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 ...
You & me both baby-girl, you & me both......
8^)
;-D
Abyssus abyssum invocat ..............
gee, thanks.
You wanted hallmark .......?:o)
Adversus solem ne loquitor .....
But thanks. LOL.
I thought that was what ya wanted........LMAO !!
I went in at 5AM.....just getting free. Gonna go hit the pool, the jacuzzi and a bucket of cold cervesa's and get a nap before I have to go back in. Fiscal year panic management has officially set in......:o)
What, is the demand for new widgits that high?
Listen you two - cut out the dead foreign language stuff.
At least, converse in a LIVING language. Something people can actually translate without a PhD or two.
Or... you can email/FReepMail me the translations - so I know you aren't talking about me. Or at least, what you're saying.
;-)
Dasher
Your not by chance 44 years old, and a blonde hottie are ya DD ?
43 - what a lucky guess.
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.
Pretty extreme if you ask me, so if they take you to your
home, how do they hold you against your will for 12 hours?
Loving that tag line Squant
;o)
Dang.
Nice tagline.
Reminds me of the 9th Recon Motto -
In God we trust, All others we monitor.
Yours reminds me of one on my homepage....see if ya can guess which one.....:o)
http://www.freerepublic.com/~squantos/
Stab him for me too!?
ROTFLMAO !!!!!........HUA !
I like this one.
"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast." --- Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman
LOL!!!
Squantos and Eaker?
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