Posted on 07/08/2005 10:18:07 AM PDT by Dashing Dasher
Eric Laverriere was celebrating last New Year's Eve at a friend's house in Waltham when police broke up the party. They took him into protective custody and kept him locked in a cell for nine hours until the effects of a night of beer drinking wore off.
In what legal experts believe to be a first-of-its-kind legal challenge, Laverriere filed suit against the Waltham Police Department in US District Court in Boston, contending that he has a constitutional right to get drunk on private property ''so long as he causes no public disturbance."
Laverriere, a 25-year-old computer systems specialist from Portland, Maine, argues that the Massachusetts Protective Custody Law is intended to target public drunkenness and that Waltham police overstepped their bounds when they used it to seize him from a private residence.
''One thing people should be able to do is drink in their own house," Laverriere said in a phone interview yesterday. ''That's the beauty of the land of the free."
The state's Protective Custody Law, enacted in 1971, replaced a law dating back to Colonial times that made public drunkenness a crime, subject to arrest, conviction, and a criminal record. The law, which does not explicitly say whether it applies to those in public or in private, authorizes police to take incapacitated people to their homes, a treatment facility, or a police station, where they can be held against their will for up to 12 hours.
Under the law, people have to be drunk and deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. They are not charged with a crime.
Laverriere asserts in his lawsuit that he had ''a constitutional right to be drunk in private, a privacy and liberty right founded in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution."
{SNIP}
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
;-)
Amazing how many people read that - it never occured to me, to read a freeper profile. LOL.
(Think about it)
I can always bring it up, silly.
Oooooh - excuse me a momment.
What? BS? You mean you don't BELIEVE me? LOL.
I never claimed to be above pimping out my friends for fun and profit.
I know - I saw that.
The moral police out again?
[snip]
1,023,4821. Modernman
[unsnip]
Obviously.
Make sure you keep my email address someplace safe for the day when they finally come to get me.
PS... I put it in SBR - figured it would be safe there.
Oh well.
;-X
Hey, I'm even more willing to pimp out people who aren't my friends.
Come on, you can make up to $5,000 a night (I'll only take, like, 50%). More, if you're willing to go to Brunei.
What happenened? you got censored?
I like to know who I am posting too.
Plus, we have location in common.
I grew up very close to the Battle of Bull Run.
I can remember parties that were not considered good unless the cops came. They were always polite, checked everything out and left with admonitions to tone it down.
They couldn't arrest but they could admonish.
H Square on 103 Chamberlain Street ...... gone but not forgotten
A little.
More offline.
Ah. That's why I put it there - so ya'll could see me.
I miss HS, College and my 20s - and the first part of my 30s.
;-)
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