I was complaining that it was not reasonable that an officer should expect to be able to strip-search a ten-year-old girl without a warrant specifying exactly why he should be able to, including which ten year old girl he plans to strip search. Clearly, I am hopelessly naive. I only hope officers still believe it is not reasonable that they should be able to torture ten-year-old girls without warrants. But I am probably naive there, too.
see my response to AFAIKnow.
No, there’s nothing embarassing about being forced to pull your shirt up and then pull your pants down and turn around in front of a police officer while a bunch of other police officers with guns prowl the premises. How silly of me. I mean, she was a FEMALE cop and everything! What ten year old girl would be bothered by such an incident? I’m sure if you had a ten year old girl, you would be just fine with it. Right?
BTW, if I’d said ANYTHING about “body cavity search” or Nazis your comments would be warranted, but as things stand, it’s YOU who’s dishing out the hyperbole.
Well, again, THIS WAS NOT THE ISSUE BEFORE THE COURT.
Incidentally, it’s a good policy. As both majority and dissent note, crafting such a rule would simply allow the search target to hide his contraband on a minor or on a female on the premesis, playing the odds that they were not specifically named in the warrant. Do you like the idea of children being forced to act as drug mules? The judge in this case signed such a warrant – he signed the affidavit attached to the warrant. Surely he was aware that “any occupants” could potentially include minors.
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No, it’s not. Treating kids like shit is never good policy. And I’d have to see some kinda sign that drug dealers were using kids as drug mules before I’d even consider such a policy. We shouldn’t turn ourselves into the social equivalent of pederasts just because a cop, DA or legal solon goes “Boo!”
The point of law was not dependent on the age of the girl. The point of the law was whether or not the officers could search “anyone” in the house. The officers in this case testitifed that, to their knowledge, they had obtained permision to do so. And just ot be clear, you aren’t saying that no one should ever by allowed to search a minor, are you?
Posting strawman arguments only makes your postion look weaker, btw. You may think you’re scoring emotional points by talking about torturing minors, but you’re not.
That wasn’t an argument, it was an expression of moral disgust.
About something you made up. No one has argued in favor of torturing minors here, nor did the police. That’s a strawman.
If the search warrant gave permission to search anyone on the premise, then how is it reasonable to have to exclude monors? Again, there is no law stating that minors are excluded from search warrants.
For some reason, this quote from “Inherit The Wind” comes to mind:
Apparently, no act, however brutal or stupid, can arouse moral outrage in some people, so long as it can be construed as legal.
Moral outrage? Sure, I have lots of that.
I reserve it, though, for people who keep kids in a crack house, and put them into a position where they might have to be searched by the police for drugs.
Or worse.
Nobody here is defending crack mommy. I just thought we should have higher standards for the cops than for crack addicts.
You’re saying crack mommy (and crack daddy) ought to be able to sue the cops for the search. How is this not a defense of them?
But the search warrant DIDN’T give the police permission to search anyone on the premise.
We do. Raising a kid in a crack house is much worse than what happened to the kid during the search. Did you mean to equate them? If not, then why imply that the standards were the same.
Well, arguably, it did. The warrant had an affidavit attached to it that was signed by the judge; that affidavit indicated the scope of the warrant included all occupants on the premesis.
The only issue was whether that was sufficient, since the affidavit wasn’t mentioned on the face of the warrant.
The “face of the warrant,” BTW, is the form document the cop fills out. Part of the problem in this case was that the box for listing the name of the searchee on this particular form of warrant was very small – room for John Doe’s name and not much else. Given the awkwardness of the form, the requesting officer thought that simply attaching the affidavit would be sufficient. Turns out he was wrong, but he could have easily accomplished the same thing by typing “see attached affidavit” in that box.
And these reasonable actions by the officers involved demonstrate to me an effort to do their jobs under the letter and spirit of the law.
Now, it may have transpired that a procedural violation occurred. There is a reasonable remedy for this - the evidence obtained is thrown out, better training is implemented, officers are even scolded. However, a lawsuit against the officers isn’t reasonable in this case, IMHO.
And that is the matter that the court had to determine.
