Probable Cause

There’s an old saying:

It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

The quote is attributed to Abraham Maslow and I have neither a reason to doubt that, nor consider it important enough to look up.

I don’t know if it’s original with him, but, not to be outdone, San Francisco writer, speaker and broadcaster Merlin Mann, recently tweeted:

When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a reason to buy a way nicer hammer.

Both statements have applicability to the rather funny story — which also highlights a problem — that I write about today.

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Today’s San Francisco Chronicle, in a story titled “Gates 911 tape raises more issues in case,” is important because it mentions — and I’d like to highlight — something that happens every day.

And no, it’s not that the police are prejudiced and immediately suspect, stop and harass African-American males for being in the wrong place, any time.

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I have a difficult time these days referring to myself as a defense lawyer. It’s not because of the usual negativity that one encounters as a defense attorney. Many people on hearing that someone is a criminal defense lawyer will have an automatic negative reaction and ask “how can you defend criminals?” I’m used to that. (Forget the fact that a large number of people charged with crimes in Fresno are actually not guilty.)

No, the problem is my ongoing encounter with law enforcement officials and judges who literally do not care what the law is. They’ve made a decision about what they think should happen with a particular defendant and — by God! — they’re not going to let the facts or the law stand in their way.

Makes it easier to understand how it’s possible for a police officer to believe that making a woman strip and submit to a body cavity search on a busy roadway is a legitimate exercise of his power. But I digress…

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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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