Black, Pink, Lilac, Animal Prints?
What's your pleasure?
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 ...
No, not the fur lined cuffs! ;)
AHA! Now I understand why smiling doesn't make people wonder what you've been up to!!! LOL
Black, Pink, Lilac, Animal Prints?
What's your pleasure?
Well, chucking bottles at the cops was probably a bad idea.
I thought they were a gift.
Free? We haven't been "FREE" in a long time.
This guy is only 25 years old, he doesn't know what freedoms have been lost in the last few years alone.
Party pooper....
Yes, I agree.
But - it never said that our little buddy, Eric, was a bottle thrower.
I've had a couple thrown at me in my career. Didn't exactly put me in the best of moods. :-)
Say Nada....
That's hilarious!!!
No, they were a "leave-behind." :-)
True. And it looks very much like he was actually busted for filming the cops.
Oh, crap. I hope my neighbor doesn't have a minicam in the pasture . . . I done milked his cow without permission last weekend.
I can well understand that.
This time next week I fully intend to be practicing my rights with a pitcher (or 2) of Margaritas.
If I pass out in the front yard and wake up with fire ant bites, that's my problem ;)
I think the police had no business arresting him.
Much less urppy.
Leopard print would be nice.
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