[GeronL]

Amazing. He actually caught a drug trafficker and the judge lets him go.

Thanks media for announcing to all the drug traffickers how to get the drugs past the cops to the schools.

[Slings and Arrows]

So if the driver hadn’t been a drug dealer, would the search still be justified?

[nathanbedford]

I think it was the Warren court that concluded that the only way to stop unreasonable searches and seizures was to prohibit the evidence thus obtained from being introduced at trial. There were other remedies that had been used such as civil suits against policeman etc. but the court concluded that all these remedies were inadequate to protect the public from violations of their rights to privacy set down in the Bill of Rights.

Of course this means that virtually every time a criminal defendant wins a motion to suppress and is therefore acquitted, a guilty man escapes justice because, by definition, he was found with the goods.

The point is how do you want to balance the right to privacy against society's interest in obtaining the conviction of the guilty? Your right to make that balance by way of legislation enacted by your elected representatives was taken away by unelected justices. The idea of the Bill of Rights is to immunize certain unpopular rights from the will of the majority and that is properly done by unelected judges. But should that extend to the remedy for violation of that right?

[Ecliptic]

How many cars have been stopped because of color that were not drug dealers? I am one.

[LevinFan]

” Amazing. He actually caught a drug
trafficker and the judge lets him go.”

No, he ignored the constitution and got lucky. Should he be allowed to do that?

These days, cops see everything as suspicios. Tea leaves in the trash, buy growing supplies because you like tomatoes. When everything is now suspicious, it is called fishing. Do it enough, and you get lucky a few times. But only if you don’t care about bothering the innocent. Fishing is not a legitimate police practice.

We had created our rights because the British behaved like this. You questioning the founders’ wisdom?

The judge didn’t let a drug dealer go. Your hero cop let a drug dealer go, by taking shortcuts he KNEW were wrong.

[jiggyboy]

Thanks media for announcing to all the drug traffickers how to get the drugs past the cops to the schools.

Flesh that out a little for me. I assume we're basing it on the car having been repainted. Are you thinking that a drug trafficker should paint his car because it's more likely that he will be pulled over by a bored and overzealous cop, resulting in an illegal search, arrest, trial, and possibly jail, which, some number of years and thousands of dollars later, will be overturned, maybe, by a state court, at which point he cackles all the way back his lair?