Continuing my series of articles on bad, sloppy, or downright evil lawmaking, I'd like to talk a little bit about how much states love to suspend or revoke people's driver's licenses.

A suspended license is a branch of a problem I mentioned earlier: Free Punishment. A suspended license is just a database entry and a form letter. It probably costs the state less than a buck, but causes a lot of misery to the person who suddenly can't drive.

(It may even be a profitable punishment: Around here, after the period of suspension expires, there's a $70 fee to have your license restored, plus a $5 fee to get a new copy of your license.)

In some cases, of course, suspending a license makes a lot of sense. Here in Illinois, they will take your license for reckless driving that kills or injures someone, driving drunk or refusing a breath test, drag racing, eluding police, or being involved in a lot of accidents or getting a lot of tickets for moving violations. We can argue over the details, but in general it makes good sense to take the license of someone who demonstrates they cannot handle the responsibility of driving.

Your license can also be suspended or revoked if you lied to get the license, if you haven't paid for your license, of if they issued you a license in error when you weren't really qualified. Again, these reasons all make sense.

In some cases, however, it's clear that the suspensions are little more than legislative theater to get tough on something. For example, they can take someones license for "violating the Cannabis Control Act, the Illinois Controlled Substances Act, the Methamphetamine Control and Community Protection Act, or the Use of Intoxicating Compounds Act while that individual was in actual physical control of a motor vehicle."

It doesn't stop there: They can take a license if someone "Has been convicted of the following offenses that were committed while the person was operating or in actual physical control, as a driver, of a motor vehicle: criminal sexual assault, predatory criminal sexual assault of a child, aggravated criminal sexual assault, criminal sexual abuse, aggravated criminal sexual abuse, juvenile pimping, soliciting for a juvenile prostitute and the manufacture, sale or delivery of controlled substances or instruments used for illegal drug use or abuse in which case the driver's driving privileges shall be suspended for one year[.]"

In other words, if you have a valid license which you obtained legitimately, and you haven't done anything that shows your driving endangers other people, they can still take it from you. None of the crimes in the last two paragraphs involves the use of a vehicle as an element of the crime, yet you can still lose your license just because you happen to commit the crime while driving a car.

I'm not saying that people who commit those crimes shouldn't be punished, but suspending their license has no connection to the crime and makes no sense.

I suppose supporters might argue that if someone uses a car as a place to molest a child, it's a good idea to make sure they don't have that opportunity again. Sure, that makes plenty of sense, but the state should do that by putting child molesters in jail. I mean, what kind of half-assed stunt is it to take away a child molester's driver's license?

Anyway, you can also lose your license if you have a gun in your car. Or if you vandalize someone else's vehicle. Or if you use a vehicle to deliver alcohol to a minor.

If you don't have your car tested for emissions when you're supposed to, the license of everyone listed on the registration will be suspended. Isn't that going to make it kind of hard to bring the car in for a test?

If I'm reading this stuff right, they will also take your license if you operate a garage or a parking lot and you discover an unclaimed vehicle but don't report it to the police in a timely manner.

Note: I've probably got at least half of this wrong. I found all these rules by poking around in the Illinois Compiled Statutes. It's a big mess. Not only do the traffic laws specify license suspensions, but the laws for the Illinois Secretary of State's Office (which handles driver licensing) have a whole different set of reasons for suspension. I'm sure I found it confusing because I'm not a lawyer, but I'm told that even traffic lawyers and Secretary of State employees have trouble figuring out what it all means.

A few months ago, I posted a followup to my Jury Duty series in which I expressed my curiosity about whatever happened to the defendant, whom I called "Jose." I had been unable to find out what sentence he received.

Well, one of the prosecutors (I think the one I referred to as the "blonde prosecutrix") just stumbled across that entry:

Imagine my surprise to see a Jury that I prosecuted detailed on a blog I randomly found during a Google search. The Defendant [...]--never returned for sentencing and currently has an outstanding warrant for his arrest. The Judge that told you he was looking at Probation for the Aggravated Battery has since this trial revoked each and every person's bond once convicted because [Jose] blew it for everyone else.

I had just recently discovered that myself.

In the same earlier post, I had mentioned that some of the jurors thought Jose's needlessly elaborate testimony was a setup for a civil suit. I doubted this because the stakes seemed so small. After all, Jose's only injury was only a bloody nose.

I hadn't really thought it through. There's more to such a suit than just an injury:

You touched on a possible civil suit from the Defense team after this trial--that was very astute. The Defense usually chooses a Jury trial on a case they believe they can win to test their witnesses for a civil jury trial if the defendant is acquitted. They can sue the Town where the officer is employed for false arrest and Civil Rights violations. Usually a town settles because it is cheaper than litigating the case. The defense team you saw pursues these case frequently.

(Note: I have edited the prosecutor's comments slightly to remove the use of the defendant's real name.)

This sounds like a good idea to me:

Oath of Presidential Transparency For Open, Transparent, and Accountable Government

I, __________________________, candidate for President of the United States, pledge to the American Public that, if elected President of the United States, my administration will be fully and robustly committed to open, transparent, and accountable government principles.

Effective management, accountability, transparency, and disclosure of taxpayer expended resources by federal agencies are of the utmost importance to maintain the trust of the American people. The paramount goal is effective and efficient delivery of critical government programs to the American people. Results-oriented management of federal agencies and taxpayer resources must be aggressively pursued and must provide maximum value for the public good.

