Driving is a licensed privilege, it is extended and authorized so long as the licensee meets certain standards of behavior, one of which is not getting drunk and then driving. The driver implicitly declares his willingness to have his status verified by driving. Lurking with intent to loom does not qualify.
Choose ignorance if you’d like, but your original statement about NYC’s S&F was facile and wrong. Judge Scheindlin did not make her ruling per your claim, and only someone who doesn’t understand how judicial review works in the US would make the error of thinking her ruling was definitive. This was still working its way through courts when DeBlasio became mayor, and he isn’t going to pursue this further. A future mayor might, in which case we will have the opportunity to see what the higher court says.
That’s not how the court found traffic stops for drunk driving to be constitutional. They used a “balancing test” where they balanced the need for public safety against the intrusion on the citizen.
Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz
Emphasis added.
N.B.: I don’t cite all this legal crap because i agree with it. In fact, I don’t. I think Traffic Stops area an abomination. I think Stop and Frisk makes a mockery of the 4th amendment. But what I try not to do is filter actual facts through an ideological lens, refusing to recognize reality because it differs from my own political perspective.
Same things with the cops, which is what this thread is about. I think they’re assholes, and are acting like spoiled children. But being an asshole isn’t, per se, agains the law.
Concur, with the reservation the textualism bites it.
The Drug War killed the 4th amendment, and the War on Terror desecrated its corpse, cremated it, and used the ashes in a Satanic ritual.
we’re not getting the 4th amendment back while there’s still a Drug War. Period.
Well, he’s half right. Part of the rationale in Sitz is that drivers on public highways have a reduced expectation of privacy.
Sure.
If the case went to a high enough level to make a precedent I believe the policy would probably have been invalidated or at least given very strict limits. But you are failing as a constitutional scholar. First you boldly state that all warrantless searches are illegal because 4th amendment while ignoring a couple of centuries of case law then you start shotgunning precedents with no understanding of what they mean. Just say you don’t like and move on.
But that isn’t about licensing. The same argument is made that people walking on the street have a reduced expectation of privacy, as compared to someone sitting in his homes.
Well, no. People driving have even less of an expectation of privacy because of “the highly regulated nature of the highways.” It’s the primary grounding for the automobile exception to the 4th Amendment warrant requirement.
Perhaps I was unclear. We departed from the “plain text” of the 4th amendment with the “balancing test” in cases where public safety trumps the need for the cops to have probably cause or a warrant. The original statement was made that S&F violates the 4th amendment because there is no probable cause and the cops have no warrant. But the courts recognize there are times when public safety overrides this. One needn’t invoke the licensing of vehicles in order to skirt the strict reading of the 4th when it comes to vehicle searches, at some level.
S&F is not, per se, a violation of the 4th even if the particular method of implementation used in NYC is eventually found to be so. (My guess is that would be found to violate the 4th, but I wouldn’t bet much money on it.) They might then to need to make procedural adjustments to the policy, but they wouldn’t need to abandon it altogether. We left the strict reading of the 4th (which Steve invoked in his argument) a long time ago, and one can’t simply rely on such a reading to determine if a given law or policy is in violation.
That depends on how you define “stop and frisk”. If you mean Terry stops, sure, they’re fine. However, Terry and its progeny require an LEO to have articulable reasons for frisking a suspect. You can stop everyone, but you can’t frisk everyone. The evidence in the NYC stop and frisk litigation tended to show that pretty much every black and Hispanic male who was stopped in certain neighborhoods was frisked.
that does not cover being searched while walking on the sidewalk, does it.
And the bottom line is still, the federal court rejected the NYPD stop and frisk policy as unconstitutional. As for feeling humility. nope still not feeling any.
… or a war on terror, or a war on whatever.
As for the cops acting like assholes, John Mace I agree with you. What I am also saying is, there are and should be legal ways to rein them in, and that those laws already exist.
And that decision was later stayed and the judge removed from the case. Actually there was never a real higher court ruling on the matter. Since Di Blasio is dropping the defense of the policy in court there never will be. We can only speculate on what the decision would be.
The federal court? THE federal court? Unless one is referring to the Supreme Court, one is referring to a federal court. And in this case, it’s a LOWER federal court. Which doesn’t mean a whole lot in terms of judicial precedent.
Clearly an appeal to humility is wasted on someone who insists on doubling down on the stupid.
I really think you’re nitpicking, John.
OK, it was A federal court. You happy now? As for appeal to humility, I never was the humble type and I’m not gonna start now. I don’t have to humble myself to anyone.
For that matter, WTF does “appeal to humility” even mean?
But I don’t really give a fvck, if you have to resort to insults anyway.
It is no where near nitpicking. There was a ruling by a lower federal court judge. It was not heard by an appeals court where case law and precedents generally begin. And that lower court ruling was stayed and the judge was removed from the case by a judicial review board. So saying that a court ruled it to be unconstitutional is misleading at best. The case did not get to a court that mattered and the one ruling that was made was thrown out. That is not nitpicking.
I’ll ask again. (But only once, lest I be accused of hijacking or nitpicking.) What is the purpose of this affectation of spelling fuck with a “v”?