Supreme Court hears arguments over freedom of information

The Supreme Court heard arguments in Food Marketing Institute v. Argus Leader Media in a case with implications for freedom of information.

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  • Why Police Can Stop Motorists With Air Fresheners Hanging in Their Cars

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He’s just coming up with anything to talk to me or mess with me,’” said Colbert, 23, who recorded the traffic stop on his cellphone and ultimately was let off with a warning. The air fresheners that dangle from rearview mirrors have been a ubiquitous accessory in cars for decades. But they may be treated as illegal in a majority of states, which have laws prohibiting objects near the windshield that can obstruct motorists’ views. They are part of a suite of low-level offenses, such as tinted windows or broken taillights, that civil rights advocates complain have become common pretexts for traffic stops that too often selectively target people of color. The encounter this week in Minnesota that led to a police officer fatally shooting Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, began when officers initiated a traffic stop and raised the issue of a hanging air freshener, according to Wright’s mother, who talked to her son on the telephone moments before he was shot. Pete Orput, the Washington County attorney, said officers had noticed an expired registration tab on Wright’s license plate and decided to pull his car over. One of the officers later noted the air freshener hanging from the mirror, which was a violation of the law, Orput said. Racial bias in traffic stops has been a focus of researchers and civil rights advocates for years. At Stanford University’s Open Policing Project, researchers analyzing more than 100 million traffic stops around the country found persistent racial disparities, with Black and Hispanic drivers more likely to be stopped and more likely to be searched. Collectively, officers found contraband at a lower rate among those searches than in searches of white drivers. Traffic stops also have the potential to escalate, like the case of Wright, who was shot by a police officer after he got back into his car as the police tried to arrest him for an unrelated warrant. The officer, Kimberly Potter, who had shouted that she was preparing to use her Taser, resigned and was charged with second-degree manslaughter. Paige Fernandez, a policing policy advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union, said low-level infractions such as expired registrations and air fresheners on mirrors should not be handled by armed police officers. “The danger that police traffic stops pose greatly outweighs any benefit of having them engage in that,” Fernandez said. Mayor Mike Elliott of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, where Wright was killed, said police officers should not be pulling people over because of an expired registration during the coronavirus pandemic. The prohibitions against objects hanging from rearview mirrors can extend to fuzzy dice, graduation tassels and rosaries. Last year, amid the pandemic, authorities in Maine warned against hanging masks. A woman who answered the phone for the manufacturer of one of the most common hanging air fresheners, Little Trees, said the company would have no comment on the legal debate. The company’s website shows the scented paper trees hanging from a rearview mirror. States have long grappled with how to best handle the obstruction issue. After court data showed more than 1,400 citations in one year for people driving on Maryland highways with windshields obstructed by objects or materials, the state changed its law in 2017. The violation is no longer a primary offense, which would justify a traffic stop, but a secondary offense, which can only be cited after a motorist has been pulled over for something more serious, such as speeding. Virginia has followed suit as part of a broader package of reforms limiting when the police can conduct traffic stops. Dana Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, said the group had supported some of the changes, including a prohibition on stopping people for recently expired registrations. When lawmakers changed the law to require that a driver’s view must be “substantially” obstructed by objects to be considered a violation, police agencies did not object. Making windshield obstructions a secondary offense could allow some motorists to continue driving even with substantial obstruction that limits their view. Schrad said that had raised concern that roads could become less safe. Schrad said that when officers stop people for minor violations, they can also discover other issues, including outstanding felony warrants or evidence of other crimes. “The more you limit the ability of a law enforcement officer to intervene in something that would be a violation of the law, you limit their ability to discover other criminal activity,” she said. In places where air fresheners have been treated as a