SCotUS: 4th Amendment slows Cops Forfeiter Train...

SCotUS: 4th Amendment slows Cops Forfeiter Train...

WITH THE FOURTH AMENDMENT,
THINGS AREN'T SO PREDICTABLE
The question is how to balance law enforcement interests against the right that the Fourth Amendment gives citizens to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."

US Supreme Court Limits
Warrantless Use Of Drug Sniffing Dogs

Forfeiture $quads

There’s a Fourth Amendment?

It was refreshing earlier this week to see a few of the Justices crack open their dusty Constitutions and discover some text sitting there between the 3rd and 5th Amendments. Almost surprising, unfortunately.

Jacob Sullum talks about one of the other huge 4th Amendment issues currently making its way into the courts: When Proactive Policing Becomes Harrassment

The Terry Supreme Court Decision that is the current law regarding encounters on the street allows stop and frisk if officers believed that a crime was about to take place and that the suspect was armed.

As the number of stop-and-frisk encounters initiated by the NYPD grew from about 100,000 in Michael Bloomberg’s first year as mayor to almost 700,000 in 2011, the share of stops yielding guns fell from 0.38 percent to 0.033 percent.

Pretty thin.

Supreme Court finally limits dog searches
Important, and close, ruling handed down today.

Court: Drug dog sniff is unconstitutional search
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police cannot bring drug-sniffing police dogs onto a suspect’s property to look for evidence without first getting a warrant for a search, a decision which may limit how investigators use dogs’ sensitive noses to search out drugs, explosives and other items hidden from human sight, sound and smell.

The high court split 5-4 on the decision to uphold the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling throwing out evidence seized in the search of Joelis Jardines’ Miami-area house. That search was based on an alert by Franky the drug dog from outside the closed front door.

Justice Antonin Scalia said a person has the Fourth Amendment right to be free from the government’s gaze inside their home and in the area surrounding it, which is called the curtilage.

“The police cannot, without a warrant based on probable cause, hang around on the lawn or in the side garden, trawling for evidence and perhaps peering into the windows of the home,” Justice Antonin Scalia said for the majority. “And the officers here had all four of their feet and all four of their companion’s, planted firmly on that curtilage — the front porch is the classic example of an area intimately associated with the life of the home.”

He was joined in his opinion by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Interesting line-up of Justices on the two sides.



Reclaiming our Police Forces

A couple of articles worth reading on the subject of Law Enforcement. One of the real important reasons for ending the drug war, in my opinion, has been to reclaim the positive relationship between police and their communities. The drug war in particular, along with militarization, has turned the police against those they are supposed to serve, and vice versa.

►Why We Need To Stop Exaggerating The Threat To Cops by Radley Balko

When cops are told that every day on the job could be their last, that every morning they say goodbye to their families could be the last time they see their kids, that everyone they encounter is someone who could possibly kill them, it isn’t difficult to see how they might start to see the people they serve as an enemy. Again, in truth, the average cop has no more reason to see the people he interacts with day to day as a threat to his safety than does the average resident of St. Louis or Los Angeles or Nashville, where I live. [...]

Of course, there are other factors that have contributed to the psychological isolation of police. One example is the move from foot patrols to squad cars or, more broadly, from proactive to reactive policing. When cops walk beats, they become a part of the communities they patrol. Residents see them out and about. They learn names, faces and places. When police patrol in cruisers, they’re walled off from neighborhoods. [...]

So we have cops whose interactions with the public are negative the vast majority of the time, who are constantly told they’re fighting a war, and who are constantly reminded that their job is highly dangerous and getting more dangerous, and that they could be killed by anyone at any time. When they start to see the people they serve as the enemy, they begin to treat them that way. The people in the communities treated that way then respond in kind. Thus, we get the hostile, often volatile cop-community relationships we see in too much of the country today, in which citizens don’t trust cops enough to help them solve crimes, and cops feel so threatened and isolated that even well-meaning officers won’t report fellow officers who break the law.

►Saving Law Enforcement Organizations From Themselves by Diane Wattles-Goldstein (LEAP Member). Diane writes about a loathsome statement made by a police union member in support of officers who conducted body searches merely based on the supposed smell of marijuana.

So the Drug War marches on with more victims, collateral damage to a futile attempt to control human nature. All the while, supposed criminal justice professionals like Roberts continue to influence a profession that I loved, changing our course from protecting those we have sworn to serve to victimizing them at unknown cost to our humanity. Professor Roberts, I would simply ask you that if this were your wife, your daughter or someone you loved, would you be so callous? I think not. So I offer a bit of advice that I used to tell my officers: Before you say or do something, ask yourself if your mother would be proud of your words or actions, and would you be happy to see it on the front page of the news? Clearly, with this remark, you failed both standards, and would have done well to remember that even if you are not a real police officer, as the head of their union you don’t just represent yourself, but also a profession that you have brought to a new low.



The vast majority of prohibitionists
profit on the drug war,..
... and that is their only motive

Policing for Profit

Potential Prohibition Profits
Outweigh Citizens Benefits

Prohibition Profiteers
Lobbyists War Over Billions in Antidrug Aid

DEAth Merchants
Money Grubbing Dung Worriers
OiNkDeCePtion Is Flying Blind

When Police Learn

When Police Don't Learn

DAREyl SWAT Gates, LAPDog Perversions.

Got SqWAT?
Ganjawar Puppycide

The Assassins of Youth: DARE † FRCn PDFA
S.A.M. supporter demonstrates its absurdity

Religious drug treatment in Texas
Rehab Profits on Misery Caused by Prohibition



Kochroach & Aleech
Today many have had their eyes opened regarding the huge profits made off of what is commonly called the "Prison Industrial Complex." Suddenly awareness has turned from disbelief to anger as taxpayers realize the screwing private prison companies, their lobbyists and elected Legislators have been giving them for more than three decades now.

The Drug War
and Mass Incarceration
By the Numbers
Despite an increased emphasis on treatment and prevention programs in recent years, the Obama administration in its 2013 budget still requested $25.6 billion in federal spending on the drug war. Of that, $15 billion would go to law enforcement, interdiction and international efforts.

40 Years of Drug War Failure
Represented in a Single Chart

 

Court Rules for Immigrant in Deportation Case
CN April 23, 2013 Adam Liptak New York Times
“The social sharing of a small amount of marijuana” by immigrants lawfully in the United States does not require their automatic deportation, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

“Sharing a small amount of marijuana for no remuneration, let alone possession with intent to do so, does not fit easily into the everyday understanding of trafficking, which ordinarily means some sort of commercial dealing,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for a seven-justice majority, partly quoting from an earlier case. Read More...

Marijuana Possession Not a Deportable Offense
CN April 23, 2013 Lawrence Hurley Reuters
Washington, D.C. -- The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that a legal immigrant is not subject to mandatory deportation after being convicted of possessing a small amount of marijuana.

The court held on a 7-2 vote that Adrian Moncrieffe, a Jamaican citizen, could not be subject to mandatory deportation because basic marijuana possession is not a felony under federal law. Read More...

SCotUS: 4th Amendment slows Cops Forfeiter Train...

The Politics of Pot

Why Do You Think They Call it DOPE?

"Marijuana Use and Mortality" April 1997 American Journal of Public Health".
"Relatively few adverse clinical effects from the chronic use of marijuana have been documented in humans. However, the criminalization of marijuana use may itself be a health hazard, since it may expose the users to violence and criminal activity."
The Kaiser Permanente study

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