It’s reassuring to see Packman’s hard work land at a place that will give it the institutional support and high profile it deserves.

Why? Paperwork.

Elroy Phillips will remain in federal prison in Miami while prosecutors and his defense attorney file a joint motion outlining again why they think he should be set free. U.S. District Court Judge Joan A. Lenard demanded the paperwork at a hearing this afternoon instead of accepting a joint motion to release Phillips.

The new paperwork is yet another legal hurdle for Phillips, who thought he was going to be released two weeks ago when prosecutors finally agreed to drop the charges.

Phillips spent years while behind bars trying to prove his innocence. He requested documents, hired a private investigator, and got a paralegal’s license so he could file his own court paperwork. When he learned two weeks ago that prosecutors planned to drop the charges, his daughter, Shatroyia Phillips, brought him clothes to wear when he’s released. At his hearing today, he wore a jail-issued white shirt and brown pants, his hands handcuffed behind his back.

Lenard said she couldn’t release Phillips because she needed to see it on paper. “It has a very broad sweep and differing legal theories,” Lenard said. “There are a lot of moving parts here.”

Lenard also happens to be the judge who presided over Phillips’ trial in 2003.

There was no dispute in court Friday in Jefferson City that favorable evidence was improperly withheld from George Allen’s defense in a St. Louis murder trial almost three decades ago.

What stands between Allen, 56, and freedom is the question of whether that evidence exonerates him or is likely to have swayed the jury that convicted him.

On that, there was no agreement in the daylong hearing.

Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green, in charge of the case now, said he would decide later in what are two options: exonerating him with the possibility of a retrial, or leaving him in prison to finish his 95-year term.

Among the evidence casting doubt on Allen’s guilt:

• A coerced confession from a schizophrenic suspect. Even after the confession, the suspect continued to give police incorrect information about the crime. One of the detectives who conducted the questioning now concedes the interrogation was not consistent with department policy.
• Allen also confessed to a number of other rapes he couldn’t possibly have committed.
• A jailhouse informant says he was coerced by police to claim Allen had confessed to him in a jail cell.
• An admission from the same detective above that investigators weren’t certain of Allen’s guilt.
• Three fingerprints at the crime scene that were never analyzed.
• In Allen’s first trial, the jury deadlocked 10-2, with the 10 voting to acquit.

But here’s the most convincing part:

[Defense attorneys] also focused heavily on a written report by a St. Louis police crime lab technician, Joseph Crow, in which there were crossed-out references to analysis of the crumpled, bloody robe found near Bell’s naked body. The blood type from semen on it did not match hers, her live-in boyfriend’s or Allen’s. A typed report presented to prosecutors, and used at trial, did not make reference to those findings.

Scheck pointed out that a police report, which never went beyond lead detective Herb Riley, showed police had been looking for a suspect with the same blood type as found on the robe.

“The defense should have had this,” he said. “That’s a powerful argument they never got to make.”

Assistant Missouri Attorney General Michael Spillane said the semen wasn’t relevant because, “This was not truly a forensics case. It was a confession case.”

Well yeah. Of course it wasn’t a forensics case. It wasn’t a forensics case because the forensic evidence was improperly kept from Allen’s attorneys. If it had been a forensics case, the forensic evidence would have excluded Allen, and he would never have been arrested, much less charged, convicted, and imprisoned. (Serology is a poor way to pin a crime on someone to the exclusion of everyone else. It’s much stronger evidence when used to exclude someone.)

This was an “arrest a mentally disabled guy walking in the area of the crime because he looks vaguely like a sex offender, then coerce a confession out of him” case. But that probably doesn’t sound very convincing in a courtroom.

A uniformed NYPD sergeant was caught on video unleashing a vulgar tirade against a group of Brooklyn men — threatening them with his gun even while condoning their criminal behavior, The Post has learned.

Sgt. Lesly Charles even indicated that some criminal activity is apparently OK on his beat — as long as he’s paid proper respect.

“You guys are hustling or whatever, I ain’t got no problem with that. Listen . . . do your thing,” Charles barked during the April 28 diatribe, which is now being investigated by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board. “But when I come around and I speak, you f–king listen. Tell your boys.”

Then he started with the fantasies threats.

“I have the long d–k. You don’t,” the cop bragged.

