Posted on 07/13/2014 1:52:17 AM PDT by beaversmom
Aside from doing my bit for the First Amendment (your continued support is much appreciated), I've lately been taking a much greater interest in the Fourth Amendment, particularly since a meek mild-mannered mumsy employee of mine was unlawfully seized by an angry small-town cop last year. So I've been chewing over yesterday's Supreme Court ruling. The case began half a decade ago in Bellaire, Texas:
During the early morning hours of New Year's Eve, 2008, police sergeant Jeffrey Cotton fired three bullets at Robert Tolan; one of those bullets hit its target and punctured Tolan's right lung. At the time of the shooting, Tolan was unarmed on his parents' front porch about 15 to 20 feet away from Cotton.
Happy New Year! Auld Lung Syne: That's one acquaintance Mr Tolan won't soon forget.
But it gets better. The only reason Sgt Cotton was emptying his gun into Mr Tolan was because his colleague, Officer Edwards, had mistransposed a digit when taking down Tolan's license plate, which is 696BGK. Instead, Officer Edwards entered into the database 695BGK, which came up stolen.
As Mr Tolan and his cousin exit the vehicle, Officer Edwards draws his gun, orders them to the ground, and accuses them of stealing the car. "That's my car," says Tolan, but complies with the request to lie face down.
It's worth noting that, in other countries with a different policing culture, a gun would not have been drawn and the officer would have asked to see the registration.
Instead, hearing the commotion, Tolan's parents come downstairs in their pajamas and find their son and their nephew lying on the ground with a cop pointing a gun at them. Mrs Tolan explains, "Sir, this is a big mistake. This car is not stolen... That's our car."
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
LOVE the graphic!
Gave some serious thought to printing a copy and mailing it to the JBTs who tossed the flash-bang grenade into the kid’s crib in GA.
May yet do it.
It needs to be nailed to every telephone pole in every town and city.
Excellent post, btw.
Every police station and sheriff’s office in the country should get a copy of that graphic. It’s
easy to send it to them, but you have to be careful about fingerprints and DNA.
The best way is to buy a box of letter-sized envelopes and a box of medical gloves. Don’t
handle the copies of the graphic or the envelopes without wearing the gloves. Don’t lick
the envelopes. Use a damp sponge.
Get all their addresses, and then use them randomly as the return address on each envelope.
Send the graphics to every one of the stations and LE facilities, and perhaps a few judges,
the governor, and your representatives and senators as well.
It’s for their own good. When The People get angry enough about their beaten-up mothers,
grannies, and children, and about their beloved but now deceased (murdered) dogs, the
backlash against the JBTs will be dangerous for them, so that sort behavior has to be gently
removed from their approach to the public at large.
I was thinking “self-adhesive” envelopes.
And it would probably be better to send copies printed on a black-and-white printer (no color toner at all); a story came out a few years ago about printer manufacturers adding the printer serial number in the margin of printed documents, small and “yellow”, so it would be very hard to see with the naked eye but would show under blue light.
Best reference for this is probably the EFF Page A quote from that page follows:
Xerox senior research fellow Peter Crean has informed us that each document identification request that Xerox's security department receives from the Secret Service is handled on a case-by-case basis, that Xerox identifies only suspected currency documents, and that identification of machines used to print pamphlets, letters, and other non-currency documents does not occur. If true, these statements are somewhat comforting, but a clear risk remains due to the absence of legislation regulating the use of the marking technology. Color printers are regularly used for anonymous printing and pamphleteering; they are an important tool of speech. Without appropriate legal protections against the misuse of identifying technologies, these long-protected forms of expression may be in danger, as the government has easy and secret ways to identify the authors, or at least the printer purchaser, of any speech printed on color printers.For what it's worth.
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Oh, thank you, Sir! I didn’t know that at all, and it is good to know.
Yes, we can switch our printer to B&W.
In light of the more recent case of Mr. Shaver being murdered by an AZ unlawful enforcer and said enforcer being acquitted, a ping to Steyn’s piece from 2014. (And I do not hate police, but we should call out the bad ones...in this case *horribly* bad.)
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