VIDEO - TV news reporter Ben Swann speaks to a crowd about the dangerous results of prohibition and what it does to communities around the US-Mexico border.

In the wake of a dramatic increase in deaths at the hands of U.S border patrol agents, the Department of Homeland Security has agreed to launch a long-awaited investigation into the agency’s use of force. Since 2010, border agents have killed at least 18 people, including Valeria "Munique" Tachiquin, slain by a Border Patrol agent on September 28 in broad daylight several miles north of California’s border with Mexico. Tachiquin was a U.S. citizen and mother of five children. Her family is now brings a wrongful death lawsuit against the Border Patrol.

Police still won’t admit the plants they seized in what was supposedly the biggest outdoor marijuana bust in Lethbridge history are plain old flowers — daisies, to be precise. All police will concede at this point is the 1,624 plants torn from a suburban Lethbridge garden on July 30 isn’t marijuana, as first claimed after a phalanx of police marched in and starting plucking. “This is a significant bust, given the size of this operation,” is how a senior officer put it at the time, while proudly displaying garbage bags full of the dastardly daises.

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico's most violent states - one which directly borders Texas - going on the record with such accusations is unique.

Prosecutors are arguably the most powerful figures in the American criminal justice system, a system that is not equipped or willing to punish their crimes..
according to attorneys and criminal justice reform advocates, prosecutors across the country are misbehaving -- and getting away with it. While the most common forms of prosecutorial misconduct are hiding exculpatory evidence and engaging in improper examination and argumentation, another form of intentional misconduct is the knowing use of false testimony to win convictions.