Within 30 days of accession to the Presidency, I will execute an Executive Order ensuring timely implementation of, and administrative commitment to, the letter and spirit of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency (FFAT) Act of 2006 (PL# 109-282, 120 Stat. 1186).

The FFAT is supposed to establish a free searchable website that lists every person or organization that receives federal funds, so we'll all know where the money's going.

Signed, so far, by Senator Barack Obama (who was instrumental in passing the FFAT), Rep. Ron Paul (the most libertarian candidate), and Sen. Sam Brownback.

In the time-honored journalistic tradition of running with a story because we've got pictures, here are a few shots I took on my 3-hour drive home after the storms we had yesterday.

Larger ImageA Rare Moment of Speed

Larger ImageTree Down On Road and Power Lines

Larger ImageBigger Tree Down on Road

Larger ImageLine Down on the Road

Update: John Ruberry got some good shots of the damage.

I upgraded to Microsoft Outlook 2003 a few weeks ago, and I just sort of assumed that if anything went wrong there'd be error messages or something.

It turns out that Outlook and the Windypundit mail server aren't talking to each other. I didn't notice because I have about half a dozen email accounts coming into Outlook and all the others seem to be working.

I finally realized that people were sending me things I wasn't getting, and I realized what had happened. I checked the server and it has about 600 messages (most of them trying to sell me replica watches or making libelous innuendos about my genitals).

I'm trying to fix it now...

DUI lawyer Lawrence Taylor has been writing for a while about the resistance by breathalyzer manufacturers to various legal attempts by defense lawyers to get a peek at the source code for software that controls the machines. As a civil libertarian and software developer, I have mixed feelings about this.

I can certainly understand why the defense would want to know more about the software that is saying their client is guilty. On the other hand, I also understand why the company doesn't want to give up the source code. It's valuable stuff.

Lawrence Taylor has been fighting some of the crazier aspects of our DUI laws for years, but I think he hits far off the mark in some of his commentary on this issue:

I’ve also written ad nauseum about the myriad problems that render these machines inaccurate and unreliable. Among other things, for example, their operation and computation of blood alcohol levels is controlled by an old Z-80 microprocessor — an historical antique that used to drive the original Pong computer game.

The implication here, that the old processor makes the breathalyzer unreliable, is just plain wrong. There could be a lot of things wrong with the breathalyzer equipment, but that's almost certainly not one of them.

The Zilog Z80 is a well-understood processor with a 30-year operational history. It has been used in hundreds or thousands of embedded applications, from hard drive controllers to financial point-of-sale devices to electronic musical instruments. All its bugs, quirks, and glitches have already been discovered. I'll bet it's been 20 years since anyone found out anything new about it.

When it comes to microprocessor designs, old means reliable. Old processors like the Z80 are the mainstay of critical systems. Their reliability has been proven by years of use in the real world. Processors of similar vintage are used to control medical instruments and spacecraft, including the Space Shuttle.

(I looked for examples of Z80 processors in life-critical applications, but haven't found any. They've been used in outer space, but I didn't find any examples where human life depended on it.)

Commenting on a manufacturer's refusal to divulge the source code that runs their breathalyzer, Taylor says:

Kind of makes you wonder what the manufacturer is trying to hide, doesn’t it? Maybe the secret software code for computing blood alcohol levels isn’t all that it’s claimed to be?

Or maybe they've spent a few million dollars developing the source code and they regard don't want to give it all away to settle a legal matter they're not a party to.

Consider another scenario: Suppose there was a criminal case that relied on a digital photo that had been enhanced in Photoshop to reveal someone's face. If the accuracy of the enhancement became an issue, should a judge really be able to order Adobe to give him hundreds millions of dollars worth of source code so the defense could examine it?

On the other hand, a company that makes breathalyzers seems much more involved in the resulting DUI case than Adobe is in my hypothetical example, so maybe they shouldn't have the same protection I think Adobe deserves. I'm just not sure how to draw a principled distinction.

(Hat tip: Mike at Crime & Federalism.)

As my way of apologizing to poor Ken Lammers, who visited here to see the pretty girls and found my plunger story instead, here are a couple more shots from last month's model shoot. (I am way behind in processing these photos.)

Larger ImageKathy

Larger ImageNicole

I remember back when I was a kid and I did something wrong, sometimes my parents would handle it separately, and I'd get yelled at or punished by both of them for the same misdeed. It seemed so unfair.

Lawmakers do much the same thing. Only instead of doing it at the same time, they do it one after another. Not a year goes by that my state legislators don't bump up the penalties on a few crimes. Then when someone commits one of these crimes where the legislature has been piling on like this, they get hit with years of invented penalties all at once.

As with all the items so far in my Evil Lawmaking series, I'm not complaining about what's been made a crime (although in some cases I have objections), rather I'm complaining about how the laws are written.

To my mind, the questionable nature of these piled-on statutes is self-evident: After decades of lawmaking, is it really possible that legislators are continuing to discover never-before-seen gaps in the criminal code? Or is it just that lawmakers are putting on a show, legislative theater if you will, to try to convince their constituents that chaos would reign without them?

