Reason Magazine - Topics > Abortion

• Dymond Milburn Update
  

  A few updates on Dymond Milburn, the Galveston, Texas girl I posted about last week. Milburn and her family are suing the Galveston Police Department.  They allege that two years ago, several plain-clothes officers jumped out of a van, accosted her in her yard, and assaulted and beat her during a raid in which they mistook her for a prostitute.  She was 12 at the time.  Three weeks later, the police then arrested Milburn at her school in front of her classmates, and charged her with assaulting the police officers who were wrongfully arresting her.  Her father has also been charged with assault.

  The updates:

  • There's been some chatter on various blogs and message boards that the story may be a hoax. While I'm sure the police account of the incidents differs from that of Milburn, her family, and her attorney, the lawsuit itself is real. Here's a copy (pdf) of the complaint. And here's a record of the filing in federal court.

  • The Galveston Daily News picked up the story this morning. They're reporting that Galveston police and the district attorney's office can't comment on the case because Milburn is a juvenile.  Neither office has returned my calls, either. The attorney for the officers Milburn is suing did give the following statement to the Houston Press:

  "The father basically attacked police officers as they were trying to take the daughter into custody after she ran off."

  "The city has investigated the matter and found that the conduct of the police officers was appropriate under the circumstances.  It's unfortunate that sometimes police officers have to use force against people who are using force against them. And the evidence will show that both these folks violated the law and forcefully resisted arrest."

  As far as I can tell, Texas does appear to allow for a citizen to resist an unlawful arrest if the arrest meets certain conditions:

  Texas Penal Code Chapter 9, Subchapter C, Section 9.31, Subsection C:

  (c) The use of force to resist an arrest or search is justified: (1) if, before the actor offers any resistance, the peace officer (or person acting at his direction) uses or attempts to use greater force than necessary to make the arrest or search; and (2) when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is immediately necessary to protect himself against the peace officer's (or other person's) use or attempted use of greater force than necessary. 

  Even setting aside the severe beating Milburn's lawsuit says she received at the hands of the police (which is presumably backed by records from the hospital she was admitted to later that night), you're left with several plain-clothes police officers jumping out of an unmarked van, calling a 12-year-old girl a prostitute, then attempting to snatch her from her own front yard. I would think that those actions alone would satisfy the "greater force than necessary" portion of the statute.

  • It looks like one of the officers named in Mlburn's lawsuit, Officer Sean Stewart, was named a Galveston PD "Officer of the Year" last June.  See page five, here (pdf).

   

• Hayek in the Stagflation Days of Yesteryear (and tomorrow)?
  A blast from the stagflation past (and future)? The audio track from Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek's June 22, 1975, appearance on "Meet the Press." Against all odds and all the interviewers, he steadfastly maintains that inflation is a monetary phenomenon, and the government's fault.
  
• Woman May Lose Her Home Because of Decade-Old Blowjob
  

  Wendy Whitaker, 29, has been on Georgia's sex offender list for more than 12 years.  Her crime?  She performed oral sex on a high school classmate just after turning 17.  The boy was just shy of his 16th birthday.  Both were sophomores.  Whitaker is now suing, claiming that given her crime, her sex offender status is cruel and unusual punishment.

  After the international uproar associated with the Genarlow Wilson case (Wilson, you'll remember, was convicted of a similar crime—having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old while he was 17), Georgia's legislature clarified state law to prevent these sorts of cases—what Whitaker did 12 years ago is no longer a crime in Georgia.  But because some Georgia lawmakers stubbornly wanted to keep Wilson in jail, the legislature took a separate vote to keep the law from applying retroactively.  Wilson and Whitaker are still convicted felons.  Whitaker's suit cites the Georgia Supreme Court's ruling in Wilson's case, which found that Wilson's 10-year sentence and mandatory sex offender status amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

  The question is whether the court will consider the registration requirement in and of itself cruel and unusual punishment for people convicted of consensual oral sex as minors before the law was changed.

  Whitaker is also involved in a second lawsuit—this one to keep her house.  In 2006, she and her husband scoped out neighborhood surrounding the Harlem, Georgia home they eventually purchased to be sure they were in compliance with Georgia's sex offender law at the time.  That law prohibited offenders from living within 1,000 feet of any area where children congregate.  Despite their efforts, local authorities ordered Whitaker and her husband to vacate shortly after they moved in.  They had overlooked a nearby church, which was running an unadvertised daycare service.

  That law was struck down by the Georgia Supreme Court last year, giving Whitaker a brief reprieve.  But Georgia's legislature then passed a revised law earlier this year, one lawmakers apparently believed is in compliance with the state supreme court's decision, but that still manages to rope in Whitaker.  Last week, she was told she has to move out of her home by Thanksgiving.  If that happens, she'll likely have to foreclose.

  reason's Jacob Sullum wrote on Georgia's sex offender law here and here.  Kerry Howley wrote on sex offender exile laws here.

• 40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets
  

  When reason began in 1968, it was just one of many mimeographed zines then pushing a mostly obscure political and philosophical vision known as libertarianism. At the time, aside from rare outliers such as the Newsweek columns of Milton Friedman and the science fiction novels of Robert A. Heinlein, there were few places to encounter such ideas except in do-it-yourself publications. 

  The debut issue of reason was a few pages of typewritten text, and the topics it covered largely concerned urban violence, then a major political issue. While we don’t know for sure, the print run probably was no more than a couple of hundred. Most of the content was written by the founding editor, Boston University undergrad Lanny Friedlander.

  Forty years later, long after such titles as Living Free, Bull$heet, The New Radical, The Abolitionist, and The Individualist have fallen by the wayside, reason endures. The champion of “Free Minds and Free Markets” exists as both a paper magazine (now slick and colorful) and a vibrant presence in a medium that was still science fiction in 1968: the Internet, where the reason website is visited about 2.7 million more times per month than the first paper issue had readers.

  During the intervening decades, the broader civilization has, in fits and starts, heeded much of the message that reason has been pushing since that first mimeographed edition. From the deregulation of airlines to the decriminalization of sodomy, from the fall of communism to the rise of dot-coms, the world is in many ways much freer than it was in 1968. It’s easy to get caught up in those many restrictions on liberty that remain—including ne