Daily Links #116: Officials misbehavin’ edition

• It may interest you to know that the NYPD lies in court so often they have a name for it – “testilying”.
  (via @Snowden)

• Seattle, WA district attorney’s office ratchets up their prostitution-related caseload to meet quotas set by a privately run anti-sex-worker organization that pays them yearly grants. This is amazingly messed up. (Of the over 100 clients arrested last September, roughly half had their charges dismissed because police had illegally wiretapped them.)
  (via @davidminpdx; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Alabama sheriff legally rerouted $750K meant to feed inmates to pay for his beach house. Reporter breaks the story. Days later, the source who blew the whistle is arrested on drug charges and held in one of the sheriff’s prisons.
  (via @G_Padraic; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Wisconsin school district limits discussions of racism after an MLK Day exercise on social privilege made the majoritarily White community uncomfortable.
  (via @jeffelrod; retweet by @Popehat)

• In several death-penalty cases in the 1970s, prosecutors in Muscogee County, Georgia systematically excluded Black jurors in handwritten notes where they marked their names with ‘N’ (White jurors were marked with ‘W’). Of 44 potential Black jurors, two were allowed to serve.
  (via @davidminpdx; retweet by @Popehat)

• Finally: Look, I understand that guns in schools is a sensitive topic. But can we still agree that “hand gestures” by a six-year-old cannot possibly warrant a police investigation for “terroristic threats”?
  (via @TimCushing; retweet by @radleybalko)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.