IANAL but I doubt if pictures hung in a public place have the same right against unreasonable searches and seizures. In this case there was no seizure. The “search” amounted to looking at posters that had been publicly displayed so that people could look at them.
And I then re-ask my question, why did Mott need to go to the school at 1:30am to view the pictures? Were Treece or the administration preventing anyone from seeing the pictures? Was that the only time Mott could get to them?
It strikes me as possible that Mott felt he needed to document something that the administration was either denying or trying to keep secret.
Whether or not he was justified in doing so is another question, but I would like an explanation of his motives.
Regards,
Shodan
The pictures would NOT qualify as “papers and effects.”
A search warrant is only required when the area to be searched has an expectation of privacy by the person whose effects are searched.
Did you know that?
Now that you DO know that, are you prepared to revise your statement?
- Rick
Hate to say it, but I’m inclined to agree with Shodan for a change.
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Were the students simply expressing their own opinions? Theoretically, this would mean there were pro-war pictures as well as antiwar ones, as someone mentioned above. Knowing Limbaugh, I would suspect that the situation was painted as “pinko liberal teacher teaches children liberal subversion,” regardless of whether this was true or not. Is it true? How true?
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What was the officer’s purpose and intent upon entering the school building? Did he have a warrant? If not, and if his intent was to take pictures of children’s artwork specifically for Rush Limbaugh, then he is likely to get reprimanded, at least; wearing your cop suit on non-cop business is not exactly a crime, but it does constitute abuse of the public trust, depending on exactly what you do; there is legal precedent for this. But I’d want to know exactly what his story was before I took him out and strung him up…
I must confess that I am surprised to see some of our more conservative brethren defending the actions of the officer involved. We can argue until we are blue in the face as to the appropriateness of the teacher’s lessons, but the fact of the matter is that it was not for the cop to decide that issue. If he though that there was a crime happening, then he needs to show probable cause and obtain a warrant. Otherwise, it is for the school board, parents and school administration to determine the curriculum.
Look folks, something really ugly happened here. A representative of the law entered a classroom under the cover of night for the purpose of stifling political speech. If you want to talk about the lessons that are being learned here, think about the fact that those kids probably feel even more justified in their feelings of oppression.
ARGH!
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I am not defending the officer.
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I AM asking how the Constituion was offended.
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The wall of a school classroom offers no reasonable expectation of privacy; therefore, no warrant was required.
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If anyone has ANOTHER theory of how the Constitution was offended, I would love to hear it.
Why is this coming up now? The issue was settled way back in May. The teacher is not going to teach that course again, he took down a couple bumper stickers. What happened to the police man is a private personnel matter.
The midnight photos were taken April 9, 2003.
April 15, school superintendent sends request to police regarding this issue.
Cop takes ‘midnight photos’ of teacher’s classroom(May 5,2003)
Breaking story, I guess.
Cop-teacher controversy crosses the country(May 8,2003)
Rush gets in on the act…
City Officials Protest Intrusion(May 23, 2003) This story details the event including what Mott says he was doing. He was on duty, but claims he was on break.
The Times Argus has quite a nice little search engine.
That’s true, in a way. No doubt the officer disapproved of the content of the posters and hoped that exposure and publicity would lead to a change.
However, the officer didn’t do anything to prevent the students from posting their opinions. In fact, the students’ opinions received much wider coverage as a result of his actions. And that’s their objection. There was a desire on the part of some to avoid the embarassment of allowing their crackpot political opinions to be made public.
One could similarly argue that Daniel Ellsberg stifled political speech by making public the Pentagon Papers. His actions discouraged governtment employees from writing embarassing analyses that they thought would be kept secret. But, most of us think Ellisburg was promoting free speech by making the Pentagon Papers public.
I don’t think that I was referring to you as defending the officer’s actions, and I am also not a Constitutional lawyer (or any other kind of lawyer for that matter). However, as I read article IV:
There really isn’t anything in here about an expectation of privacy. The way that I read it, it is talking about securing papers/effects and so forth against unreasonable searches. It seems to me that this is what happened. The artwork in question was undeniably the possession of the student’s, it was secured (i.e. inside a locked building) and without probable cause a cop entered the building and searched. Seems like a slam-dunk to me, but again I am not a lawyer.
And really, all of that is beside the point. We could take this to court and have slick lawyers on either side convincingly argue the matter both ways. BFD. The bottom line here is that the actions of this cop are oppressive, politically motivated and a gross abuse of the public trust. This is not what the police are supposed to be doing here.
IANAL either, but
The artwork in question was certainly the possession of the students. However, it was on display in a public building. Which is why I would like to know why Mott felt it necessary to examine and document the artwork at 1:30am.
One of the linked articles mentioned that Treece had posted something earlier insulting to Bush, but that it was removed. Might it be possible that the school administration was denying that any political artwork was being produced, and that Mott felt it necessary to document that it was?
I do not know if this is the truth, but it might be a possibility.
And, as Bricker says, I am not necessarily defending the actions of Mott, but I would like to understand them better.
And I don’t see that a police officer viewing your art work necessarily interferes with your First Amendment rights. I doubt, for instance, if Mott had viewed the artwork on parent-teacher conference day, or as part of his work as JROTC officer, that anyone would suggest that he was violating the students’ First Amendment rights. This is even if he vehemently disagreed with it.
