The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.The Supremes just gutted it some more. They held, in essence, that if a prosecutor is able to persuade a judge to sign a material witness warrant, even if the affidavit from the prosecutors is riddled with lies and half-truths, then the Feds can hold someone even if there was never any real plan to use the arrested person as a witness. A couple of the concurring justices tut-tutted about the brutal treatment that the so-called material witness received at the hands of the FBI and the prison guards, but that, of course, didn't matter a whit to the majority.
Bottom line: If they can find a sufficiently addlepated judge to sign off on a material witness warrant based on a bogus affidavit, they will throw you into a constitutionally-blackened hole.
4 comments:
It was a good Constitution. Maybe some day, someone will use it to make their lives better.
We don't even aspire to adhere to it.
I totally agree. Taken together with recent court decisions weakening the Fourth Amendment, this is a game-changing Constitutional development.
I don't know how to rectify matters without another Constitutional amendment, specifying that the Bill of Rights is to be interpreted in accordance with 'strict construction' jurisprudence, and anything else is grounds for impeachment of the judges concerned. On the other hand, the politicians (of any and all parties) would hate such a restriction on their license to steal . . .
As for the judges who issued this monstrous ruling, I guess Juvenal had it right, a couple of millennia ago . . . Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
*Sigh*
Peter, it doesn't much matter what we put in the Constitution, for it's the courts that interpret it.
Maybe what we need is a national vote on the justices' tenure, say every ten years after their appointment. And maybe a mandatory retirement after age 80 or 25 years on the job, whichever comes first. But those will have to be by Constitutional amendment.
One reason Australia doesn't have a Bill of Rights in their Constitution is that they've decided that it doesn't matter whether you have one or not, because it's the elected government and their appointed judges that are going to interpret it, and they're going to interpret it according to what society as a whole wants to do at a given moment, so why bother?
The majority of Americans apparently are authoritarians who shout "Ve must haff ORDER!" upon waking every morning, so this is what we get. I can't tell you the number of seemingly sane and nice people I've encountered who if I complain about the latest outrage accuse me of being "soft on criminals". They *WANT* to live in a police state, apparently. And are getting their desire, and dragging the rest of us along with them, but democracy, baby. What can you do? The only way you can stop the majority in a democracy from doing what they want to do is via imposing the will of a minority at gunpoint onto them. Yeah, that usually works out well, doesn't it?
- Badtux the Morose Penguin
Post a Comment