Land of living skies and utility box tributes to the father of medicare. Hail Saskatchewan!

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has just released a special report on Contacts between Police and the Public in 2005 [313 KB PDF]. Each year, about one in five people in America have an encounter with a police officer, mostly in traffic stops.

There’s lots of interesting information in the BJS’s series of “police and public” reports (like how, in 2005, 83% of people who experienced police use of force thought it was excessive), but the most interesting of all is the data about people giving consent to search. Of the roughly 850,000 police searches in 2005, well over half (57%) were by consent. And in about 10% of those consent searches, the police found criminal evidence.

Why do people consent to police searches, especially people who know the police are going to find criminal evidence? Could it be that they don’t know—or at least don’t truly believe—that they can refuse consent? Could it be that, even if they do know, they don’t know how to and have never had a chance to practice refusing consent (in a role-play, for example)?

The U.S. Supreme Court has said that the police don’t have to tell you that you are allowed to refuse consent to a search. The federal and state governments don’t really spend any money to educate people about their right to refuse consent to a search, either. Even most know-your-rights efforts that do educate people about refusing consent don’t help people practice what it’s like to actually refuse consent (though some do).

Once upon a time, back in 1972, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that for a consent to a search to be valid, the police would have to be able to prove that you gave it “with an understanding that it could be freely and effectively withheld.” But the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the Ninth Circuit on that, saying that to require police to tell you that you were allowed to refuse your consent would be “thoroughly impractical.” Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting (inspiringly and forcefully, as usual), made this point:

I must conclude, with some reluctance, that when the Court speaks of practicality, what it really is talking of is the continued ability of the police to capitalize on the ignorance of citizens so as to accomplish by subterfuge what they could not achieve by relying only on the knowing relinquishment of constitutional rights.

About a decade earlier, as the Supreme Court was lunging towards its decision in Miranda v. Arizona (which spelled out how the police should read you your rights before questioning you), Justice Arthur Goldberg put an even sharper end on this point:

[N]o system of criminal justice can, or should, survive if it comes to depend for its continued effectiveness on the citizens’ abdication through unawareness of their constitutional rights. . . . If the exercise of constitutional rights will thwart the effectiveness of a system of law enforcement, then there is something very wrong with that system.

I’m off to spend May Week and Beltane in Saskatoon and Winnipeg, the socialist hearts of Canada’s Prairie Provinces. More from the road if I can.

A number of courts around the US have begun offering RSS feeds of court opinions and news. So far, the Idaho courts have not (as far as I know). For my own benefit, I’ve used Feed43 to create feeds of the published opinions of the Idaho Supreme Court and Idaho Court of Appeals. In case anyone else wants to use them, here they are:

• Idaho Supreme Court Civil Opinions (RSS feed)
• Idaho Supreme Court Criminal Opinions (RSS feed)
• Idaho Supreme Court Case Orders (RSS feed)
• Idaho Court of Appeals Civil Opinions (RSS feed)
• Idaho Court of Appeals Criminal Opinions (RSS feed)

They aren’t as pretty as I’d like because I can’t get Feed43 to stop choking on en dashes. Perhaps I’ll work on that, but hopefully the court will soon begin offering its own feeds and mine will become unnecessary.

This week has been a complete Canadian freakout. Wednesday was the Arar, Canadian folk hero thing. Tuesday was the 25th anniversary of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the patriation of Canada’s constitution—a big… no, a huge deal. And then this coming Monday will be the 110th anniversary of the birth of legendary Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Pearson was once just the name of an airport to me, but now I’ll be damned if this Mike guy wasn’t responsible for just about everything that’s come to mean “Canada” to the world: the maple leaf flag, universal healthcare, official biligualism, and the Auto Pact.

But all of that is a trifle next to what has suddenly infected every minute of Canadian life: the playoffs. My God.

