Posted on 04/21/2015 8:51:35 AM PDT by John Semmens
When a neighbor was engaged in a domestic dispute, Henderson, Nevada police demanded that Anthony Mitchell allow them to use his home as a fort and command center in order to gain a tactical advantage in their efforts to cope with the situation. Mitchell refused, but police battered down his door, pepper sprayed him, and put him in jail for the duration.
Mitchell sued contending that this home invasion by the police violated his constitutional rights under both the Third and Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution. Federal district court Judge Andrew Gordon dismissed Mitchell’s Fourth Amendment argument, saying that “the Constitution guarantees against ‘unreasonable seizure.’ In this instance, the police had a reasonable need to occupy the home. The damages they did to Mitchell’s home could’ve been avoided if he had simply obeyed the commands he was given.”
“Mitchell should consider himself lucky he only had to spend one night in jail,” Gordon added. “He could’ve been shot. For all the police knew, the whole neighborhood could’ve been a terrorist enclave. Many Americans own guns and have excessive and erroneous notions about their so-called rights.”
Gordon was even harsher toward Mitchell’s Third Amendment argument. “The whole ‘troop quartering’ thing applied to British troops,” Gordon maintained. “Since no British troops were involved, Mitchell’s line of reasoning is totally irrelevant to this case.”
if you missed any of this week's other semi-news/semi-satire posts you can find them at...
http://azconservative.org/2015/04/18/bipartisan-plea-for-lynch-confirmation/
What nonsense. This is the equivilent to the "musket" argument against the 2nd Amendment.
I wish you’d link to the real story on this one. I just read it and it is horrible that cops would do this BS to someone who hadn’t done anything wrong! IMHO every last one of those violent home invaders deserves to die just like any other violent home invader.
Sadly, this was Nevada and not Indiana or Texas where the people have the legal right to use lethal force to defend themselves against cops who act outside the law and outside the Constitution.
Note to the Jackboot Lickers: I don’t care that you’re offended. Bite me.
The headline sounds funny but its not wrong
Rightly or wrongly, no judge would rule in your favor if the above course of action was taken in the situation in question, whether it happened in Texas, Indiana, Nevada, or the moon. Just wouldn’t happen.
That judge was appointed by Obama.
Obviously for his constitutional knowledge.....
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
That's the "semi-satire" part of the post. Here's the actual decision.
And this is the relevant part:
In Estate of Bennett v. Wainwright, the court held that municipal police officers are not soldiers under the Third Amendment and that the use of a house for less than twenty-four hours does not constitute quartering.[159] The court stated that "[t]he plaintiff's position appears to be another of the `far-fetched, metaphorical applications' of this amendment that have been `summarily rejected' as noted by the Second Circuit."[160] This holding is supported by the original purposes of the Third Amendment.The Third Amendment was passed in response to several quartering acts imposed on the American colonists by Parliament; these acts functioned as a pseudo-tax to support the British military.[161] Modern interpretations of the Third Amendment, under the penumbra of Griswold v. Connecticut, have described the amendment as protecting a fundamental right to privacy.[162] In Engblom, the Second Circuit incorporated the Third Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment based on the logic that the "property-based privacy interests protected by the Third Amendment were not limited solely to those arising out of fee simple ownership but extended to those recognized and permitted by society as founded on lawful occupation with a legal right to exclude others."[163] Thus, under Griswold, the Third Amendment protects private citizens from incursion by the military into their property interests, and guarantees the military's subordinate role to civil authority.[164]
In the present case, various officers of the HPD and NLVPD entered into and occupied Linda's and Michael's home for an unspecified amount of time (seemingly nine hours), but certainly for less than twenty-four hours. The relevant questions are thus whether municipal police should be considered soldiers, and whether the time they spent in the house could be considered quartering. To both questions, the answer must be no.
I hold that a municipal police officer is not a soldier for purposes of the Third Amendment. This squares with the purpose of the Third Amendment because this was not a military intrusion into a private home, and thus the intrusion is more effectively protected by the Fourth Amendment. Because I hold that municipal officers are not soldiers for the purposes of this question, I need not reach the question of whether the occupation at issue in this case constitutes quartering, though I suspect it would not. Furthermore, I need not address whether the Third Amendment rights allegedly violated were clearly established as of June 2011.
Totally agree. It is up to the property owner. Up here in Northern Idaho, I would probably let them in, because the LEO would ask....not demand as they are part of the community.
Yet soldiers WERE the police at the time the Brittish were quartering soldiers. So I stand by my original point.
His ruling leaves basically says that anybody other than soldiers can seize a house for any amount of time and that police (local, state or federal) are not soldiers.
And that soldiers may seize a house for up to 24 hours as he doesn’t think that constitutes quartering.
They should have included the fifth amendment in the suit about no seizure without compensation.
Then the judge can join the other outlaws at the gallows.
Sorry, but cops engaged in a firefight do not have, and should not have, an obligation to follow legal technicalities that would otherwise apply.
If someone is shooting at me, I have every right, even if I’m not a cop, to take cover wherever I can.
For more or less the exact same reason I have the right to shoot someone who is trying to kill me.
This is the exact same line of reasoning, only flipped, by which every serving of a warrant needs to be done using SWAT tactics.
No, they do not have a right to occupy every home in a neighborhood just because they feel like it. The court be damned! If this is how some cops and some departments care to operate then I hope they get killed for their arrogance and callous disregard of why this country exists in the first place.
Anyone who swears an oath to defend and protect the Constitution, which includes this:
“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.”
Well, if someone swears an oath to protect this right and then says they have a right to trample it - then I hope they die a slow and painful death.
Just because my neighbor has a problem doesn’t give the police a right to make it my problem. Screw them!
Taking cover wherever needed from fire is to my mind eminently reasonable.
Also, nobody searched and nobody seized anything. Or at least it wasn't claimed that they did.
Let's take this to its logical conclusion. Let's assume the race warriors finally get their race war. An active insurrection is in progress, with thousands of people dying.
Are the police, Guard and military required to obtain warrants before making tactical decisions on where to take cover?
Or, if you don't like that one, let's assume a Mumbai or Beslan style terror attack by heavily armed men.
Must the cops obtain warrants before occupying positions from which they can defend Americans?
From Wikipedia Third Amendment to the United States Constitution :
The Third Amendment has been invoked in a few instances as helping establish an implicit right to privacy in the Constitution. Justice William O. Douglas used the amendment along with others in the Bill of Rights as a partial basis for the majority decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which cited the Third Amendment as implying a belief that an individual's home should be free from agents of the state.
-PJ
I’m calling bullsh*t on you.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/07/03/59061.htm
Tell me in this story where the police were being fired upon? Because they were not being fired upon.
All that’s happened here is the cops have been handed a useful pretext for invading people’s homes without a warrant.
-PJ
Hell, after arresting the guy they were after, they ended up dropping the charges against him. link
Bubba, your link shows the cops searched the homes without a warrant after they used their pretext to invade them. Thank you for pointing out that the charges against the Mitchell family were dropped with prejudice - meaning the judge was sending a message that the cops were out of line.
And they were.
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