“Your pretty face — I like it very much. My d–k will go in your mouth and come out your ear. Don’t f–k with me. All right?”

After the target of his tirade insisted, “I didn’t do anything,” Charles retorted, “Listen to me. When you see me, you look the other way. Tell your boys, I don’t f–k around. All right?”

“I’ll take my gun and put it up your a– and then I’ll call your mother afterwards. You understand that?”

For good measure, the sergeant added: “And I’ll put your s–t in your own mouth.”

. . . and the punchline.

Charles, reached at home yesterday, said, “I’m just doing God’s work. You know I can’t comment . . . Have a blessed day.”

It’s a paltry figure, which I think speaks volumes about the strength of Hayne’s case. Unfortunately, that they paid any money at all allows Hayne’s attorney to make claims like this:

Hayne’s attorney, Dale Danks Jr., said he “most definitively” believes Hayne has been vindicated by the judgment.”Very derogatory statements were made against him,” Danks said. “He is pleased to get this behind him. It was not a matter of money.”

Vindicated. Sure. I mean, he has been barred from doing any more state autopsies in Mississippi. And the Mississippi legislature passed a bill specifically aimed at keeping him from ever being used by prosecutors in the state again. And he was forced to resign his membership in the National Association of Medical Examiners in the face of an ethics inquiry. But sure. Let’s go with vindicated.

Here’s where the story accelerates from mildly irritating to outright appalling:

The project’s work helped lead to the exoneration of several individuals, including Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks, each of whom had been convicted of raping and murdering a child. Brewer spent 15 years behind bars and had been on death row, and Brooks, sentenced to life in prison, had spent18 years.

Both men from Noxubee County have lawsuits against Hayne, who testified for the prosecution at their trials.

But Danks said Hayne deserves credit for helping to prove the innocence of Brewer and Brooks by preserving the DNA evidence that exonerated the men.

The attorney for the guy who, along with Michael West, was the main reason two innocent men spent nearly two decades each in prison—one of whom was nearly executed—says we should thank Steven Hayne for their eventual exonerations.

There is no official record-keeping system for exonerations of convicted criminals in the country, so academics set one up. The new national registry, or database, painstakingly assembled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, is the most complete list of exonerations ever compiled.

The database compiled and analyzed by the researchers contains information on 873 exonerations for which they have the most detailed evidence. The researchers are aware of nearly 1,200 other exonerations, for which they have less data.

They found that those 873 exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each. Nine out of 10 of them are men and half are African-American.

Nearly half of the 873 exonerations were homicide cases, including 101 death sentences. Over one-third of the cases were sexual assaults.

DNA evidence led to exoneration in nearly one-third of the 416 homicides and in nearly two-thirds of the 305 sexual assaults.

And of course these are merely those who were able to get a court’s attention. I’ve been told by defense attorneys, for example, that there are people in Parchman Penitentiary going back to the 1960s and 1970s for whom there isn’t even any record of a trial. That 2,000 figure also wouldn’t include someone like Cory Maye.

You can peruse the registry here.

Here’s the gist: When the friends and family of people arrested for drug crimes bring in cash to bail someone out, police in Brown County, Wisconsin are turning the cash over to a drug task force, which then brings out a drug dog inspect the bills. When the dog alerts, the cops are then seizing the money for the police department, citing state and federal civil asset forfeiture laws.

So the cops keep the money for themselves, and the suspect remains in a jail cell.

Read all about it here.

Tillman pulled over Cheryl Helfrich, 50, of Maryville for failure to display any registration and claimed to find a “crack pipe” inside Helfrich’s car. He arrested the woman and the Madison County State’s Attorney’s Office charged her with unlawful possession of a controlled substance on Jan. 18.

Then, in March, the woman’s attorney told the state’s attorney that Helfrich did have temporary registration affixed to her car at the time of the stop and asked whether a video or audio recording was made of the incident as it wasn’t mentioned in Tillman’s report, according to a press release from the Madison County State’s Attorney’s Office.

Per procedure, the Collinsville police department requires in-car videos to be logged if the end result is a felony charge.

The state’s attorney’s office reviewed the tapes and discovered Helfrich did have a valid temporary registration on her vehicle, even though it is not mentioned in Tillman’s report. His report also did not log any video or audio recording into evidence. The recording, which also showed Helfrich was Tillman’s neighbor, was backed up by the department’s system, according to the release.

