The transition from one year to another is a time to remember. Perhaps because I have recently made contact with some people from Pullman, Washington, the town where I lived the first sixteen years of my life, something came back to me. The memory concerns a man whose last name was, I think, Meade or Means, but whose first name was John. My father was the Chairman of the Department of Animal Science at Washington State University (actually it was called Washington State College during our period there). Several times each year my parents...
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Sniffing and Sampling Only One Spot at Fire Scene Gets Arson Conviction Thrown Out, or How Not to Respond to Canine Evidence
I don’t know if anyone keeps statistics comparing the type of evidence and the percentage of cases where ineffective assistance of counsel is eventually argued, but if they do I’d be willing to bet that where canine evidence is a significant part of the prosecution’s case, claims of ineffective counsel after convictions are very high. Far too often lawyers, jurors, and judges take the handler’s testimony as gospel. One judge who doesn’t is Judge Nancy Gertner of the federal district court of Massachusetts. In 2006, James Hebshie was convicted...
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Bomb Dogs More Effective Than Manual Screening at Ferries, but Cost Three Times as Much
U.S. ferries annually carry over 80 million passengers and 25 million vehicles. They are potential targets for terrorism, and ferry systems have been hit by terrorists overseas. The Transportation Security Administration supplies Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response teams to ferry systems. Some of these VIPR teams include explosives detection canine teams (a handler and a dog). TSA has deployed 319 VIPR units to ferry systems in almost four...
Saturday, December 11, 2010
School District Resists Autism Service Dog, but Benefits Outweigh Control Problems
K.D., an autistic child, attended an Illinois elementary school. In May 2009, the boy received a Labrador retriever, Chewey, from Autism Service Dogs of America (ASDA). The court kept the child’s identity and the family’s name confidential, but news reports have identified them. The Villa Grove School District soon sent K.D.’s parents a letter saying that Chewey could not accompany K.D. to school. In July 2009, K.D.’s parents filed suit, seeking a court order permitting K.D. to bring Chewey to the school. The school district filed a motion to...
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Huang Hua, Joan Hinton, and China, 1984
Two people that I met in China died recently. Last week it was Huang Hua, once Vice Prime Minister of China, who entertained my father and the members of his family traveling with him in a dining hall in the Forbidden City in Beijing. More on that later. The other was Joan Hinton, whom I met on a collective farm in rural China. My father led a group of American agriculturalists around China for 30 days in 1984. Instead of just visiting the cities,...
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Are Terrorist Threats Changing Constitutional Parameters of Police Behavior? Considering an Incident at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Airport
An opinion of a federal magistrate shows that narcotics detection dogs at airport screening must be deployed before a seizure of a passenger’s carry-on luggage has become unlawful under the Fourth Amendment. The facts of the case also show something about how TSA and airport police hand off cases to each other during screening procedures. Conducting a dog sniff during an initial search of the luggage at an inspection table would have been legal...
Monday, November 22, 2010
Navy Oversight of Canine Operations Needs To Improve: Hazings in Bahrain
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Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Using a Bite-and-Hold Trained Dog for Search and Rescue Leads to Lawsuit
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Thursday, November 11, 2010
The Dogs of the Night Watch
In the urban centers of northern Europe in the Renaissance, a lowly and lonely profession was that of the night watchman. Those wandering the dark streets at night could often be presumed to be up to no good and night watchmen were usually armed against the dangers. It is therefore not surprising that night watchmen would acquire dogs to add the animals' senses to their own, as well as to combine the jaws of dogs with the weapons of their arsenels....
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