Again, and I (again) cannot say this enough, THIS WAS NOT THE ISSUE BEFORE THE COURT.
Nothing in the Grooby case is about whether a minor has to be specifically named in a warrant for a search of the minor to be valid. Indeed, as I’ve noted (many, many times now), if the officer had typed “all persons on the premesis” on the face of the warrant OR had typed “see attached affidavit,” there would be no question about the propriety of the search.
If you don’t like this rule, fine. But you cannot get angry at Sam Alito for failing to address a question he was not asked. He was not asked to resolve the question “should children have to be specifically named in a warrant?” He was asked to resolve the question “is an affidavit attached to a warrant but not mentioned on the warrant’s face sufficient to allow a legal search of persons described in the affidavit?”
I believe I acknowledged, quite clearly, that such a search would be embarassing under any circumstances. I was just pointing out that the cops took steps to minimize the amount of embarassment to the searchee.
No, but you have described the search as “brutal,” drawn analogies to torture, and said this search was the social equivelant of pederasty. If that isn’t whipping up a huff of hyperbole, I’m not sure what is.
Well, of course they aren’t using them as mules now – because under current fourth amendment law, kids aren’t subject to any kind of heightened warrant requirements. That’s sort of the point. The logical consequence of providing potential hiding place X with higher warrant requirements means that hiding place X will suddenly become the hiding place of choice, precisely because it is more difficult for the police to search.
I think everybody felt bad about what the little girl endured. The magistrate. The cops. The courts. Even strangers like us. Certainly, Judge Alito expressed his personal anguish about it — repeatedly in fact. Possibly the only people who didn’t feel bad about it were the drug dealers. After all, they thought nothing of routinely exposing her to an environment of freaked out half-minded crack addicts. I can understand why the hand-wringers want to place blame in this instance, but I think the blame goes squarely on her guardians. Like the judge explained, making little girls off-limits to search serves utlimately to expose little girls to the worst possible fate: repositories for criminal contraband.
(Indeed, I do support the elimination of laws of prohibition, but since they’re here, and since the environment surrounding them is full of risk and danger, it is appropriate to protect children from harm.)
In other words, it’s perfectly acceptable to violate the law, if someone else is already doing so? I find what you reserve your outrage for to be outrageous, despicable, and numerous synonymous adjectives. I also find a cop doing a strip search of a 10-year-old without specific authorization to do so, to be outrageous, despicable, and related terms.
Dewey, I take your point. I was listening to Judge Alito’s explanation, and yes, I found his argument persuasive: he was asked to resolve a single particular and technical legal question, regarding the interrelationship between a warrant and an affidavit affixed to it, and did so appropriately.
My objection is that there are legal principles beyond the technical niceties involved. If a judge permits a violation of the Constitution brought before him to continue, and uses as his excuse “judicial self-restraint,” that differs only in degree, not in form, from “We were just following orders” to defend against accusations of condoning genocide and similar heinous acts. There are times and places to take a principled stand and be activist on matters of law and moral justice. Sam Alito was presented one, and he took refuge in a legal technicality, and I defy you to call it anything but a legal technicality. If a case presents a basic question of Constitutional rights, and there’s some minor technical flaw in the documents presented: say the affidavit had said 5824 Main Street and the warrant issued in reliance on that affidavit said 5284 Main Street owing to a typist’s transcription, the same premises being clearly meant in both cases, is that typo grounds for throwing out the case entirely? Or is a judge to apply some common sense and deal with the substantive issue before him?
Poly, what violation of the Constitution did Judge Alito, in your opinion, permit?
It’s important to distinguish between law and “moral justice”. Do we want our judges to be dispensing “moral justice” or do we want them interpreting the law? The reason we have laws is spefically because we can’t all agree on what “moral justice” is.
Can you clarify exactly what you’re trying to get at wrt constitutional rights? The example you gave is, I think, a very poor one. In fact, no consitutional rights would be violated if 5284 Main Street were searched, since the cops could reasobably assume that they were authorized to search that house. The constitution protects the right against unreasonable searches, not against being on the wrong end of a typo.