The state’s attorney’s office dismissed the felony charge against Helfrich on March 13 and began reviewing Tillman’s actions.

“There is no allegation that the evidence was planted, but because it was an unlawful stop, it would have probably been inadmissible in court,” said Stephanee Smith, spokeswoman for the state’s attorney.

The Collinsville police department suspended Tillman, according to the release.

State’s Attorney Thomas Gibbons commended the Collinsville police for investigating the matter and bringing it to his attention.

It’s nice to see an officer held accountable for an illegal stop, lying about the registration, and for apparently either failing to turn on his dash camera or erasing the video after the fact. But these are pretty serious charges, and seem a bit out of place for jurisdiction known for bad stops and questionable searches.

I thought at first that this might be a reaction to the negative publicity over the Terrance Huff case, but the grand jury investigation began about two weeks before my Huffington Post article on Terrance Huff gave the story some national exposure, and about two months before Huff filed his lawsuit. So the timing doesn’t quite work.

To be fair, Collinsville Police Chief Scott Williams did initially try to fire Officer Michael Reichert, the cop involved in the Terrance Huff case (among others). It was a state appeals court that ordered Reichert back on the force. Williams also then went on to give Reichert awards, has since publicly defended him, and was rather duplicitous with me when I interviewed him. But a little empathy for Williams, here: I’d imagine it’s pretty damned difficult to balance a desire to do the right thing with pushback from a cop-friendly appeals court, with abiding by the terms of a police union contract he didn’t negotiate, with trying to simultaneously maintain morale among, respect from, and authority over the officers in his department.

That isn’t to say I agree with all of Williams’ decisions. I’m only pointing out that generally speaking, even a conscientious, well-intentioned police chief can catch a lot of blowback from a lot of different places when he tries to start holding bad cops accountable.

Just look at what they’re doing to Chief Ken Burton in Columbia, Missouri.

Cannabis has passed the tipping point toward widespreadsocial acceptance (and probable legalization). Even prominent judges in states where marijuana is illegal are coming out as users and advocates. And now, if pop culture and scientific inquiry are any indicators, it would seem that psychedelics are re-entering the national dialogue with a marked separation from their perceived hippie past—and that’s probably a good thing.

Today, scientists throughout the country are delving into the trippy world of psychedelics to finally provide some concrete data and potential uses for the long-illegal drugs. Most notable, perhaps, is the work of Charles Grob at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, which was recently profiled in the New York Times Magazine. Grob has been administering psilocybin, the active chemical in magic mushrooms, to terminal cancer patients, with the hope of alleviating their understandable end-of-life anxiety. And it’s been working.

Harvard’s John Halpern conducted recent research that indicates LSD is an effective treatment for debilitatingly painful cluster headaches, even at sub-psychedelic doses. He started a company, Entheogen Corp., around manufacturing and distributing a non-trippy LSD derivative known as BOL-148 to treat the disorder.

Even Oprah Winfrey’s mag wrote up a story last year detailing a doctor’s use of MDMA, Ecstasy’s main ingredient, as a treatment for PTSD in rape victims. Results from that study indicate that some 83 percent of subjects felt that the use of MDMA helped them overcome their traumas.

Now more than ever, America could use the cautionary wisdom (and mind-blowing special effects expertise) of an 11-year-old Radley Balko.

(Note to the ONDCP: This video is better than most of yours. Make me an offer.)

Three out-of-state men arrested in a Bridgeport apartment raid days before the NATO summit were charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism and possession of an explosive or incendiary device, their attorney and police said early Saturday.

The arrests were the result of a month-long investigation into a group suspected of making Molotov cocktails — crude bombs usually created by filling glass bottles with gasoline, according to law enforcement sources and police records obtained by the Tribune.

But the National Lawyers Guild, which is representing the men, said they were simply NATO protesters who had beer-making equipment when the apartment they were staying at was raided overnight Wednesday.

The men also were in a car that was stopped by police a week ago, leading to a YouTube video of the stop that has prompted protesters to complain Chicago Police were harassing the occupants, said Sarah Gelsomino, a lawyer with the guild.

She called the charges “an attempt to continue this intimidation campaign on activists. Charging these people who are here to peacefully protest against NATO for terrorism, when in reality the police have been terrorizing activists in Chicago, is absolutely outrageous.”

