Dear God. I hadn’t been following all of this. Patterico and I have had some heated, downright ugly exchanges in the past, but let’s be clear on this: What’s happening to him right now is terrifying. It’s an attempt to terrorize political opponents into silence.

A couple commenters here have suggested there’s some sort of lesson in all of this about SWAT teams or police or something or other.

No. There are no lessons here. The sociopaths who are harassing Patterico and the other bloggers involved need to be arrested and charged with about a dozen different crimes.

I think I’ve seen them about 10 times now. In that time I’ve also become friends with Chris (Tapp, the guitarist and singer) and Brian (Mullins, the drummer). What’s so impressive about these guys is that they know how incredibly good they are, but at the same time, until you’ve actually seen them on stage for the first time, you’d never know that (a) they’re musicians, and (b) they really are that damned good. The guys wear suits on stage. When they’re finished playing a show Nashville, they drive two hours back to their homes in Henderson, Kentucky. When women flirt with Tapp after a show, he tells them about his wife’s casserole. These guys are far more into music than into being musicians.

It’s been fun to watch their rise. I scan crowds when I go to see them play. You can sit at Nashville’s 3rd and Lindsley and watch one by one, as people who haven’t seen them before slowly come around. Earlier this year, they started working with Nashville superlawyer and music kingmaker Kent Marcus. They’re expecting the master of their first full-length, professionally produced album to be finished next week. It comes out in about six weeks. They were planning a national tour to promote it.

I saw them in Evansville, Indiana a few months ago, just across the state line from their hometown. In Nashville, they still open for other bands. They’re still winning converts. Back home, everyone is converted. The place was sold out. There was a label rep at the Evansville show. He told them he wanted to see if their live show was as good as they sounded on tape. After the show, he told them he wanted to make their recordings sound more like their live show. Watching the steady of success of these two genuine guys, playing original no bullshit, straight-on blues rock, well, it was a beautiful thing to witness.

And then. This week. Well, bloody hell: On Monday, Chris Tapp put up a status update on Facebook that he has cancer.

He’s facing some tough odds. As he explains it, he had some spots removed from his back in 2009. Lab tests for melanoma came back clean. He has since discovered that the lab reports were wrong. Someone fucked up. Which means  that over the last few years, as Tapp and Mullins have been winning battle of the bands competitions, blowing headline bands off the stage, and rattling bar glasses around Nasvhille, as they’ve inched their way to the brink of breaking through, the entire time, cancer has been growing in Tapp, dropping a smothering shroud on all of this just a few weeks before it was about to blow up.

(A little side note: The outpouring of support for Tapp on the band’s Facebook pages is enough to make you forget about all the company’s negative press in recent weeks. Facebook is perfect for this sort of thing. Tapp’s been posting test results shortly after he gets them, at which point he’s smothered with encouragement and expressions of faith from friends, family, and fans.)

Awful as this is for those of us who know and like Chris, for Cold Stares fans eager to see more from him and Brian, none of that is nearly as important as this: The guy has a wife and two kids. Ages 10 and 5.

I’m a writer. Words are how I make my living. And I guess this is the part where I run out of words.

If you’ve become a fan of the band through this site, you might take a minute to send Chris some encouragement, either on his Facebook page, or via email. That’s the point of this post. Give him some support. Chris is a devout Christian, so if that’s your bag, send some prayer his way.

There’s a bit more, too. Over the last ten years, I’ve built a pretty nice platform with this blog. We have a core community of loyal and regular readers here. I hope y’all don’t mind if I exploit that a bit for a friend who could use some help. As I mentioned, Chris is facing long odds. But not impossible odds. But his treatment will be expensive. The way I see it, the last thing he ought to worry about over the coming months is his family’s financial security and his kids’ future. So we’re working on setting up a fund to help with his medical bills, his day to day bills, and whatever other expenses that may come up. I don’t know what sort of fundraising ability this blog has, but to the extent we can help, I’d like to try.

I’ll let you know how you can help once the fund is up and running. This was my idea, by the way. Chris has signed off (reluctantly, I would guess), but he didn’t suggest it. Nor would he, from what I know of him.

The Nashville music community has a nice history of rallying around musicians in Chris’s situation. So we’re also looking into the possibility of some sort of benefit concert. So if you’re in the music industry, or live here in Nashville and think there’s some way you can help, let me know in the comments, or drop me an email.

Finally, I should add that Chris is pretty adamant about welcoming encouragement, but not pity. In an email, he writes: “I’m going to survive, and when we come back musically it’s going to be an extremely powerful event.”

They committed months ago to play my book release party—which I’m hoping will be next spring. As I wrote in an email to him, that gives him about a year to kick this thing in the ass, and then get back into playing shape.

