Eugene City Police Ordered to Release Taser Police Report

from the Register-Guard:

The order issued Monday afternoon came after The Register-Guard and the Eugene Weekly separately asked the District Attorney’s Office to overturn a city decision that asserted state laws pertaining to personnel records required the police reports to remain secret until the city completes a misconduct investigation into officer Judd Warden’s actions. [...]

Two weeks ago, [Eugene Police Chief] Kerns held a news conference and wrote a guest opinion piece in The Register-­Guard arguing that he could not share even basic details about the case with the media or the public because the misconduct investigation was under way. City attorneys advised him that releasing any information under those circumstances would violate state personnel records law and the city’s contract with the police officers’ union…

Um, yeah. Because, obviously, what matters most is protecting this taser-happy cop’s contract. I’m sure that keeping the records secret had nothing to do with trying to avoid a lawsuit. Nothing at all.

good news for health science

another link from Wired this morning: pro bono group’s challenge to patent on naturally-occurring genetic material allowed to proceed:

U.S. District Judge Robert W. Sweet of New York, in ruling that the case may proceed to trial, noted that the litigation might open the door to challenges of a host of other patented genes. About one-fifth of the human genome is covered under patent applications and claims.

Allowing patents on genes isolated from living things is bad policy, because it delays and imposes costs on important research even while it raises administrative costs by promoting speculative land-rush patent filing. The patent act was never meant to encompass natural phenomena, and the last 20 years of biotech patenting can only be explained by the fact that 20 years ago, patent examiners and judges didn’t understand the science well enough to reject these claims on the grounds that the claimed “invention” was occurring on its own, naturally, without human intervention.

Hopefully this is just another sign of an ongoing rollback in the scope of patentable subject matter. If Bilski ends the era of business method patents, it will probably have the collateral effect of putting a stake through the heart of software patents at the same time. If this case about gene patents is also carried through effectively, we’ll have come a long way back towards sanity in the US patent system.

And, incidentally, created a lot of work for patent litigators specialized in challenging business method, software, and gene patents on behalf of new market entrants.

If the law is a secret, do you have to obey it?

I’m thinking that negotiating a secret treaty that will strip rights from internet users to pacify movie studios is a pretty good way to make sure that it’s eventually rejected by the American people.

Tazers in Eugene

The really choice fact missing from this article is: it was the same officer who tazered the protester last year.

A Chinese college student shocked by a Eugene police officer’s Taser stun gun a few hours after the student moved into his new apartment has contacted attorneys to represent him in the case.

The male student, a Chinese citizen who began attending language training classes last month at the University of Oregon, was confronted Sept. 22 inside his West 11th Avenue rental townhouse by police officers who thought he and his roommate were trespassing.

During the encounter, one of the officers used a Taser to subdue the student, who does not speak English.

wish I’d thought of this

because, hah! that’s fantastic:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/04/three-armed-baby-cos.html

A short post on Michigan’s Castle Doctrine law

The Michigan Coalition for Responsible Gun Owners published this short article summarizing the features of Michigan’s castle doctrine law. This is not legal advice.

bar exam results

I passed!