By the way, for anyone tempted to be impressed by some of my photography, when I was getting the photo of the toilet and plunger for the previous item, I had to take nine shots to get a composition I liked with the correct exposure to show details in both the white and the black objects. And I still had to use Photoshop to crop it a little and adjust the contrast curves to bring out the details of the black plunger cup against the black tile floor.

(Also, I spent about 10 minutes trying to come up with a toilet-related pun for the title before settling on the execrable result you see above.)

Yesterday I was moving some boxes into my new rental storage locker. As I went to get a cart to haul the boxes, I once again saw all the signs asking us not to steal the carts. It's a realistic concern. I'm moving out of my old storage locker because people stole all the carts and management decided not to replace them.

When I finished, I used the bathroom, where I found this disheartening reminder of the depths of human depravity:

Larger ImageChained Toilet Plunger

That's right. They had to chain down the plunger for the toilet because otherwise people would steal it.

I mean, who steals a toilet plunger? And why? Did they just happen to need one right now? If not, what were they doing about toilet clogs before?

In a post a few weeks ago, I pointed out that Mississippi dentist Dr. Michael West, a bite mark analyst who often gives expert testimony in criminal trials, isn't much of a scientist. I based my conclusion on Radley Balko's Reason article, which included this description of West's methodology:

But even in an already imprecise field, Dr. Michael West has taken forensic odontology to bizarre, megalomaniacal depths. West claims to have invented a system he modestly calls "The West Phenomenon." In it, he dons a pair of yellow goggles and with the aid of a blue laser, he says he can identify bite marks, scratches, and other marks on a corpse that no one else can see—not even other forensics experts.

Conveniently, he claims his unique method can't be photographed or reproduced, which he says makes his opinions unimpeachable by other experts.

That's nonsense. If it's not repeatable, it's not science. Dr. West might as well be claiming divine revelation because, after all, no one can reproduce that either.

I've been thinking about this a lot, trying to explain why West's assertion that he alone can do these tests is so wrong-headed. I can't quite explain it in a way that completely satisfies me, but I think it's fair to say that his method has problems with validity and robustness.

Forensic analysis starts with simple observable (or measurable) facts. Then you apply some general rules about the world to to derive new facts. When police find fingerprints on a murder weapon that are a match to a suspect's fingerprints, they can use the general rule that no two people have the same fingerprints to derive a new fact: The suspect touched the murder weapon.

It should be obvious that in order for the analysis to be valid, the underlying general rule must be valid: If fingerprints were not unique, then a print match would be much less useful.

What's less obvious is that the methodology for determining the observable facts must also be valid. If you don't have a good way to determine that two fingerprints match, then you can't be sure you've proven anything new. In other words, it's not enough that the idea behind the analysis is sound. The the procedures for gathering and analyzing the data must also be valid and repeatable.

Consider the science of forensic bloodstain pattern analysis. Blood from a wound will be spattered around a crime scene in different ways depending on how the wound is inflicted and the victim's post-wounding position and movement. The effect is a routine application of the physical laws governing the behavior of fluids and has been proven experimentally.

When a forensic scientist analyzes the scene of a bloody crime, however, he's actually working backwards: Instead of figuring out how the blood will spatter for a particular crime, he's looking at the resulting spatter and trying to figure out what caused it.

That seems like it ought to work, but we can also imagine reasons why it might not: Spattered blood may be difficult to classify properly, it may be hard to define the edges of a smeared droplet, different scenarios may produce identical droplets, and so on. Even if we know all about how a violent act produces blood spatter, whether or not a forensic analyst can work backwards to understand a violent act is a separate question that is itself subject to testing.

Complicating matters further, there's also always a question how well the analysis works on the margins and where to set the limits. How large does a blood spatter pattern have to be for a forensic analyst to be able to reliably differentiate between high-velocity and medium velocity impact spatter? A square foot? A square inch? How much of a fingerprint is needed to get a reliable match? 14 points on a thumb? 4 points on a partial index finger?

As far as I know, these and other questions of validity have been investigated and answered quite thoroughly for fingerprint analysis, and a little less so for bloodstain pattern analysis. Since the "West Phenomenon" can't be performed by anyone else, I doubt it's ever been subject to a real scientific investigation of its validity.

Scientific tests can also be analyzed in terms of their robustness. A robust test isn't very sensitive to changes in the testing conditions. For example, a robust chemical test will be accurate across a wide range of room temperatures, and will yield the same results regardless of how fast the technician stirs the beaker. An even more robust test will work even if the technician doesn't use enough of one reagent, and it may be resistant to the most likely contaminants. A robust test methodology produces accurate results under a wide variety of conditions.

Since the conditions of the test are largely under the control of the person performing the test, this way of thinking about robustness leads us to an interesting and counter-intuitive conclusion: The most reliable scientific tests are those that can be performed by the stupidest people.

For example, I've had no medical training whatsoever, but with simple medical equipment from Walgreen's I can measure my father's blood pressure and blood sugar levels well enough for his doctor to use those numbers to assess his health. These are very robust tests because lots of people can learn to do them.

Not robust enough for you? How about measuring body temperature? Body weight? The tests for those are so robust that literally billions of people know how to do them. I'm no lawyer, but I doubt anyone has ever been prevented from testifying about body weight because of lack of expertise.

