Posted on 01/27/2015 1:17:30 PM PST by Yellowstone Joe
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a blow to the constitutional rights of citizens, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Heien v. State of North Carolina that police officers are permitted to violate American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights if the violation results from a “reasonable” mistake about the law on the part of police. Acting contrary to the venerable principle that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” the Court ruled that evidence obtained by police during a traffic stop that was not legally justified can be used to prosecute the person if police were reasonably mistaken that the person had violated the law. The Rutherford Institute had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hold law enforcement officials accountable to knowing and abiding by the rule of law. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Court’s lone dissenter, warned that the court’s ruling “means further eroding the Fourth Amendment’s protection of civil liberties in a context where that protection has already been worn down.”
“By refusing to hold police accountable to knowing and abiding by the rule of law, the Supreme Court has given government officials a green light to routinely violate the law,” said John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of the award-winning book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. “This case may have started out with an improper traffic stop, but where it will end—given the turbulence of our age, with its police overreach, military training drills on American soil, domestic surveillance, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, wrongful convictions, and corporate corruption—is not hard to predict. This ruling is what I would call a one-way, nonrefundable ticket to the police state.”
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
While I believe this is indeed a sketchy decision, based upon the ruling, you must admit that not all is well with the Supremes. After ‘Kelo’ and the betrayal of Roberts, I don’t really find it too hard to believe that they’ve gone and done it again...
Sorry to inform you, but this is SCOTUS’s ruling 8-1 with Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the dissent as the only judge against it.
Go figure, the idiot gets it right
The problem was the driver with the broken tail light and the "consent" to search. That said, the real problem is if you don't give "consent", you can be arrested..the same as refusing to sign a ticket. That has been the case as long as I remember.
Think about this folks:
The most conservative Supremes said aye. Sotomayer is a liberal and sees every thing as a right. Plus, I have no problem with contraband being found in a simple traffic stop, although some cops' actions/motives are questionable when asking to search. I'm surprised this had to go to the USSC.
Don't get me wrong, there are corrupt and power-hungry cops out there. Glad to see that body cameras are being initiated by many LEO agencies, and will grow. The recordings will protect both the innocent citizens AND the cops as in the recent cases of so-called innocent blacks being shot or strangled.
No, I never knew about it until I saw it, but I also think we have way too many laws on the books that can get any of us locked up. But for the grace of God we could all be locked up in another 10 years on any of hundreds of laws on the books we are completely unaware of.
I am not so ignorant as to think I need a cop to be around to be the lone arbitrator of my rights. I have a gun for that.
Although the concept of the exclusionary rule was first addressed in 1920,(Silverthorne Lumber v. the United States) it didn’t get fleshed out until:
Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961)
Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471 (1963)
Nix v. Williams, 467 U.S. 431 (1984)
Not exactly a founding fathers concept. There are other remedies and several warehouses filled with cases involving rulings. We are still protected as long as we may be heard.
“The SCOTUS is as corrupted as the rest of the govt. It started for me when they ruled a person’s private property could be taken through eminent domain and given to another private party. What was that 6-7 years ago?
If you are watching the mini series “Sons of Liberty” on the History channel the parallels from then to now will jump off the screen at you. The reset is coming.”
SCOTUS is a great deal more corrupt then the rest of Washington if you ask me. Theirs is simply a dictator like corruption of power, currently being bent by the leftist-Academic trained ‘legal community’ to enact brand new leftist law.
Put simply the current members of the Federal employees in black robes have no concept of written English outside of that given to them or not given to them by leftist ivy league universities like Harvet and Yale. You can quite imagination the political agenda that drives the lies and ideology they teach there. Most of which comes down to and depends upon ‘the Court law making theory’ which holds that they can build judgement solely upon what they think previous judgement said, that ‘opinion’ built upon ‘opinion’ is of course the ultimate creative tool with which you can and will build any ‘opinion’ you could possibly want.