It is Friday, so it seems right to keep with tradition here, and end this post with some music.

A former high school football star whose dreams of a pro career were shattered by a rape conviction burst into tears Thursday as a judge threw out the charge that sent him to prison for more than five years.

Brian Banks, now 26, pleaded no contest 10 years ago on the advice of his lawyer after a childhood friend falsely accused him of attacking her on their high school campus.

In a strange turn of events, the woman, Wanetta Gibson, friended him on Facebook when he got out of prison.

In an initial meeting with him, she said she had lied; there had been no kidnap and no rape and she offered to help him clear his record, court records state.

But she refused to repeat the story to prosecutors because she feared she would have to return a $1.5 million payment from a civil suit brought by her mother against Long Beach schools.

During a second meeting that was secretly videotaped, she told Banks, “‘I will go through with helping you but it’s like at the same time all that money they gave us, I mean gave me, I don’t want to have to pay it back,” according to a defense investigator who was at the meeting.

It was uncertain Thursday whether Gibson will have to return the money.

Uncertain. Jesus. In a just world, she’d be forced to sign what’s left of it over to Banks. Along with half her paycheck for the rest of her life. And that would be only once she gets out of prison.

Let’s not overlook that Gibson hurt a hell of a lot more people than Banks, here. It’s stories like hers that make it more difficult for women to come forward when they actually have been raped. And that make it more difficult for authorities to charge and convict their assailants.

What a nightmare.

Excerpt:

Every day, eighteen people die in the United States while waiting in vain for a kidney transplant, according to the National Kidney Foundation. The Department of Health & Human Services reports that nearly 92,000 patients were on the kidney waiting list as of April 6 (up from 66,000 six years ago), but that only 16,812 transplants were made in 2011. That deadly math is part of the reason that, according to the National Institutes of Health, more than 380,000 Americans are on dialysis, a punitively expensive and physically grueling death-postponement procedure. The imbalance cannot be meaningfully addressed via cadaver-harvesting alone . . .

So we know that maintaining prohibition—letting the law be guided by our moral revulsion toward placing price tags on human organs—will certainly increase the body count. We know that boosting the number of kidney donations from the living is the only real way to whittle the waiting list down. And we also know, from such procedures as egg donation, that legalizing monetary rewards is a guaranteed method for expanding the pool of living donors. Your morality may vary, but mine says that sentencing more than 6,000 people a year to an avoidable death falls well short of the Golden Rule.

A few additional thoughts:

With kidneys, and also with vital organs, you could also envision markets that, for example, would pay a smaller sum while you’re still alive if you sign to donate your organs when you die. Another plan might give larger sums to your family once you’re dead, should you die in a manner in which your vital organs remain viable. It also isn’t difficult to imagine “organ brokers” finding that there’s a market advantage to protecting their donors—for example, by including clauses in donor contracts stipulating that any  kidney donor who later encounters health problems requiring a transplant would receive a free kidney,  a paid-for transplant, and move to the top of the donor list—not because organ brokers would necessarily be kind and benevolent, but because if I were donating a kidney, I’m thinking that would be one of my primary concerns, and I’d probably chose a company or system or non-profit that could give me that peace of mind.

The most common argument against organ markets is that they’ll exploit the poor. That’s basically an appeal to equality. There’s nothing wrong with putting a high value on equality. But if your vision of equality includes letting thousands of people die so we can be confident the poor aren’t being exploited by entering into voluntary transactions in which they’re paid for one of their kidneys, I’d argue that you’re putting far too much emphasis on equality. It’s true that we’re all equal when we’re dead. That doesn’t mean it’s a desirable outcome. The argument is also fairly paternalistic, in that assumes that poor people aren’t capable of making these decisions on their own, so the rest of us should impose the correct decision upon them.

We already let people donate kidneys. We considered them heroes. And with good reason. They’re saving a life. But if the same person accepts compensation for the organ, a large chunk of the population suddenly considers the whole exchange somewhere between tacky and hideous. It doesn’t seem to matter to most people that legalizing the process would result in more lives saved, the very reason why we find donors heroic in the first place.

But the fact that money exchanges hands doesn’t change the end result. Someone still gets a shot at at life that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. I’d submit that if you’re ready to use the force of law to condemn people to die years, possibly decades, earlier than they otherwise would, all so you aren’t burdened with icky feelings about living in a country where organ donors are compensated, it might be time to reassess your principles.

At the same time that the US Department of Transportation is pushing laws to ban in-car cell phone use, it is promoting the “511″ government program that encourages drivers to dial 511 for information on traffic conditions instead of tuning in to a traffic reports on AM radio.