For an example of the middle ground in robustness, think about radar speed detection. Have you ever seen one of those electronic "Your Speed" signs along the road that supposedly shows you if you're speeding? The numbers jump all over the place, and you can't tell if it's showing your speed or the speed of another car near you. That's because it's just a radar gun bolted in place and pointed down the road. With no one to aim it and no way to tell where it's pointing, it's probably the ultimate in unskilled operation, and it fails miserably. Clearly, radar speed detection requires a trained operator to get accurate results.

Other forensic tests, such as fingerprinting and bloodstain pattern analysis are even more complicated, requiring lots of training and practice. The most complicated forensic procedure of all is probably a forensic autopsy, which is why the people who do them have to be trained for years. Yet all of these forensic procedures can be performed by hundreds if not thousands of people in this country alone.

When Dr. West claims he's the only one who can perform his method of testing, he's saying that he's the only person with the talent to do the test. But that's just another way of saying that his method is totally lacking in robustness: Anyone else who tries his method will introduce enough variation into the process to make it fail.

I can't help but wonder how often Dr. West himself introduces enough variation to cause the test to fail. Maybe Dr. West's estimate of the number of people who can use his methods is too high by one...

I should add that just because a test procedure is difficult and not robust doesn't mean it's useless. It's still possible to get great results by going to the expense and effort of controlling the test conditions very carefully or repeating the test enough times to build up confidence in the results. However, any such activity would surely either require or result in the ability of other people to reproduce the "West Phenomenon"

Finally, while I have some training in science and statistics, I have no legal training, so while I'm somewhat confident that I've accurately described the scientific approach to thinking about these things, I have no idea if a court would care about any of this.

I think Rudy Giuliani may well be the most authoritarian of the mainstream presidential candidates. The man loves power too much. Here he is in a speech from 1994, before 9/11 made people forget what an ass he is:

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

I think Rudy Giuliani is so law-and-order that he's Vlad Ţepeş waiting to be reborn. If you pitched the question to him in just the right way during a debate, I'm sure he'd enthusiastically support sending a message to would-be lawbreakers by impaling convicted criminals on the street corners and leaving their bodies to rot in the hot sun.

(Hat tip: Balko.)

Mirriam at Not Guilty finally gave birth to her twins—two baby boys!

I don't know the details, but I know she had a hard time getting pregnant and went through IVF hell to do it. Then, when it was time to get the babies out, she had to have a Caesarean section. It all sounds like a lot of work.

Congratulations Mirriam and Drue! And Good Luck!

When I saw that an advance copy of the new Showtime series Californication was availble on Netflix, I had mixed feelings. A comedy starring David Duchovny could be really good. He's proven his comedic chops on The Larry Sanders Show and he brought some humor to his role on The X-Files as well. Plus, advanced reviews tend to generate a good number of hits on the blog. However, I was afraid I would like it and not be able to watch future episodes as I don't have Showtime. That's something I needn't have worried about.

Duchovny plays Hank, a bachelor with writer's block and a penchant for unavailable women. He sleeps with one married woman after another on his path to self destruction. It's played for laughs - not big laughs, but ironic puffs of air escaping your nostrils kind of laughs. I didn't find it very funny, and aside from normal respiration, there was no air coming out of my nose. As a character study, I suppose it's mildy interesting and the acting is fine, but I just don't care enough about any of the characters to continue watching. Even if I did have Showtime.

If you are still interested in checking it out for yourself, Californication premiers on Showtime Monday August 13th at 10:30 pm / 9:30 Central.

Update: I should have mentioned that this is R-rated fare and not meant for the kiddies. Mature situations, nudity and foul language.

Yesterday I wrote about the moral perils of punishing people in a way that is profitable for the government. Today, the Gary Washburn of the Chicago Tribune gives me another example:

Driving-related fines and fees provided the city treasury with more than $210 million last year. That represented about 4 percent of the 2006 budget, a small, but significant amount. A projected 2008 revenue shortfall of a similar size, $217 million, has brought predictions of a menu of tax, fee and fine increases to plug the gap.

That's not an incentive that's going to favor the ordinary citizens of Chicago.

Daley administration officials insist their system is fair, and they say that motorists who think they've been cited in error are guaranteed due process.

They can contest their tickets by mail or in person before an administrative hearing officer, presenting photos or other proof to bolster their cases, officials say. If found liable, they can appeal the decision in Cook County Circuit Court.

An administrative hearing officer is a city employee, not an independant judge, so it's a stretch to call this due process. Consider the experiences of Heather Thorne, who found a police officer writing a parking ticket for her car:

"I asked him where the sign was," said Thome, 35, a temp worker. "He said there used to be a sign on 'that' pole, and it hasn't been there for two years. My logical question was, 'How can you write a ticket?' And he told me he doesn't want to, but his boss tells him he has to go out every day and write tickets."

Thome said the cop advised her to appeal to the city's Department of Administrative Hearings. She did, by mail, with a photo of the scene—sans sign—enclosed. She still was found liable.

Well, that just means that Thorne needs to appeal to the Cook County Circuit Court in order to get this matter heard before a real judge, right?

Not exactly. You see, the ticket was only $50, but the fee for filing the appeal would be $93.