This is what they call ‘law’ when it is not grounded in the text of a Constitution, but rather the corruption & abuse of those who have in the past claimed to rule under(or in this case over) that constitution.
It is of course a supreme subversion of the concept of a written constitution that actual makes such a constitution more a liability to liberty than a asset. That is of course why if there is to be any Constitutional convention reigning in the Federal court to either make them accountable to the States or utterly abolish their jurisdiction and capability to build such ‘opinions’ on other ‘opinions’ is supremely important, less nothing else done there to the written constitution could possibility matter when they ignore or rewrite it.
it’s just another ace in their sleeve. “you’re obstructing”, “stop resisting”, “I smell alcohol”.. not to mention trained dogs producing high failure rates (on purpose sometimes). As damaging as drugs are on society, the “war” on drugs has done more to erode our God given rights than any drug ever to hit the streets
Slavery and the Dred Scott case comes mind.
“==The SCOTUS is as corrupted as the rest of the govt==
Slavery and the Dred Scott case comes mind.”
I actually agree with the Dred Scott ruling when you read what they actually did as apposed to what Abolitionist radicals and the press of the time and today said they did.
All the Federal court in Dred Scott did was say that the US government in its laws over territories did not have the authority to take a man’s property(his slave) from him simply by virtue of his presents in a territory, that proclaimed under the same law owning/buying that property illegal.
Well that to me sounds like a perfectly sound application of the 4th amendment(because Washington would have to search and seize without a warrant as none was ever issued) and the 5th amendment(because Washington would have to try the slave master for this crime of buying/owning property and convict him which never happened).
The tragicaly of Dred Scott is that the judge was a flaming racist who couldn’t keep his opinions out of his public statements on the judgement, and of course the Abolitionist eagerly translated those opinions into the edict of the court rather than what the Federal court actually did. A position the Racist judge I’m sure would have been happy to have everyone believe were it true if only he could make law like modern Federal ‘judges’ do.
Can you be a bigger drama-queen with you super-sized font? Maybe you need some testosterone replacement therapy since it looks like your estrogen is taking hold. Sheesh.
Supreme Court Rules Police Can Violate The 4th Amendment
...
This is old news, and that’s not what the SCOTUS ruled.
Legal Ping
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Look to the Soviet Union for confirmation of that. They did have a constitution, adopted in 1922, revised in 1936 and again in 1977. They even had a Freedom of Speech clause in it, completely ignored in practice, of course. They even went so far as tp accept the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which were a form of a Bill of Rights (among other things). Of course, ignored.
Just for the general FYI, here’s the background of the stop
the stop/arrest (via wikipedia):
“On April 29, 2009, Maynor Javier Vasquez and Nicholas Heien were traveling along Interstate 77 in North Carolina. Vasquez was driving Heien’s car, and Heien was sleeping in the back seat.”
“While watching for “criminal indicators of drivers [and] passengers”, Sergeant Matt Darisse observed Vasquez drive by and thought he appeared “nervous”. Sergeant Darisse then began following Vasquez. Vasquez eventually slowed his car when approaching a slower-moving vehicle, and Sergeant Darisse observed the car’s right rear brake light hadn’t turned on.[1]:2-3 Sergeant Darisse believed that it was a violation of North Carolina traffic law to drive a vehicle with a broken brake light, so he activated his blue lights and stopped Vasquez (observing that as he did so, the right brake light “flickered on”).[2]:2 Sergeant Darisse informed Vasquez and Heien that he had stopped them for a broken brake light.”
“During the stop, Sergeant Darisse began to suspect the vehicle might contain contraband. His suspicion increased when Vasquez and Heien claimed, in separate questioning, that they were traveling to different ultimate destinations. Sergeant Darisse then asked Vasquez if he could search the vehicle.[2]:3 Vasquez said he should ask Heien, who said he “didn’t really care”.[1]:3-4 The ensuing search found cocaine.”
Figured that out!.. See post 50!.
I agree.
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