My God!! When I arrived here, I was surprised at how big of a deal hockey was. And I had expected hockey to be a big deal. Then, the NHL season started. Games were covered regularly on the official national television network. Hockey scores led newscasts. When more than half of the Canadian NHL teams were playing in a single night, HNIC would go completely fucking insane. And then there was Hockey Day. And the five dollar bill. And Hockey: A People’s History—where in documentary after documentary, the CBC explained how hockey is the central basis and metaphor for Canadian life.

The playoffs have changed all that. Canada is no longer going apeshit over hockey. It has pushed far outside of the apeshit envelope and plunged into a minute-by-minute maniac obsession that I’m confident nobody in my blasé, cynical America has ever approached. The nightly news and, indeed, all non-hockey programming is now long gone from the CBC, in prime time. TSN, the Canadian ESPN, has launched a war room for keeping its vigil on the tournament. If something drastic happens, like, say, a shooting rampage, the CBC just commandeers other TV channels so that the hockey coverage doesn’t flag. I have heard four-year-old girls offering studied game analysis, while walking to school, that would go way over the head of the highest paid professional hockey pundits in the States. Club meetings and volunteer events have all wound down until the end of playoff season. Hell, nobody even ever says “Stanley Cup playoffs” or “NHL playoffs.”

It’s just “the playoffs.” Only fools and tourists wouldn’t know what you were talking about. They do not speak the same language here. They speak hockey.

I’ve just returned from a lecture given by Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was tortured in Syria after being sent there by the United States. Although Arar’s case is not unique, what makes it special is that he could not be any less of a terrorist, by pretty much all accounts, including the official account of the Canadian federal government (”I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada”).

Arar is something of a folk hero for Canadians, especially Canadian liberals. It’s kind of a holy grail of situations for many progressive Canucks, who yearn for opportunities to both (a) condemn the Canadian government and (b) condemn the American government, yet (c) ultimately be able to point out that the Canadian government is less offensive than the American government. And wow, is this the set of facts for doing all of that:

1. Arar is headed home to Montréal after a vacation in Tunisia.
2. He’s got a layover in JFK (note to Canadians: don’t layover in the US!)
3. US officials detain him, tell him he can’t have a lawyer and that he can’t call a lawyer. He does get to see someone from the Canadian consulate, who tells him, “oh, they won’t send you to Syria—the Americans would never do that.”
4. Then they chain him, shackle him, and send him to Jordan.
5. Jordan hands him over to Syrian Military Intelligence.
6. Arar spends 10 and a half months in a six-foot by three-foot cell, and is tortured and forced to sign a false confession.
7. He’s finally released. Canada launches a full inquiry into the case and finds that the RCMP, Canada’s federal police force, had provided false information on Arar to US officials, information that probably caused his rendition to Syria. It also finds that Arar was really and truly tortured, and that he is not a terrorist and not a threat to national security. Canada and the RCMP apologize to Arar and settle with him for CDN$12 million.

The United States government, for its part, continues to deny any wrongdoing. It continues to deny, in fact, that it has ever rendered anybody to Syria or that it did anything other than “deport” Arar. And it has refused to remove Arar’s name from its no-fly and terrorist watch lists, despite a formal protest from the Government of Canada. Indeed, David Wilkins, US ambassador to Canada (and in whose home I was recently a guest and enjoying the off-color jokes of his drunken South Carolinian good old boy friends, to the point of tears), spoke in Edmonton (while I was in Halifax) and pretty much said “fuck you” to Canada for even suggesting what America should do about Arar. The US ambassador to Canada during the time of the Canadian inquiry (not Wilkins) refused to testify before it. The US Department of Justice won dismissal of Arar’s suit against the US government by invoking the state secrets privilege and claiming that even disclosing the reason for detaining Arar in the first place would threaten national security.

The impact of hearing a man who your own country extraordinarily rendered into torture—a man standing closer to you than your professors in law school did—is impossible to describe. Even if you don’t believe Arar or the Canadian inquiry’s findings, hearing the account of Arar’s experience firsthand would be troubling. One of the “lessons” that Arar said we can learn from this is that Canada and the United States do not see the world in the same way; that if he had been an American citizen, he would probably still be in that tiny Syrian cell. It is chilling to realize that he is probably right.