I’ve posted the video below. From the audio, it appears that police pulled the car over for turning around in a “private driveway.” The cops then proceed to tease, harass, and threaten the occupants of the car. At one point, one cop asks a fellow officer if the law permits him to lock up one of the occupants for wearing a bandanna in public. The headline quote is from a cop the video, who is waxing nostalgic for the 1968 DNC riots. You’ll also hear the line, “OK, now we’ll beat your white ass,” which is how one of the cops responded to an accusation of racism.

Back in 2009, Chicago PD sent a bunch of cops to Pittsburgh to help out with security at the G20 summit. While they’re, the got themselves a souvenir by arresting a kid, charging him with BS crimes, then forcing him to pose with them for a trophy photo.

But I still think my favorite story from recent political protests is this t-shirt, which was distributed by the Denver police union during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

(*Second rule, not applicable here: The fattest guy in the band plays the mandolin.)

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the program. It seems there could be some church/state concerns, particularly when the department starts handing out “badges” to religious leaders (although it isn’t clear if the badges imply any real authority). On the other hand, policing has grown far too reactionary. One of the byproducts of the militarization trend is the “us versus them” mentality it tends to ingrain in cops, even those that don’t serve on SWAT teams or drug task forces. It’s generally a good idea for cops to be more active in the communities they serve. And churches obviously are a pretty important part of many communities.

In any case, the alliance in Houston is breaking down, because Houston police don’t want the ministers they’re working with to criticize them. The fissures started forming when a Houston police officer was recently acquitted on criminal charges after beating a teenager.

Eyewitness News spoke with the coordinator of the group Houston Ministers Against Crimes and he says it’s situations like the Chad Holley case why they are no longer working with the Houston Police Department.

“This is their rule book. They took our group, the Houston Ministers Against Crime, and changed it to PACA (Police and Clergy Alliance),” said the Rev. Robert Jefferson with the Cullen Missionary Baptist Church.

Reverend Jefferson is one of dozens of ministers who are no longer working with HPD. Houston Ministers Against Crime and the police department had a partnership for more than three decades. But just recently, HPD adopted new guidelines for the Police and Clergy Alliance, also called PACA.

“In PACA, you cannot speak out against the city, nor the police department, you cannot associate yourself with people who are speaking out, and you cannot cause any kind of problem in the city as long as you’re carrying a PACA badge,” said Rev. Jefferson.

Wednesday’s verdict in the Chad Holley case, Rev. Jefferson says, is an example as a case he would not be able to discuss under the new guidelines. But since turning in his PACA badge, he spoke openly to us about it.

“Yes, I do feel like they whooped that boy unmercifully and somebody should be punished,” Rev. Jefferson said.

Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland says he has done nothing to curb anyone’s First Amendment rights to speak or say what they want.

“But as a member of PACA, if you are representing PACA, obviously we don’t endorse any political views, and I think that’s proper,” said Chief McClelland.

“It’s saying shut up, muzzle it, don’t say nothing or we take your badge. That’s what it says,” Rev. Jefferson said.

Part of the new PACA guidelines are that members can’t hold a press conference or press briefing to condemn city administration or the Houston Police Department. In addition, members aren’t allowed to represent anyone in any matter adverse to the city or HPD.

If the point of the program was to promote and celebrate Houston’s police officers, I suppose you can’t really fault HPD, here. If the intent was to nurture dialogue and relationships between the department and the city’s churches on crime and policing issues—a far more productive objective—then the new HPD guidelines are obviously counterproductive.

Meanwhile, here’s an email I received today from a pain patient in Tennessee.

Hi Mr. Balko. First, thank you so very, very,  much for being the “voice” for all of us chronic pain disease people. I have a rare disease called RSD/CRPS. It is rated the highest of all pain diseases on the Mcgill Pain Scale. It is rated higher in pain than child birth or the loss of a digit. I am on a fentanyl patch and other meds as well. I have recently been informed that the pharmacies near me will no longer fill opiate pain meds! My husband has to drive all over the state to find a place that will fill my medicine. I would be willing to talk to you if it will help me and others with the nightmare we are living. Again, thank you for what you are trying to do. We need you.

After my Huffington Post series on chronic pain, I created a file for emails from pain patients who can’t find treatment. It’s up to 300 messages.

But they must all be lying. Because the drug czar assures me such people don’t exist.