Yesterday I wrote about the evils of free punishment, which tempts lawmakers into punishing people just because they can. But free punishment is just the low endpoint of a much bigger problem: Profitable punishment, also known as fines.

There's nothing inherently evil about fining wrongdoers, but it carries the risk of turning law enforcement into a profit-making operation for the government, which really screws up priorities.

The classic example of profitable punishment is the small-town speed trap. Some small towns along major state roads figured out that if they stationed a cop on the road right at the point where the speed limit dropped to pass through town, he could ticket enough out-of-town drivers that the fines would pay most or all of his salary.

Most small-town speed traps were eliminated by the growth of the limited-access Interstate Highway System which kept traffic out of the small towns. However, during the oil crisis of the 1970's, federal oil conservation laws forced states to lower their expressway speed limits from the typical 60 or 70 miles per hour to only 55. Most drivers ignored the limit and continued to drive at normal speeds, and states quickly learned they could make a lot of money by ticketing their own citizens for speeding. Long after the oil crisis had passed, expressways continued to have 55-mph speed limits, now justified by concerns for safety.

In a more recent invention of ways to bilk money from citizens in the guise of safety, the state of Virginia has been in the news for imposing very high fines for some traffic violations. E.g. $900 for for driving 20-mph over the limit.

The Virginia legislature didn't even pretend this had anything to do with public safety: The fines are part of a bill passed to provide "statewide funding of transportation projects through current funds and additional funds" according to its summary on the General Assembly website. In other words, this is a transportation funding bill. The closest the bill comes to a legitimate justification is some language in § 46.2-206.1.A which says "The purpose of the civil remedial fees imposed in this section is to generate revenue from drivers whose proven dangerous driving behavior places significant financial burdens upon the Commonwealth."

Timothy P. Carney of The Examiner contends that the entire funding bill is the result of lobbying by real estate developers to get the state to build roads that will increase the value of real estate they want to develop.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko points out that Virginia House Delegate David Albo—who has been taking credit for the new law—is a partner in Albo & Oblon, a law firm that specializes in defending people accused of DUI and other traffic offenses. No wonder he's so excited about this law: He'll make a lot of money from people who hire his firm for their defense. This isn't the first time he's done this kind of thing, either.

Another new money-raising trick is high fines for speeding in construction zones. Where I live, these tickets cost $375 each. A cop giving out just one a day is covering his own salary. There have been allegations that the city stretches out construction projects just to increase their ticket revenues.

The prevailing modern version of the small-town speed trap, however, is automatic enforcement using computer-controlled cameras. Cities are making millions of dollars from installing red-light cameras. The supposed justification is safety-related, but there's plenty of discussion by folks in city government about how much more money they'll make with a few more cameras.

In fact, it seems that automatic red-light cameras actually hurt safety. Several studies in Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, and other places have shown that the accident rate increases at intersections that have red-light cameras, and a recent study showing a decrease in accidents in Delaware appears to use bad math.

There seem to be two reasons for this. First, drivers approaching an intersection as the light turns yellow are more likely to stop rather than continue through, which increases the number of rear-end collisions. Second, in a disgusting example of money-over-safety, some places have been shortening the duration of yellow lights at intersections, which increases the number of tickets issued but also increases the number of accidents.

The most blatant example of red-light profiteering I can think of is in nearby Tinley Park, Illinois where the village will soon give red-light camera vendor Redflex the right to install cameras in village intersections in return for a flat annual fee. The village will get a steady cash flow, and Redflex will get to keep all the money from the tickets.

(There are signs of an uprising against our camera-wielding robot masters. When radar speed cameras were first tried in the American west, they were often shot up by angry motorists. In gun-free Great Britain, they prefer to destroy the offending cameras with burning tires.)

Profitable punishment is a far worse problem than free punishment. It provides a much greater incentive for unnecessary criminal laws. But even when fines are used to punish genuine crimes, they also provide a perverse incentive to not actually reduce the amount of bad behavior. When a city is spending a million dollars a year running a batch of red-light cameras, the last thing they want is for everyone to drive safely.

About a month ago, Gideon at a public defender posted a poll for his fellow criminal defense lawyers to pick the "most evil legal principle". Being lawyers, Gideon and his readers are concerned with real legal principles, like harmless error and reasonable suspicion. I'm more concerned with the principles used by legislatures when creating new criminal laws.

One of the aspects of law making that seems...well, not evil exactly, but certainly suspicious, is when a criminal law specifies a punishment that don't cost the government anything to implement.

Throwing someone in jail costs a lot of money, maybe $25,000 per year, so when lawmakers specify a prison sentence for a particular crime, they're saying it's worth our money to punish the criminal and keep him off the streets. I tend to assume they really believe an act is worthy of punishment when they're willing to put their money where their mouth is.

On the other hand, many states also punish felons by taking away their right to vote. I understand that it's not unusual for a first-time offender to receive no prison time for a minor felony, but still lose the right to vote. In other words, we're supposed to believe they're bad enough to no longer deserve one of the key rights of citizenship, but not so bad that we should actually commit any resources to their punishment.

That seems...insincere.

The same rules apply to gun ownership: Felons aren't allowed to own guns. Again, they're apparently too dangerous to own guns, but not so dangerous that they can't be allowed to roam freely among us.