Mike Riggs:

Whether American agents or contractors pulled the trigger that killed two pregnant Honduran women who were headed to a mother’s day celebration, whether they put the gun to the head of a Honduran teenager and then left him bound in the jungle, are disputable facts. Why the Honduran government is waging a war against it people is not: The American government has instructed it to, and is training and equipping its military and law enforcement agencies.

The one interesting result from last night was a surprisingly easy primary win for a protege of Rand Paul’s in an open Republican congressional district in Kentucky. But Paul had some outside help. You think Super PACs are having an impact on presidential politics? Check this out from the Louisville Courier-Journal . . .

Here’s Kilgore’s excerpt from the Courier-Journal article:

[Thomas] Massie came into the race largely unknown in the district’s population center of Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties but was able to overcome his lack of name recognition by scoring a couple of big name endorsements and getting the backing of several tea party organizations.

He also got more than $500,000 worth of backing from a super PAC called Liberty for All, which was funded almost entirely by a 21-year-old Texas college student with an inheritance. The group ran ads supporting Massie and criticizing Webb-Edgington and Moore.

Marc Wilson, a supporter of Webb-Edgington, criticized the group after the ballots were counted.

“It’s a shame that a Texas libertarian super PAC could come in and invade the Republican Party to buy a congressional seat,” he said.

Kilgore comments:

Wow. Wonder if the kid down in Texas turned in a term paper to his poli sci class entitled “How I bought a congressional seat in Kentucky.”

Hmm. Well instead of tossing off unhelpful descriptors like “Rand Paul protege,” let’s look more closely at the candidates’ actual records and positions. Mike Riggs profiled Thomas Massie for Reason a few months ago. Some highlights:

Immediately after winning the election for judge executive in 2010 (a position similar to county manager), Massie began eliminating waste. “None of that necessarily included any layoffs or anything,” Hogan says. “It was just going through the phone bill for phone lines that weren’t connected anymore, electrical meters that weren’t hooked up.” Massie also cancelled a deal between Lewis County and a railroad company after learning that the county was paying to lease land that the railroad had sold nearly 20 years ago. “The county had just been paying this money to the railroad company,” Hogan says. “Thomas could never get a response out of them. So he didn’t pay the bill.” When the railroad called asking for rent, Thomas asked for the county’s money back.

So he put an end to his local government handing free money over to a corporation. And he made sure the local government wasn’t paying for phone lines and utilities that were no longer functional. He also stopped a county treasurer from using taxpayer funds to replenish the gravel in her driveway. What a right-wing nut!

More from Riggs:

Massie’s small-government instincts extend far beyond keeping a tight grip on the checkbook. He’s also opposed to the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretapping, the police state, the drug war, and military adventurism.

Huh. If you’re a progressive, on these issues Massie is a sight better than most Democrats in Congress, no?

So what about establishment GOP candidate Alecia Webb-Edgington, the party favorite from whom Massie and his super PAC money allegedly stole this nomination?

A former member of the Kentucky State Police and the Department of Homeland Security, Webb-Edgington also helped launch Kentucky’s DHS-funded Fusion Center and told the crowd at a 2010 Lincoln Dinner, “We don’t need any more socialists, communists, or libertarians in the Republican Party.”

Webb-Eddington has also made deporting more immigrants a central part of her campaign.

On social issues, the two are virtually the same. Both are pro-life, favor fewer gun restrictions, and oppose gay marriage. So let’s call that a wash.

So what happened last night, then, is that instead of an establishment, party machine GOP operative who supports the Homeland Security-industrial state, Kentucky got a waste-cutting opponent of the PATRIOT ACT and other war-on-terror government power who also wants to end pointless wars, repeal drug prohibition, and has a record of tackling corruption. Given that the GOP nominee will be the favorite in November, you’d think Massie’s victory would be something a progressive like Kilgore could appreciate.

Kilgore is right on one point. Without the half million dollar infusion from the super PAC, it’s doubtful Massie would have won. And that of course is precisely the point. Strict limits on campaign contributions only further entrench the two major parties. If your views aren’t in line with establishment thinking, if the party machinery has backed a more traditional candidate with predictable positions, you’ll be starting your campaign in a hole. They have the phone lists, the donor lists, the existing office holders and the perks of their offices, name recognition, and the campaign infrastructure. It takes money to overcome all of that. It takes money to merely be heard. Take all the money out of politics (assuming you could—you can’t) and the two-party machinery advantages don’t go away. It just makes it more difficult to challenge them.

So I’d ask Ed Kilgore: Let’s assume the GOP nominee wins this seat in November. Aren’t progressives better off with Thomas Massie in Congress than with Alecia Webb-Edgington? And if super PAC spending is the reason why that’s now likely to happen, how does particular race illustrate the perils of unlimited campaign spending?

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.