Probable Cause

If I walk up to you and slap you in the face because your music is too loud and I can’t think, or because you’re acting carelessly and have damaged some of my property, or nearly knocked me down, several things may happen.  First off, in perhaps the “best case” scenario, I’m likely to be arrested.  In a worst case scenario, I may be shot and killed.  In almost no scenario that I can imagine will you thank me for bringing the problem to your attention.  Nor are you likely to modify your behavior because I slapped your face.

Yet every day we — collectively, as a society — slap others around and expect to change behaviors, even if we don’t necessarily expect our victims to thank us for bringing the fact that we think they have (or are) a problem to their attention.

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Cops lie.

If you haven’t the moral courage to hear that and consider what should be done about it, then go somewhere else: you’re not going to be happy reading this blog post.  (Be sure to stay away from Injustice Everywhere, too.)

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During a momentary escape from a brief I’m trying to complete before the end of today, I ran across an article on the Pennsylvania Litigation Blog about a sheriff who has become a hero to some because he won’t conduct auctions on foreclosed homes as the law requires.

The article itself was basically just a reprint of one that was supposed to appear in the Wall Street Journal on June 6, 2008.  It was a user comment that struck me more and inspired this post.

I don’t normally write about non-criminal law issues, but since this involved a sheriff picking and choosing what duties to perform, it seemed an acceptable fit here.

The commenter praised the sheriff because even though what the sheriff did was “against the law,” it was the morally right thing to do.  At least, it was the morally right thing to do in that commenter’s opinion.

I disagree.  At least I think I disagree.  (Keep reading!)

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Concerning the difficulty of researching and writing historical ethnographies, the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, states:

[I]t ought to make us self-conscious about our vulnerability.  And the fact that we are not on very solid ground also ought to make us ethically and politically sensitive when we write about other cultures.  In historical ethnography, it should alert us to several acute methodological problems when we deal with archival and documentary material written before modern ethnography even got off the ground.  …  “Any ontology we use to ground the human sciences must ultimately be based on ‘faith’ since any ontology of even minimal significance must derive from a variety of sources, including the scholar’s religious and cultural heritage; and any ontology that we employ can never be final since the very historicity of our being prevents that.”  (Gananath Obeyesekere,The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (1997) 200.)

Well, what’s that got to do with criminal law?

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I thought I’d mentioned the town of Tenaha, Texas before, so this story looked familiar to me.  A link sent by Bunny Chafowitz, however, makes the story look fresh so maybe it’s just my imagination.

Police in Tenaha are accused of committing — quite literally — highway robbery.

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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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