Another problem with free punishment is that since it costs nothing, there's no reason to stop. Criminals who lose their rights usually lose them forever. If you rob a liquor store when you're 19, you still won't be able to vote or own a gun when you're a 50-year old grandparent.

(Actually, there are ways to get relief, but it's not automatic, and politicians have been know to close these "loopholes" from time to time.)

Another example of a free punishment is suspending someone's driver's license. To the person who loses their driving privileges, it's a disruptive life change, but to the government that does it to them, it's just a database entry and a form letter. So any time politicians want to "get tough" on drunk drivers or parking ticket scofflaws they just tack on a license suspension or increase one that's already there, because they pay no cost for doing so.

It's not that there aren't good reasons for taking away the licenses of drunk drivers and keeping violent felons from owning guns. However, as long as doing so doesn't cost anything, there's going to be a temptation to punish too much, just because we can.

Regular readers may notice that I've replaced the Chicago skyline photo at the top of the page. It's an emerging tradition here at Windypundit that the banner photo is one of the few photos on the site that is not my original photography (mostly because I'm too lazy to trek to the lakefront).

The previous photo was a stock photo licensed from Matt Dula, and the one before that was a copyright-free Nasa photo taken by an uncredited astronaut.

The latest photo is by Ken Gibson, and it's taken from a collection of city skyline photos posted at Road Trip America.

Woman of the Law has a really good rant about a customer service nightmare with Sallie Mae, her student load provider.

I'm hoping the links in this post will improve her search engine score for the phrase "nightmare with Sallie Mae". Or maybe I should link to it with the more traditional "Sallie Mae sucks," or my personal favorite, "Fucking Sallie Mae!"

In any case, I wish her luck in her efforts to smear a major corporation on the web. I'm sure they have it coming.

Over at the conservative blog Illinois Review, John Ruskin quotes with approval from an unnamed letter writer who has a few things to say about the recent protests against stronger immigration enforcement (elisions mine) :

Certain people are angry that the US might protect its own borders, might make it harder to sneak into this country and, once here, to stay indefinitely.

Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests. Let's say I break into your house. Let's say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave.

But I say, "I've made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors. I've done all the things you don't like to do. I'm hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).

...

If you try to call the police or force me out, I will call my friends who will picket your house carrying signs that proclaim my RIGHT to be there.

It's only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I'm just trying to better myself. I'm a hard-working and honest, person, except for well, you know, I did break into your house.

And what a deal it is for me!!! I live in your house, contributing only a fraction of the cost of my keep, and there is nothing you can do about it without being accused of cold, uncaring, selfish, prejudiced, and bigoted behavior.

Hmm. That's an interesting analogy, and I know there are advocates for illegal aliens who've made absurd demands.

That said, let me offer another analogy:

Let's say I own a house, and I've hired you to tend my lawn. It's a great deal for both of us. You get money and I get a great lawn.

However, my neighbor doesn't like you, so he forces you off my property at gunpoint, and just to teach me a lesson, he steals some of my stuff.

You and I point out that our work arrangement doesn't involve him, and it's none of his business, so he should stay out of it. In his imagination, however, if I hadn't hired you I would have hired one of his friends, so he insists that you've stolen the money that his friends would have earned if I'd hired them instead.

Furthermore, when his wife sees how hard you work and offers you some lemonade, he accuses you of working on my lawn to make it easier for you to steal his lemonade.

When you and I point out how irrational he's being, he responds by accusing you of trespassing on his street, ignoring the fact that it's my street too, and I invited you.

There's a place for reasonable immigration rules, but people who try to use the force of government to control who the rest of us are allowed to do business with are the moral equivalent of the playground bully who doesn't like it when his friends play with kids he doesn't like.

Last September, I wrote a long series of articles about my service on a jury hearing a case in which the defendant—whom I called "Jose"—was accused of assault and battery against a police officer. At the end of the 3-day trial, we found him guilty.

After I wrote the first four articles about the case—Voir Dire, Testimony, Verdict, and Reflections—I had one more article planned. It would be titled "Jury Duty: Sentence", and it would come out right after the judge pronounced his sentence.

But, as I explained in a followup piece in May, I couldn't get any information about the case on the day of the sentencing hearing, except that it was continued to a later date. I didn't know how to find out anything more. I don't know anything about how criminal sentencing really works, but I speculated that perhaps Jose had been sentenced to some sort of court supervision which kept his sentence out of the official record.

The truth turns out to be more interesting. When I was in court last month for a traffic ticket, I asked my lawyer how to find out what happened, and he showed me how to use the public access terminal. The defendant's name turned out to be pretty common, but we eventually found the right case, and I finally found out what happened to Jose.

Fled.

Jose never showed up in court again. There's a warrant out for his arrest. I imagine that if he's ever caught, the judge will not go easy on him.

At the end of the last day of the trial, after the verdict, the judge had visited us in the jury room and told us a few things about the case. It turned out that Jose had a clean record, and the judge told us that he thought Jose was just a young man who had made a mistake. For that reason, he decided not to take Jose into custody to await sentencing. I wonder if he regrets that.

He also told us that there was a chance Jose would receive probation. As we filed out of the courtroom later, we passed the defendant and his lawyers. It occurs to me now that if I'd repeated the judge's words to one of his lawyers, Jose might be in a lot less trouble right now.