Although it is at least unusual to have him look at the art at 1:30 in the morning. Which is why I am wondering why he did it then.
Put it this way - if Mott had simply been wandering thru the hall and spotted the artwork, would that violate anyone’s rights? Would he need probable cause to do that?
Even if he found the art objectionable?
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, but there IS something in there about “unreasonable” searches. How to define what is a “reasonable search” - one that does not implicate the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant - and a presumptively “unreasonable search”?
The way the courts have done so is, among other yardsticks, the expectation of privacy.
For example, let’s say you were visiting your dealer one afternoon, and getting ready to smoke some crystal meth to test the quality before buying. Hearing noises downstairs, you quickly hide your crystal meth and smoking paraphenalia in your dealer’s underwear drawer. The police charge in without a warrant and search the underwear drawer, find the paraphenalia, and are able to prove it’s yours. (Note: next time, don’t get your pipe monogrammed). They also find various contraband belonging to your buddy.
Outraged at this apparent violation of the Fourth Amendment, both you and your dealer move to suppress the fruits of the underwear drawer search as an illegal search.
Your dealer will win. You will not.
This is because you have no expectation of privacy in HIS underwear drawer. He does. The Fourth Amendment rights are personal rights, and cannot be vicariously asserted by someone else. Rakas v. Illinois. To claim Fourth Amendment protection, a defendant must demonstrate that he personally has an expectation of privacy in the place searched, and that his expectation is reasonable. Minnesota v. Carter. There are roughly one zillion additional cases that affirm these principles.
Something posted on a wall in a public school classroom has no expectation of privacy, and no person has standing to assert Fourth Amendment rights as regards the viewing of it.
Please remember that not everything bad is prohibited by the Constitution. Just because an officer does something offensive, stupid, or even illegal, the Constitution is not necessarily offended. So stop screaming about the Constitution, please, until it is actually in danger.
- Rick
You will note, if you re read my posts that not only have I not stated anywhere that the constitution was violated, but I have made abundantly clear that I am not well versed on matters of law. I do thank you for your clarification of matters constitutional, but do want to make sure that my stance here is clear.
I have not read all of the cases where the supreme court have weighed in on Article IV, and so all I have is my salt 'o the earth laymen’s take on it. As in “huh, cop sneaking in to classroom in the middle of the night to take pictures of art that he disapproves of. No warrant. Sure sounds like unreasonable search to me”.
As I have stated, I am sure that slick lawyers could make a case either way for why this either was or was not a legal action. My concern is that, from what I have read in the linked articles, it was not a moral act.
I will admit to a liberal/radical leaning (although I would hope that you could count me as one of the liberal but not nuts folk), so I tend to freak out when I see what seems to amount to misuse of police power for political ends.
Got it. But my original condemation was directed more at the likes of Duckster, who did suggest the Constitution was “torn a little more” that morning.
No argument from me on the skankiness of it – or the likely illegality of it. But I wanted to emphasize that illegal =/= unconstitutional. Slick lawyers may make a case for the law being broken or not. But no lawyer can make a colorable case for the Fourth Amendment being violated, since there are many years of case law dealing with “expectaion of privacy” and they all point the same way.
I’m generally conservative, and I freak out as well, since minimal government interference in personal lives is a hallmark of conservatism.
- Rick
It may be a public school, but it is certainly NOT a public building. The general public does not have the right to enter a public school whenever they want. Anyone who does so without relevant business will usually be asked to leave and then can be arrested for trespassing should they refuse. This cop entered at 1:30 am because he knew that he could not legally demand admittance to the teacher’s classroom during the school day, or when the administration was present. He had no legal right to enter that school. He could (and should) be arrested for trespassing as well. The fact that a janitor let him in is irrelevant. That is not the janitor’s decision to make.
The preamble, damnit! The preamble!!
First Amendment. He is acting under color of law to deprive the teacher and his students of their first amendment rights to free speech, by intimidating them into silence.
Agreed. Mott used his uniform to gain entrance to carry out a purely personal agenda.
He should have been fired no questions asked.
What business did he have in that building at 1:30am? Were he to enter the building and use normal procedures DURING NORMAL BUSINESS HOURS, then he would be exercising normal rights of public access.
However, cloaked in the imprimis of his government-supplied uniform, he felt it necessary to come into the building in the dead of night. This certainly violates the “against unreasonable searches” portion of th IVth Amendment. Given the time and the fact he felt the need to wear his government-supplied uniform to enter this building, a building that he would have been DENIED access to without his government-supplied uniform, it is obvious that only a fellow Stalinist would claim that his actions would qualify as a “reasonable” search.
Yes, the building is “public”, but not at one blasted thirty in the blessed a of em, it isn’t!!!
The little commie should be shipped off to North Korea where he can be an apparatchik to his heart’s desire.
But if the pictures were in a public area, how could there be any expectation of privacy? And if there’s no expectation of privacy for the pictures, why does it matter when the photos of them were taken?
If you had to be making money in order to violate someone’s copyright, the RIAA wouldn’t be suing all those Kazaa users.
The book review may fall under fair use because you’re incorporating the book cover in a critical work. The famous art work probably isn’t copyrighted any more, but if it is, you probably are breaking copyright.
It’s possible that Rush Limbaugh’s use of the pictures could be justified as fair use, depending on how many and how much of the pictures are represented, what context they’re used in, etc. But there are no hard and fast definitions of fair use, so I’d sue him anyway. 