Miscellaneous

It Could Happen to You (Or Your Dog)

By Anne Skove, Esq.

You're upstairs in your home, changing clothes after work. Your mother-in-law is cooking in the kitchen, your wife will return shortly. Another Pleasant Valley Sunday...

Suddenly people break in. Shots are fired; you hear screams. Still not entirely clothed, you are handcuffed by masked men. Your mother-in-law is handcuffed in the kitchen; family pets bleed to death on the floor; people have invaded your home. Your wife comes home to a nightmare.

How did this happen to the mayor of Berwyn Heights, MD? Cheye Calvo was delivered a package by UPS. He brought it inside, never knowing it was a pack full o' drugs meant for someone else. Then all hell broke loose.

This is a long way from the Berwyn Heights Mayor's office. We knew Mayor Calvo during his days as insurance/medmal guru at NCSL. If Cheye is running drugs, Betty Crocker is cooking with cannabis. Cheye is smart, involved, and it was no surprise to hear he was exonerated. If this can happen to him, it can happen to you. No matter what your relationship with your mother-in-law, nobody wants this experience.

The insanity of this case has brought nasty tactics into the national conversation in a way that might not have happened had the victim been a non-mayor. Mayor Calvo is, understandably, using his prominence to bring attention to the problem. Even Patti Davis, not the first person one thinks of when pondering civil rights, has spoken out against the situation. If there is a silver lining here, it's that the event united unlikely advocates against police misconduct and iffy warrants, and brought attention to the haphazard process of exoneration. (It's still not clear whether the police had a no-knock warrant, or just thought they did.)

See Marijuana Package Leads US Police to Mistakenly Raid Mayor's House, Daniel Nasaw, Guardian UK (August 8, 2008); and Compassion for Mayor Calvo, Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post (August 5, 2008). See also At Least They Didn't Get Medals (Yet), Scott Greenfield, Simple Justice (August 18, 2008), and The Real Reason SWAT Teams Kill Dogs and People, David Borden, StoptheDrugWar.org (August 12, 2008).

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on August 19, 2008 (boomark / email).