Corrupt acts by police officers:
Police officers have various opportunities to gain personally from their status and authority as law enforcement officers. The Knapp Commission, which investigated corruption in the New York City Police Department in the early 1970s, divided corrupt officers into two types: meat-eaters, who "aggressively misuse their police powers for personal gain," and grass-eaters, who "simply accept the payoffs that the happenstances of police work throw their way."[5]
The sort of corrupt acts that have been committed by police officers have been classified as follows:[6]
- Corruption of authority: police officers receiving free drinks, meals, and other gratuities.
- Kickbacks: receiving payment from referring people to other businesses. This can include, for instance, contractors and tow truck operators.[7]
- Opportunistic theft from arrestees and crime victims or their corpses.
- Shakedowns: accepting bribes for not pursuing a criminal violation.
- Protection of illegal activity: being "on the take", accepting payment from the operators of illegal establishments such as brothels, casinos, or drug dealers to protect them from law enforcement and keep them in operation.
- "Fixing": undermining criminal prosecutions by withholding evidence or failing to appear at judicial hearings, for bribery or as a personal favor.
- Direct criminal activities of law enforcement officers themselves.[8]
- Internal payoffs: prerogatives and perquisites of law enforcement organizations, such as shifts and holidays, being bought and sold.
- The "frameup": the planting or adding to evidence, especially in drug cases.
- Police hazing within law enforcement.
- Ticket fixing: police officers cancelling traffic tickets as a favor to the friends and family of other police officers.
Mental Torture of Prisoners
The Stanford Experiment:
How do prisoners and guards react to one another? “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy... We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none."
A guard would wear Milatary style uniform with mirrored glasses to prevent eye contact.
full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots.
they were strip searched and given their new identities.
Prisoners wore uncomfortable ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps, as well as a chain around one ankle. Guards were instructed to call prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name.
They set up a "privilege cell" in which prisoners who were not involved in the riot were treated with special rewards, such as higher quality meals. The "privileged" inmates chose not to eat the meal in order to stay uniform with their fellow prisoners.
Guards forced the prisoners to repeat their assigned numbers[6] in order to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity. Guards soon used these prisoner counts to harass the prisoners, using physical punishment such as protracted exercise for errors in the prisoner count.
Sanitary conditions declined rapidly, exacerbated by the guards' refusal to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate anywhere but in a bucket placed in their cell. As punishment, the guards would not let the prisoners empty the sanitation bucket. Mattresses were a valued item in the prison, so the guards would punish prisoners by removing their mattresses, leaving them to sleep on concrete. Some prisoners were forced to be naked as a method of degradation. Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued; experimenters reported that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded after only 6 days.
The results of the experiment favor situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed that the situation, rather than their individual personalities, caused the participants' behavior.
Death Penalty in California.
Executions in California were carried out in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison. It was modified for the use of lethal injection, but has been returned to its original designated purpose, with the creation of a new chamber specifically for lethal injection.
As in any other state, people who are under 18 at the time of commission of the capital crime[12] or mentally retarded[13] are constitutionally precluded from being executed.
The latest change of method was introduced in January 1993, when lethal injection was offered as a choice for people sentenced to death.
According to CCFAJ's report, the lapse of time from sentence of death to execution constitutes the longest delay of any death penalty state.
As of May 2012 under the current 1978 law:
- 57 inmates have died from natural causes
- 6 inmates have died from other causes
- 20 inmates have committed suicide
- 13 have been executed in California
- 1 inmate (Kelvin Shelby Malone) was executed in Missour
As of 2012, there are 725 offenders (including 19 women) on California's death row.[2][3] Of those, 126 involved torture before murder, 173 killed children, and 44 murdered police officers.[4]
The penal code provides for possible capital punishment in:
- treason against the state of California, defined as levying war against the state, adhering to its enemies, or giving them aid and comfort.[14]
- perjury causing execution of an innocent person[15]
- for financial gain (1)
- the defendant had previously been convicted of first or second degree murder (2)
- multiple murders (3)
- committed using explosives (4) ; (6)
- to avoid arrest or aiding in escaping custody (5)
- the victim was an on-duty peace officer; federal law enforcement officer or agent; or firefighter (7) ; (8) ; (9)
- the victim was a witness to a crime and the murder was committed to prevent them from testifying (10)
- the victim was a prosecutor or assistant prosecutor; judge or former judge; elected or appointed official; juror; and the murder was in retaliation for the victim's official duties (11) ; (12) ; (13) ; (20)
- the murder was "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity" (14)
- the murderer lay in wait for the victim (15)
- the victim was intentionally killed because of their race, religion, nationality, or sexual orientation. (a hate crime) (16)
- the murder was committed during the committing of a robbery; kidnapping; rape; sodomy; performance of a lewd or lascivious act upon the person of a child under the age of 14 years; oral copulation; burglary; arson; train wrecking; mayhem; rape by instrument; carjacking; torture; poisoning (17)
- the murder was intentional and involved the infliction of torture (18)
- poisoning (19)
- the murder was committed by discharging a firearm from a motor vehicle (21)
- the defendant is an active member of a criminal street gang and was to further the activities of the gang (22)
- train wrecking which leads to a person's death.[17]
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Four methods have been used historically for executions. Until slightly before California was admitted into the Union, executions were carried by firing squad. Upon admission, the state adopted hanging as the method of choice.
Lethal Injection:
Lethal injection is the practice of injecting a person with a fatal dose of drugs (typically a barbiturate, paralytic, and potassium solution) for the express purpose of causing the immediate death of the subject. The main application for this procedure is capital punishment, but the term may also be applied in a broad sense to euthanasia and suicide. It kills the person by first putting the person to sleep, and then stopping the breathing and heart in that order.
Lethal injection gained popularity in the late twentieth century as a form of execution intended to supplant other methods, notably electrocution, hanging, firing squad, gas chamber, and beheading, that were considered to be more painful. It is now the most common form of execution in the United States of America.
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