primary offense, the traffic stops have faced legal challenges with various outcomes. On an April evening in 2008, Benjamin Garcia-Garcia was driving a minivan along Interstate 55 near Springfield, Illinois, when a state trooper who had been parked in the median moved onto the freeway and pulled him over. According to court records, the trooper claimed he had seen the pink air freshener hanging from Garcia-Garcia’s mirror and believed it violated the state statute prohibiting objects that could obstruct the driver’s view. The trooper later conceded that he did not stop every car with an air freshener and had not observed any other traffic violations. The trooper issued a written warning, but in the process he also learned that Garcia-Garcia and his passengers were in the country illegally. That triggered a response from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that resulted in Garcia-Garcia facing a federal charge of crossing the border illegally. He was imprisoned and deported. Garcia-Garcia challenged the justification for the stop as part of his criminal case, arguing that the trooper could not have seen the air freshener on a vehicle going at highway speeds and that he could not have concluded it was a material obstruction. The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the argument. “The object the trooper observed was small, but given its size and position relative to the driver, a reasonable officer could conclude that it violated the Illinois statute prohibiting material obstructions,” the judges wrote. In a more recent case, on the South Side of Chicago, a police officer reported seeing an air freshener in a vehicle and began following the car, then stopped it for violating a municipal code provision prohibiting windshield obstructions. During the traffic stop, officers found guns in the vehicle and arrested the two men inside, who were Black. The men challenged the legality of the traffic stop, but the same appeals court once again held that the stop was constitutional. But in Connecticut in 2010, after a traffic stop in which a driver had a chain and cross dangling from his rearview mirror, the state Supreme Court sided with the driver, determining that the object was relatively small and that the trooper who initiated the stop did not articulate any concern that the object was blocking the driver’s view. The case of Colbert, the motorist stopped in Arizona in an unincorporated area between Parker and Lake Havasu, became public after he posted video of the traffic stop online. He later got a lawyer, Benjamin Taylor, who said he believed that the deputy engaged in racial profiling. “Even if you are polite, calm, even college-educated, the bottom line is that, at the end of the day, you are still Black,” Taylor said. “That’s all the cop sees and stereotypes.” The Sheriff’s Department later determined that the deputy had no legitimate basis for his repeated questioning of Colbert. The deputy, Eli Max, was fired in part for his handling of the stop. Colbert took steps to pursue a lawsuit but settled with the county before it got that far, Taylor said. Even for those who are ultimately let go with a warning, being pulled over for a rearview mirror infraction can have a lasting effect. In Galesburg, Illinois, Brittany Mixon was a senior in high school when she was pulled over by a police officer in 2003, ostensibly because of the air freshener hanging from her mirror. But when the officer approached the car, she said, his first question was about whether the Toyota Corolla she was driving was hers. “He kept asking me questions like he wanted to trip me up,” said Mixon, who is Black. Even now, at 35, she makes sure not to have anything hanging from her mirror — or from the mirror of a car she is riding in — because she does not want to risk getting pulled over. “If I get in a car with somebody and they have something hanging from their mirror, I’m like, ‘Can you take that down?’” Mixon said. “Being a Black passenger might trigger something in a racist cop, so let’s just remove that altogether from the situation.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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Perched on the razor-thin boundary between lucidity and madness, it gnaws at the nerves and bludgeons the senses until submission—to humanity’s helplessness in the face of the ancient world’s elemental power—is the only recourse.Produced in 15 days in August 2020, In the Earth (now playing) is not only a companion piece to Wheatley’s A Field in England—a mushroom-fueled psychotronic nightmare par excellence—but also to Alex Garland’s Annihilation, sharing a narrative focus on scientists venturing into a toxic heart of darkness, where they find brutal violence and trippy 2001-style lunacy. The primary subject of Wheatley’s latest is Martin Lowery (Joel Fry), an unassuming researcher who arrives at a remote English facility where pandemic protocols are the order of the day. No one explicitly identifies the disease that everyone is afraid of, but in drips and drabs, the film reveals that it’s extremely deadly, and that it’s ravaged the country (and planet), including the city where Martin’s elderly parents reside.