These amazing photos of the I-35w Bridge Collapse in Minnesota were taken by Tim Davis. He has a civil engineering background, so his photos really show the enormous force it takes to bend and break something as strong as a road bridge.

As Davis points out, this isn't some chaotic and unavoidable act of nature like an earthquake or a hurricane. This is engineering. The bridge collapsed for a reason.

Teams of engineers and scientists are already searching for the reason. I have no doubt they will find it.

And they will find the people responsible, too.

(Hat tip: Sharon.)

Gateway Pundit links to a story in which the Saudi Arabian government is blaming the bombing of the Shiite Golden Mosque in Samarra on...wait for it...Jews.

This sounds like an opportunity to me. Al Qaeda operatives have already taken credit for both bombings of the mosque, and many Moslems believe that 9/11—also an Al Qaeda operation—was a Jewish scheme to get the United States to invade a few Islamic countries.

We need to start a propaganda campaign to convince the Arab street that Osama bin Laden is taking orders from his Zionist paymasters!

I mean, it would certainly explain why Al Qaeda is killing so many Muslims...

Here are a couple of photos of some of the models from last week's shoot just, you know, takin' a load off and actin' casual...

Larger ImageNicole

Larger ImageJessica

(The shot of Jessica is just for you, Ken.)

Over at Reason, Radley Balko has written a piece about Mississippi dentist Dr. Michael West, who bills himself as a forensic odontologist or bite mark analyst. He has testified at dozens of trials, many leading to convictions.

Bite mark analysis is not exactly the most trusted of forensic disciplines:

Forensic odontology is an imprecise field. It often draws heavy scrutiny from other forensics experts. There's a troublingly long list of cases in which someone convicted on the word of a bite mark expert was later exonerated with improved DNA testing. In 1999, one forensic odontologist tested his colleagues with a sample crime scene bite mark during a conference workshop. Six of 10 wrongly traced the bite mark back to an innocent person.

In 1995, West's testimony helped convict Kennedy Brewer of the rape and strangulation murder of Christine Jackson, and Brewer has spent the last 12 years on death row. However, that conviction has just been overturned based on DNA evidence. The DNA left at the scene belongs to two other people.

West responds that the absense of DNA only means that Brewer didn't do anything that left DNA behind, but that he must have still been at the scene to leave the bite marks behind.

He might have a point if he were doing anything resembling a valid scientific investigation, but he's not. As a matter of fact, he essentially admits he's not doing science, but he seems not to realize it.

But even in an already imprecise field, Dr. Michael West has taken forensic odontology to bizarre, megalomaniacal depths. West claims to have invented a system he modestly calls "The West Phenomenon." In it, he dons a pair of yellow goggles and with the aid of a blue laser, he says he can identify bite marks, scratches, and other marks on a corpse that no one else can see—not even other forensics experts.

Conveniently, he claims his unique method can't be photographed or reproduced, which he says makes his opinions unimpeachable by other experts.

That's the ballgame right there: If it can't be reproduced, it's not science.

I don't deny that some people have unique talents. In fact, according to the article, "Dr. West has compared his virtuosity in bite mark analysis to the musical talent of Itzhak Perlman." It's true that no one else can play violin like Itzhak Perlman. What seems to have escaped Dr. West's notice is that Itzhak Perlman is not a scientist.

Based on what I've read about him, neither is Dr. West.

I was planning to post this 2 days ago, on the 5th anniversary of my first post, but I was so busy with other things that I couldn't finish it in time.

Rather than looking back on the issues I've covered, I'm going to make this is a look back at the blog itself.

Windypundit

When I started Windypundit, it was the early days of blogging when Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit was the king of the bloggers and it wasn't totally uncool to call yourself something-pundit. It took me a while to get used to calling myself "Windypundit" when commenting in forums or on other blogs because it sounded so pretentious, but I forced myself to do it as part of my marketing effort for this blog. By now, I've been Windy for so long now that I'm used to it.

There was a time when I wished I had picked a classier name for the blog, but I'm stuck with it now. Other than a few unfortunate fart jokes, I have no complaints.

Technology

I found the early blogging technology frustrating, and I spent some time trying to write some small bits of blogging software to improve the process. Several times, I caught myself starting fairly large software projects, and I forced myself to stop so I could focus on the writing and not get caught up in the technology.

I decided I needed more capabilities than Blogger offered, so I switched to the MovableType blogging engine, which comes with full source code. Now I had a tool that was good enough for all I wanted to do, but which was still customizable enough to allow me to fiddle with it now and then.

Probably the most prominent bit of fiddling is the MovableType extension tag I wrote to post photographs with titles, drop shadows, and links to larger images.

Hosting

Windypundit started on Blogger, and was originally hosted on Blogspot, but I soon had Blogger publishing everything to the Windows box that hosted my corporate web site because Blogger didn't have photo hosting.

When I switched to MovableType I quickly found out that the Perl programming language under Windows didn't support everything I needed to do, so I switched to Linux hosting. I started with a dirt-cheap account at Loose Foot Computing. Later, I upgraded to 2MHost, which was a MovableType hosting partner, meaning they set up MovableType for me and upgraded it whenever necessary.

Eventually, I started to do more behind-the-scenes programming, and I needed a host that supported that better. I tried Hosting Matters for a while, but found them slightly too restrictive for my needs. Now I'm at Downtown Host which is a little more accomodating.

