Probable Cause

A judge whom I consider a good man — and who I believe I would be pleased to call my friend if ever that were possible — nevertheless lost his temper with me recently during an off-the-record discussion.  The subject of the discussion and the way the court lost its temper is why I had to write this post.

Two things should be noted before I “get into it.”  First, whether the court or anyone else believes me on this, I’m writing this because a driving force in my life is the Jewish concept of tikkun olam. In other words, I want to work cooperatively to leave the world a better place than it was when I arrived.  If I can’t do it cooperatively, though, I will nevertheless work to do it.

The second thing is the corollary to that desire: I’m not writing this to further anger the judge (though given the court’s refusal to give serious consideration to this issue, that may be a sadly unavoidable side effect of my comments).  Rather, I wish to explain what I was unable to say due to the chilling effect of the court’s reaction to my off-the-record comment — and to the fact that others had started to filter into the courtroom.  I’m hopeful — since I know some judges read my blog — that this post might help explain why it is the right for the court to change its position on this one issue, and why it should be ashamed if it does not.

So what were we talking about?  And what did I say that so enraged one of the few judges I would love to be able to call my friend?

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It’s amazing how often history reports itself in things both small and large. 

I recently ran across one of the small things in this passage from Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here:

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’?”  (Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (2005 ed.) p. 17, originally published in 1935.)

Can I interest you in some “freedom fries”? 

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A reader from India left a comment here stating, among other things,

Am very impressed with citizens['] rights in your country….I should say cops in our country take us for a ride and just twist things as per their whims [a]n[d] fancies as we have no clue of our rights.

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Officially, the basic rule in the United States of America is still that “searches conducted outside the judicial process, without prior approval by judge or magistrate, are per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment — subject only to a few specifically established and well-delineated exceptions.”  (Arizona v. Gant, 129 S.Ct. 1710, 1716, 2009 Daily Journal D.A.R. 5611 (2009).)

In 1968, the United States Supreme Court said,

This inestimable right of personal security belongs as much to the citizen on the streets of our cities as to the homeowner closeted in his study to dispose of his secret affairs. For, as this Court has always recognized,

No right is held more sacred, or is more carefully guarded, by the common law, than the right of every individual to the possession and control of his own person, free from all restraint or interference of others, unless by clear and unquestionable authority of law.

(Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 8-9, 88 S.Ct. 1868 (1968), quoting Union Pac. R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U.S. 250, 251, 11 S.Ct. 1000, 1001, 35 L.Ed. 734 (1891).)

But as Bill O’Reilly would say, “That’s what the people who are paid for hating America want you to think.”

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Over on my other blog — I maintain FresnoCriminalDefense.com as my website and blog relating to more regional issues specific to my Fresno criminal defense office — I had the chance to respond to one of my readers who complained, among other things, that I was not being fair to law enforcement officers because I made allusions to the similarities between them and the enforcers of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany.

The timing could not have been more perfect.

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I’m working on a quite serious case involving an innocent man accused of things he could not possibly have done.  This impacts my ability to write the type of blog entry I prefer.

On the other hand, I looked briefly at the news today and I just have to ask again why we’re so insane as to believe that the more police officers we have on the streets, the safer we are.

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More than once recently, I’ve written about Submitizens. Several criminal defense attorneys in Fresno, California, where my office is located, simply shrug.  Among other things, they can’t understand why this bothers me so much.

But it does bother me.  Immensely.  And, frankly, it seems to me that it should bother any right-thinking true-blooded American citizen.  At the very least, it should bother criminal defense attorneys; we should understand the implication of this latest governmental insult.

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Adrianos Facchetti, a California “Internet Defamation Attorney,” writing the California Defamation Law Blog asks, among other things, if governments should regulate the Internet to control defamatory speech — however that might be accomplished.

I could only think of one response….

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New York criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield’s blog, Simple Justice, today discussed a troubling statistic and pondered its even more troubling implications.

It seems that a discovery request in a Milwaukee lawsuit over the shooting death of a dog has revealed 434 dead puppy reports over nine years, or, as the quoted compendium notes, “about one every seven-and-a-half days.”

That’s a heckuvalot of puppies.  Ciao.

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If it weren’t becoming a daily event, stories like this one would be difficult to believe.

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