‘Honeydew’ Is a Deranged Vegan Horror Movie Starring Steven Spielberg’s SonAt this outpost, a country home retrofitted for medical purposes, Martin meets Alma (Ellora Torchia), a park ranger who’s been assigned to accompany him into the dense forest to rendezvous with his former colleague Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who’s carrying out unspecified tests in the middle of nowhere. Before embarking on their two-day hike to Olivia, Martin spies a painting (and related kids’ drawings) of a fabled pagan spirit of the woods known as Parnag Fegg that captured locals’ imaginations in the 1970s after some children went missing in the area. It’s no great leap to assume that this myth is somehow related to the film’s opening sight of a towering stone slab with a hole in it (think a more earthen variation of 2001’s alien monolith). Yet at least initially, Martin shrugs off this tall tale, his attention less on campfire stories about monsters than on a practical mission that involves doing outdoors-y things he’s not very skilled in, like building a tent.Things quickly take a harrowing turn. First, the duo come upon an abandoned tent strewn with toys and a book about a witch, suggesting that a family has been hanging out in this forbidden zone. Then, they’re viciously beaten in their own tent by an unseen assailant. Shortly thereafter, they come upon Zach (Reece Shearsmith), a reclusive outdoorsman who offers them assistance—including shoes, since theirs were pilfered by their attacker—back at his surprisingly sizable makeshift home, replete with its own disinfection station. Zach is a sketchy hermit, but since they’re in desperate straits, and Martin is also suffering from a giant gash in his foot, the pair accept his assistance—which, wouldn’t you know, turns out to be an unwise idea.Referring to Parnag Fegg, Alma states, “I think the forest is like something that you can sense, so it makes sense that they should give that fear a face.” Later, she tells Martin she believes people will soon forget about their pandemic ordeal and go back to their prior ways, implying that mankind is incapable of truly respecting, or coming to grips with, nature’s awesome and terrifying might. In this hostile environment, amateur shutterbug Zach opines that “photography is like magic, really. But then, so is all technology when you don’t know how it works.” The supernatural quality of the unknown is everywhere in In the Earth, and Wheatley uses canted compositions in which his characters are dwarfed by their lush, misty surroundings to conjure an atmosphere of the mysterious, primal world devouring these interlopers, consuming and reintegrating them back into its fertile soil.The director’s dreamy aesthetics are amplified by a soundscape of menacing electronic noises, heavy breathing, and unnatural bird calls, creating the impression that this milieu is not simply alive but sentient. The interconnectedness of everything soon becomes a pressing concern for Martin and Alma, including with regards to Zach—whom they must escape, because he’s up to some wild stuff—and Olivia, who’s trying to commune with the primeval stone slab that she believes is the embodiment of Parnag Fegg, and the hub of the country’s ecological bio-network. To do this, she employs methods that are at once technological and ritualistic—a marriage of the rational and irrational that soon defines In the Earth, and also channels The Shining and the filmmaker’s Kill List as it spirals down, down, down into an abyss of schizoid craziness.Wheatley’s suspenseful visuals alternate between spying Martin and Alma at a remove and engulfed by tangled branches and heavy foliage; close-up views of flapping-skin wounds that gush blood and are stitched up with makeshift sutures; and kaleidoscopic montages of blooming flower petals, smoke tendrils, sunlit-dappled tree tops, smashing rocks, pouring rain, crawling bugs, and other unsettling images. The ethereal and corporeal are intertwined here, portending doom. No concrete explanation for what’s going on is provided; shrewdly, In the Earth’s rare bouts of exposition are handled so quickly that specifics are deliberately hard to discern. What is clear, however, is that man holds little sway over nature (and its old gods), and any attempt by the former to comprehend the latter is an endeavor destined to confound, if not drive one out of their ever-loving mind.In its bewildering final moments, the film delivers the head-spinning payoff promised by its preceding passages. In the Earth doesn’t make complete sense because it’s a movie about incomprehensibility. Tapping into our ongoing COVID anxieties of corruption and ruin, it’s a sinister vision of nature protecting itself through biologically and psychologically viral defense mechanisms—and of the futility of trying to change, fight, reason with or even fathom such unstoppable forces.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.