Wait until you see what's under the robe.
"Jail strip-search policies challenged in lawsuit; Supreme Court to rule on issue’s constitutionality" by Robert Barnes, Washington Post / September 18, 2011
NEWARK - Almost everyone can agree that what happened to Albert Florence in 2005 sounds shocking.
A New Jersey state trooper pulled their car over as Florence and his family were on their way to his mother-in-law’s to celebrate their new home. He was handcuffed and arrested in front of his distraught pregnant wife and young son.
He spent seven days in jail because of a warrant that said, mistakenly, that he was wanted for failure to pay a court fine. In fact, he carried proof that the fine had been paid years earlier.
And he was strip-searched twice, the humiliation that he says most remains with him six years later.
“I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,’’ Florence, 35, said in a recent interview, describing how he was forced to strip with other men and be examined by a guard.
Because it's torture.
How did the land of the free become a police state, 'eh?
But the question for the Supreme Court next month - when it will weigh an individual’s privacy right against the interest of jailers in maintaining safety and security - is whether such strip searches are unconstitutional.
Florence said that strip-searching him for a minor offense without any reason to believe he was smuggling contraband into the jail violated his Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The class of those joining Florence’s suit against two New Jersey jails includes, according to the brief he filed with the court, those who were strip-searched after being detained for “driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal, and riding a bicycle without an audible bell.’’
For nearly three decades after the Supreme Court decided a case called Bell v. Wolfish, federal courts interpreted the ruling to mean jailers must have reasonable suspicion before strip-searching those they detain on minor charges.
But more recently, appeals courts in Atlanta, San Francisco, and the one in Philadelphia that ruled against Florence have disagreed.
They said the Fourth Amendment does not forbid a blanket policy of strip-searching those sent into the general prison population, no matter the charge.
“It is self-evident that preventing the introduction of weapons and drugs into the prison environment is a legitimate interest of concern for prison administrators,’’ Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman wrote for the divided panel that rejected Florence’s argument. The jails’ security interests outweighed Florence’s privacy rights, he said.
Remember when all this was supposed to be about protecting us from "terrorists?" Remember all the people howling it will be expanded to all corners of life? Turns out those "kooks," as they were called then, were right.
Law enforcement officials, lawyers, civil libertarians, and politicians are just as divided as the courts.
The American Bar Association, which is supporting Florence, said a policy allowing strip searches of all who are arrested would mean a drastic expansion of a procedure that the Supreme Court has called so intrusive it falls “into a category of its own.’’
“Nearly 14 million Americans are arrested each year,’’ the association wrote in its brief to the court, and many “do not involve violence or drugs and do not suggest a motive or opportunity to smuggle contraband into a prison.’’
But an array of states, municipalities, and the Obama administration are supporting the two jails that Florence is suing.
Of course they are. Government's purpose in AmeriKa is to expand its power, not protect your rights.
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Have you looked under your car bumper lately?
"Supreme Court set to weigh in on the use of GPS to track suspects" September 11, 2011|By Adam Liptak, New York Times
WASHINGTON - In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell’s “1984’’ to sound an alarm.
They say the Fourth Amendment’s promise of protection from government invasion of privacy is in danger of being replaced by the futuristic surveillance state Orwell described.
In April, Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote that the surveillance using GPS devices would “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.’’ In a similar case last year, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.’’
Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the US District Court in Brooklyn turned down a government request for 113 days of location data from cellphone towers, citing “Orwellian intrusion’’ and saying the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.’’
The Supreme Court is about to do just that. In November, it will hear arguments in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade. The justices will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time? Their answer will bring Fourth Amendment law into the digital age, addressing how its 18th-century prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures’’ applies to a world in which people’s movements are continuously and comprehensively recorded by devices in their cars, pockets and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems.
The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars.
“The Jones case requires the Supreme Court to decide whether modern technology has turned law enforcement into Big Brother, able to monitor and record every move we make outside our homes,’’ said Susan Freiwald, a law professor at the University of San Francisco.
The case is an appeal from a unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which said last year that the government was simply seeking too much information.
“Repeated visits to a church, a gym, a bar or a bookie tell a story not told by any single visit, as does one’s not visiting any of those places in the course of a month,’’ wrote Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg.
He added: “A person who knows all of another’s travel can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups - and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.’’
Federal appeals courts in Chicago and San Francisco, on the other hand, have allowed the police to use GPS tracking devices without a warrant. The police are already allowed to tail cars and observe their movements without warrants, those courts said, and the devices merely allow them to do so more efficiently.
Yes, I love an efficient fascist state, don't you? I must, I live in one.
Judge Richard A. Posner, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel in the Chicago case, did caution that institutionalized mass surveillance might present a different issue.
The case to be heard by the Supreme Court arose from the investigation of the owner of a Washington nightclub, Antoine Jones, who was suspected of being part of a cocaine-selling operation.
Apparently out of caution given the unsettled state of the law, prosecutors obtained a warrant allowing police to place a tracking device on Jones’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. The warrant required them to do so within 10 days and within the District of Columbia. The police did not install the device until 11 days later, and they did it in Maryland. Now contending that no warrant was required, the authorities tracked Jones’s travels for a month and used the evidence they gathered to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Of course, it is OKAY for the POLICE to BREAK the LAW, 'eh?
The main Supreme Court precedent in the area, United States v. Knotts, is almost 30 years old. It allowed the use of a much more primitive technology, a beeper that sent a signal that grew stronger as the police drew closer.
I'm reading a primitive pos.
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