How cops, politicians and bureaucrats tried to dodge responsibility in 2024
Last February, explaining why he thought President Joe Biden could not be successfully prosecuted for mishandling classified documents, Special Counsel Robert Hur suggested that jurors would be apt to view the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” That amply supported characterization outraged Democrats, who portrayed it as a politically motivated attempt to undermine Biden’s reelection.
Five months later, additional evidence of Biden’s “diminished faculties” forced his withdrawal from the presidential race, showing it was Democrats’ refusal to admit the obvious, not Hur’s willingness to note it, that kneecapped their attempt to retain the White House. The misplaced criticism of Hur was one of the year’s most audacious attempts at blame shifting. Here are some more highlights.
Felonious Joking. In January, a federal jury awarded Waylon Bailey $205,000 to compensate for the ordeal he suffered in March 2020, when a dozen sheriff’s deputies wearing bulletproof vests descended on his home in Forest Hill, Louisiana, with their guns drawn, ordered him onto his knees and arrested him for “terrorizing” the public, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The cops claimed Bailey had invited this response by posting a zombie-themed joke about COVID-19 on Facebook.
Acorn Agitation. In February, the Okaloosa County, Florida, Sheriff’s Office revealed that Deputy Jesse Hernandez had resigned after emptying his gun into his own patrol car, miraculously missing a handcuffed suspect in the backseat. Although Hernandez claimed the suspect had shot at him, body camera video showed that the deputy mistook the sound of a falling acorn for gunfire.
Collision Coverage. Last February, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Police Chief Harold Medina ran a red light and slammed his department-issued pickup truck into the side of a sports car, severely injuring the driver. Medina, who said he was fleeing from a fight between two homeless men that had escalated into gunfire, blamed “gun violence” for his reckless driving.
Prohibition Perils. In April, two months after transgender activist Cecilia Gentili died from a drug overdose, federal prosecutors blamed her dealers for causing her death by selling her heroin mixed with fentanyl. Yet that sort of hazard is a predictable result of the same laws that federal officials were enforcing, which create a black market where the composition of drugs is highly variable and unpredictable.
Marijuana Mistake. In May, based on advice from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Justice Department said marijuana does not belong in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a category supposedly reserved for especially dangerous drugs with no medical utility. HHS blamed the Drug Enforcement Administration’s erroneous reading of the law for that widely derided classification, which HHS itself supported for decades before belatedly admitting that it had no scientific basis.
Lethal Lies. During his murder trial in September, former Houston narcotics officer Gerald Goines, who lied to justify a 2019 drug raid that killed Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, sought to blame his victims, noting that Tuttle fired at the cops after they broke into his house and killed his dog. The jurors rejected that argument in favor of the account offered by prosecutors, who said Tuttle did not realize the intruders were police officers and reacted as “any normal person” would to a violent home invasion.
Cat Tales. When then-Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance faced flak in September for promoting unfounded rumors about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, he said he was relying on “firsthand accounts from my constituents.” In particular, he cited a report from a woman whose lost cat turned up, alive and well, in her own basement.
Retroactive Rules. Defending its rejection of flavored nicotine vaping products, the Food and Drug Administration blamed the manufacturer’s failure to meet requirements that were not announced until it was too late to comply with them. The new standard, the company’s lawyer told the Supreme Court in December, “directly contradicts the guidance FDA provided before the submission deadline.”
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @jacobsullum.