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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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….
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.
Yesterday, I got a phone call from the litigation coordinator at Pleasant Valley State Prison saying that if I take off my pants one more time at check-in, I won’t be allowed to visit again. As I told him, if this happens, we can hash it out with the Attorney General: refusing to allow an attorney to see his client is theoretically a misdemeanor. And the guard responsible has to pay $500 out of his own pocket to the client.
I say “theoretically” because the government routinely breaks its own laws with impunity. Frankly, I don’t know why we make laws saying the government has to do this, or cannot do that; when it suits them, they simply ignore those laws.
It’s a wonder to me why anyone these days would believe a police officer’s account of anything.
The Fresno Bee the other day contained several stories concerning what is increasingly nothing more than a gang of uniformed criminals. The first story I remember concerned a Marysville police officer who stopped a woman for driving without a seatbelt. Apparently, the officer suspected that the woman was hiding the seatbelt in her ass, because he authorized another officer to strip her and do a body cavity search. Right there. On the side of the road. While cars were going by. So far, I’ve been unable to verify whether the officer actually said, “Constitution schmonstitution, check her ass for hidden seatbelts!”
But this is just one such story.
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