Photography

Photography is a recently-acquired hobby, so when I started Windypundit I never imagined I'd be photoblogging. Once I started taking pictures, however, I found that it worked well for the blog. If nothing else, I could always post one of my photos to keep the blog going when I was too busy to write anything.

More importantly, instead of commenting on someone else's work, I'm creating original source material. As much as I hope people are interested in my commentary, I know I'm just one of many people who has an opinion. On the other hand, my original photojournalism is exclusive to Windpundit.

In order to integrate more photography into the blog, I needed to find an issue that was both interesting and photogenic. My favorite subjects wouldn't really work: Economics is too abstract to photograph, and the War on Drugs is too dangerous. I finally settled on eminent domain abuse, and I've gotten a few photo spreads out of it.

My MovableType blogging software does some simple photo uploading, but it has no way to display photo galleries. I was tempted to build my own photo galleries, but I decided instead to get an account at Smugmug.

All original photos on Windypundit are served from Smugmug's very fast servers, where I have stored about 9000 photographs (many of them unrelated to the blog).

Traffic

Web traffic to the site has grown a lot less quickly than I hoped when I started. I wasn't expecting to be famous, but I was hoping to do better than I actually have. I suppose one possible explanation for the poor traffic is that my blog sucks, but now that I understand more about the blogosphere works, I think there are some pretty straightforward reasons for the low traffic.

To start with, my traffic stats were absolutely dismal during the first couple of years, which was both a result and a cause of my sparse and sporadic blogging. When I started posting more regularly around the beginning of 2005, my stats began to improve, which encouraged me to post even more. The word on the street is that it's important to post something every day, and three times a day would be even better.

I'm not a fast writer, and my day job keeps me pretty busy, so three-a-day is more than I can manage. That's why multi-author blogs tend to do better than single-author blogs like Windypundit. I took on Gary as a co-blogger this year, but neither of us expected him to post often enough to make a big difference.

Another reason why Windypundit doesn't get lots of traffic is that it's a multi-topic blog. Except for the blockbuster blogs like Daily Kos or Instapundit, most successful blogs tend to focus on a single topic that they cover very well, which attracts people who return again and again to see what's new. Because Windypundit is all over the place, I get fewer regular readers.

Finally, I just don't try very hard to take advantage of opportunities. In May of 2005 I had one of the very first posts on the web about Google Earth, and lots of sites linked to me. I got huge amounts of traffic. If I had been ambitious, I could have used the surge to launch a single-topic Google Earth blog.

Similarly, this post is the #1 Google result for the search phrase "Fucking Sprint" and people are still posting comments to it. If I were smart, I could have built that page out into a whole site for Sprint haters, with stories about the latest evil things Sprint has done, forums for visitors to discuss how bad Sprint is, cartoons, T-shirts for sale, and so on. But frankly, I got over it and have moved on.

As I write this, I've been getting surges of 5 to 20 times my normal daily traffic because I happened to do a post about Harry Potter right in the middle of Pottermania and several of the main Harry Potter sites have linked to me. The smart thing would be to quickly post a bunch of other Harry Potter articles and link to them from the first one to generate more links and return traffic...but I really don't have much more to say about Harry Potter.

Money

I've had Google AdSense up in the sidebar for a little over two years, and it earns me a low-three-figures income. At the very least, I'm covering my hosting fees.

I just started trying out Text-Link-Ads, which appear at the top of the left sidebar. I get paid a flat monthly rate for each of those, regardless of whether anyone actually clicks them. In a good month, I make 50 bucks.

I also have numerous affiliates, including Amazon and Adorama Camera. If you click through to either site and buy something, I get a small piece of it. I make almost no money this way.

Branching Out

In addition to the my Smugmug site, I also have a MySpace page, a Model Mayhem page, a OneModelPlace page, and a Yahoo profile. I'm also trying to start an archive site for storing useful information such as maps and data, but I haven't done anything with it lately.

Advice

I don't have a lot of advice about blogging, and even if I did, Technorati gives Windypundit a rank of 36,688 so you probably shouldn't listen to me. There's plenty of advice out there on the web and Google can find it all for you.

That said, here are a few tips for other minor-league bloggers:

Two bits of information I've found helpful are Joe Carter's advice for new bloggers and Jakob Nielsen's Top Ten Design Mistakes for blogs.

Content is king. No matter how well you market your blog or how well you optimize it for search engines, the thing that unltimately sells it is your original content—what you blog about and how much of it is original with you.

That's not to say that you shouldn't also learn the basics of how to optimize your page for search engines. A little bit of Google PageRank goes a long way. Windypundit is somewhere near the high and of PR 5, which is not huge, but it's enough that when I post about a subject of less than national importance I can get on the first page of Google search results.

For example, in a search for either "chicago gay pride photos" or "chicago marathon photos" my page on that subject is the fourth result. I couldn't do that without some pretty good search engine scores. Note also, however, that both of these pages contain original content that no one else has.

The Future

I'm hoping to build-out the archive site a lot more, with links to my eminent domain photos, data files for Google Earth and Google Maps, and a variety of other non-blogging materials. Other than that...

Other than that, it will be more of the same.

Finally...

Thank you very much to all my regular readers for giving me good reasons to keep on keeping on.