Another Drug Raid Nightmare

Reason Online ^ | 18 mar 08 | Radley Balko

[rellimpank]

The railroading of Ryan Frederick

Imagine you're home alone.

It's 8 p.m. You work an early shift and need to be out the door before sunrise, so you're already in bed. Your nerves are a bit frazzled, because earlier in the week someone broke into your home. Oddly, they didn't take anything; they just rifled through your belongings.

But the violation weighs on your mind. At about the time you drift off, you're awakened by fierce barking from your two large dogs. You hear someone crashing into your front door, as if he's trying to separate it from its hinges. You grab the gun you keep for home defense and leave your room to investigate.

[KoRn]

/mark

[ml/nj]

He has been charged with first degree murder. Paul Ebert, the special prosecutor assigned to the case, has indicated he may elevate the charge to capital murder, which would enable the state to seek the death penalty.

I'd love to be on the jury. I hope he gets a good lawyer and sues the piss out of the State. As far as I'm concerned it doesn't even matter if he he had drugs in his house. The State has no right to break in, and it's time that they are punished severely for actions like this.

ML/NJ

[Wolfie]

Last week, New Hanover County, N.C., agreed to pay $4.25 million to the parents of college student Peyton Strickland, who was killed when a deputy participating in a raid mistook the sound of a SWAT battering ram for a gunshot, and fired through the door as Strickland came to answer it.

Now that's just priceless.

[mysterio]

More casualties of the failed war on some drugs.

[Popman]

Unbelievable.

The no-knock WOT search warrant was based on the informant who was the guy who broke into his house three days before

Mind boggling

[SpaceBar]

We aren't becoming a police state.

[Virginia Ridgerunner]

After the raid, the police found the gardening supplies, but no plants. They also found a small amount of marijuana, but not much—only enough to charge Frederick with misdemeanor drug possession.

Assuming that the cops didn't plant the weed, this might just sink this guy's case since he was technically in possession of an illegal drug, as described in the search warrant, when he killed the cop.

[Skywalk]

Because Frederick is white, he will likely not receive the death sentence that the innocent Corey Maye received but I have NO FAITH in our system to not exonerate this man and instead put the ‘law enforcement’ structure on trial.

Watching John Adams just reminds me how little our Founders tolerated in abuse and how much we abide hoping that there will be some improvement or that WE as INDIVIDUALS will escape, no matter the collective injustice.

I’m sorry that officer is dead but if he, like others of his kind, had decided to uphold a greater law, he’d be alive and instead of ‘following orders,’ we could view him as noble as any that his profession offers for examination.

The only hope is that more police will end up like him and that will teach these local Poh-lees that they don’t own the citizens and they don’t have an unlimited right to infringe on the liberties of the citizenry. Without that extremely harsh lesson, I don’t see where police ever see that there are boundaries and that the ‘new way’ is the bad way and the tyrant’s way of enforcing law and order.

[Skywalk]

No criminal charges.

But for Strickland and Frederick and Maye-—DEATH (Strickland actually having no avenue of appeal, as his sentence was final.)

And there are scumbag ‘conservatives’ on this site that will try to justify or chime in what that ubiquitous and tired “let’s wait until all the facts are in” but only if it’s police doing the murdering.

[Seruzawa]

Drug Warriors (Armchair Division) showing up to defend this atrocity in 3... 2... 1....

[Dr.Zoidberg]

Door kicking and unannounced invaders should ALWAYS be met with overwhelming firepower.

If you do not loudly and clearly announce yourself as law enforcement then you should be paid for if you die when you're assaulting a private citizens home.

The special prosecutor is a fool for charging a man who was defending himself from unknown assailants and should be drummed out of his office.

I hope the jury has more sense.

[Dr.Zoidberg]

Assuming that the cops didn't plant the weed,

Major assumption, one I wouldn't make.

[meanie monster]

You know, all you have to do is call the narcotics unit and tell them that someone is selling drugs, give a name and address and they get searched. Someone did that falsely on a friend of ours (disgruntled g/f made the call) He now is terrified of cops and did nothing wrong.

[mad_as_he$$]

That is what you call poison fruit if i ever saw it. Sue their a$$es off.

[G Larry]

I would like to think I would have handled it differently.....ALL of the intruders would have been dead, unless I had reason to understand they were cops.

I hope the idiot prosecutor proceeds with overcharging, so as to increase the chances of acquittal.

[hiredhand]

Hmmmm...seems like a read a book recently where this was written.

[Wolfie]

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? . . ."

". . . After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you,d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur"what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

[meanie monster]

Oh yeah, and they beat his door down.

[traviskicks]

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