent lawsuits over the same basic patents held by a patent holding firm. The only problem? In filing the second lawsuit, it appears that the patent attorneys used cut & paste from the first lawsuit, but didn't use search & replace to get rid of the name of the original defendant. Hopefully, the patent holder didn't pay too much for the cost of filing that second lawsuit.

Filed Under: cut and paste, lawsuits, lawyers, patents, search and replace