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 betcha!
Hiccup.... burp... barf...
webex's. sigh. Might have one more, later.
Can't you FReep and WEBEX at the same time?
I thought you were talented!?
Try this -
"Veni, Vidi, Vici" - "I came, I saw, I conquered."
"In Vino, Veritas" - "In wine, there is truth."
"In Vino, veni, veritas."
LOL.
Ok... silly and talented.
Well, you do have that whole biplane thing going for you - I would call that talented.
SD
Animadvertistine, ubicumque stes, fumum recta in faciem ferri?
I meant you!
;0Y
Hey - are you two talking about me?
In latin?
Yes. What else? I meant you.
What are you saying - translation please.
;-)
(why didn't I take latin in college... It would have come in so handy ... today... for the first time...ever)
As long as it means something dirty...
"ever notice no matter where you stand, the smoke blows right in your face?"
Dang ...
I assumed it was dirty.
My roommate and me talked a cop out of giving us a ticket for a loud party by giving him the phone number of one of our cute female guests.
Trading a woman for a free pass on a ticket - what a nice man you are.
;-X
So did I since he did not translate right away!
I love how thay are all pointing in different directions...
Bibere humanum est, ergo bibamus.
To drink is human, let us therefore drink.
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