Florida’s famous Sunshine Law is under attack in the state legislature today as a state House Committee has already voted to eliminate the provision that guarantees government agencies must pay citizens’ attorney fees when public records are illegally withheld.
Its companion measure, Florida State Senate Bill 1220, passed in committee today with a 3-0 vote and two abstentions.
So last week, a video of a frisky cop mistaking a man’s penis for a deadly weapon had gone viral on Imgur, a short video with no audio that generated laughs, comments and compliments, but revealed no background.
The bizarre footage showed a shirtless, shoeless man being heavily patted down – groin area and all – as his hands are behind his back.
It took four hours for a federal jury to determine that an Oregon state trooper violated a man’s civil rights by kicking him in the chest after chasing him down in an unmarked patrol car and ramming into the man’s motorcycle, knocking him down and leaving him with a fractured rib and broken clavicle.
Justin Wilkins was awarded $180,000 in what his attorney described as “a message from the community.”
An undercover sheriff’s deputy in Minnesota spotted a citizen recording him with a cellphone camera while driving and used his unmarked police vehicle to conduct a contentious, and probably unlawful traffic stop.
“The ACLU will eat this up” said the Minnesota woman who wasn’t suspected of a crime, but unlawfully detained by a Stearns County sheriff’s deputy in the three videos shared below.
She’s probably right.
PINAC reporter Jeff Gray received 38 “school safe zones” / trespassing warning letters from the Superintendent of St. Johns County schools and every single principal of every single school in his home county, where his children are enrolled.
The letters were dated December 7th, a day that will now live in censorship infamy.
Nebraska police arrested the founder of Omaha Cop Block for doing nothing more than “using four letter words” on a public sidewalk.
The Omaha police officer Lucpdo felt mocked, so he used his badge and gun to get street justice, punishing Floyd Wallace with a trip to jail for contempt of cop.
The YouTube effect doesn’t happen for police quite the same as it does for activists, since the officer’s video hasn’t yet surfaced.
Florida’s St. Johns County School Board has filed and served a strategic lawsuit against Jeff Gray’s First Amendment activities targeting the PINAC reporter for his investigatory work on school bus safety in the 35,000 student district.
The New York Times usually gets it right, but the Newspaper of Record published an op-ed piece titled “How to Prosecute Abusive Prosecutors” containing a glaring factual error.
While we support the ACLU’s efforts and mission at PINAC News, we wish they would have returned our calls and emails this past week as we did our research.
A Miami-Dade police detective has come clean about stealing some bling.
Karel Rosario, a 19-year veteran, pleaded guilty earlier this week on Tuesday to stealing expensive jewelry while on-duty during a search warrant.
According to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, Rosario came clean about taking a Cartier watch, a bracelet and a couple of other pieces of jewelry in May from a suspect’s home. The suspect was being investigated for allegedly selling pharmaceutical drugs.
UPDATE III: The man killed by police has been identified as 52-year-old David Winesett, who had a long criminal history.
David Winesett
UPDATE II: A new longer video has surfaced along with an extended version of the first video. The newest video is the first of the videos below.
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