You No Longer Have the Right to be Secure in Your Home!

In this case – your vehicle.

" Fourth Amendment, U.S. Constitution

However, by an 8-1 decision [Justice Sotomayer dissenting] SCOTUS has decided all cops have to do is say, “Oops. We made a mistake.” With that, our supreme court of the land say any evidence gathered by a traffic stop for any reason at all can be used to land you in jail.

Okay, so driving a car is a privilege and police have authority to pull you over for anything at all – including not washing your vehicle. But this goes far too far. Sotomayer says it's another step in eroding our constitutional rights.

The full story is @ http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/12/u...ment-violations-police-officers-ignorant-law/

 

I read this story several times and come to the same conclusion that we have lost the 4th.

The word "reasonable" in SCOTUS writings means what? My hats off to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, her understanding and reasoning caught me by surprise in this case.

 

I believe any "mistake" on the part of police or organs of a State should be in favor of Individual Liberty.

 

I wonder if that could be used to raid people's houses.
"Oops. We thought your boy's amateur chemistry shed was a meth lab. Sorry about keeping you in jail for two months..."

 

Justice Sotomayor is right.

 

Read a piece this morning in the midst of all the Paris news that American authorities have confiscated millions of dollars worth of citizen's assets without "due process."

Where's the uproar?

 

In most cases, your rights end where cops' noses begin. If they or their dogs smell pot, might as well kiss your constitutional rights goodbye.

 

Justice Sotomayer got it right. A vehicle is property and all items inside are property and are protected by the 4th amendment. 8 Justices got it wrong.

 

In California, privacy is a right declared inalienable in our State supreme law of the land.

 

The approach to not legally forfeit your rights in such a search is to not relinquish them in the first place. This/these are cases of search-and-seizure or executed search warrants applied to expected areas of privacy (ie. home, property, person, or vehicle). Such examples do not apply when permission is not granted and instead left to proper execution of statutes regarding protocol under local and federal law.

Once permission to search is given it is considered relinquished. If you allow verbally to an officer of the law to search, you have consented and therefore forfeited your rights. You can ,by the same token, forfeit these rights by allowing an officer onto or into your property or vehicle without any verbal opposition.

Example: If an officer knocks at your door and you open it enough to allow them to put their foot between the door and the doorjam then you have already allowed them access to your home. You cannot remove their foot forcibly but are instead disposed to their discretion while your door is partially open with a view into your private residence.

Know your rights. Do not consent.

It is always easier to allow a search or questioning when we have nothing to hide but by allowing officials to run uncontested we become sheep to wolves.

Don't believe me? Look at all of the oldest civilizations on earth; they have all evolved into the most extreme examples of suppression. All are results of a phenomenon called "normalcy bias" and they all are products or examples of a sleeping society.

In search of utopia or provided security? There is a huge price to pay.

 

It's not that simple. Corrupt cops lie all the time. Unless you have a video or audio recording of an encounter with police, they will claim you gave permission to search. And of course when it comes to your word vs the police, the judge will always take the word of the police. Further, all they need to do is claim they smelled weed, it's enough to allow them to search.

 

It was in the 70s or 80s that SCOTUS carved out the "drug exception" to the Fourth. Then along comes the USA Patriot Act and the war on terror. The Fourth is pretty much dead in the water in these modern times, and Snowden showed how.

Now by way of NDAA amendments, the Habeas Corpus principle is also dead in the water. Now, in the name of the war on terror, indefinite detention is an option of the Unitary Executive.

 

It's not just the 4th Amendment, the entire Bill of Rights has been rendered impotent by all 3 branches of the US government.

 

That also is a direction the courts have gone, yes. People forget that courts are the government, not an impartial agency. The DA, the police and the judge are all the government and on the same team.

 

Years ago we were towing a trailer with a highly collectable 4,000 pound antique safe we bought cheap because the combination had been lost, meaning we'd have to hire a safecracker to figure it out (there really are such people and they aren't cheap.) Although antique, to this day that model safe considered one of the most difficult to break into because of the quality of the lock and it being multi-layered in different types of metal, some of which is highly resistance and reactive to drilling or torching, and for its shape (round) essentially impossible to blow open and instead just becomes a cannonball to explosives. It is difficult to blow opem a 4000 pound steel round ball - the interior storage area very small so it virtually solid metal.

They stopped making them a century ago as they were very labor intense to make involving multiple complex casting processes due to dissimilar metals of different melting temperatures. A brilliant design. It also sits on a tall pedestal for which it is very deliberately extremely top heavy so will tip if you try to move it, making it very awkward to try to steal the whole safe as well. There are old reports of attempts to blow one open with nitro - and no matter how much they used, instead it only blew off the pedestal and sent the safe flying like a 4000 pound cannonball. It is claimed the only way to get in to this day is a very skilled safe cracker working the lock, as a plasma torch would destroy any contents.

We were stopped at a Southern immigration check point, where they also MIGHT do drug/contraband searches. They wanted me to open the safe and I literally couldn't, which they reasonably didn't believe. After they made many calls asking what they should do, they let us go on our way. We did find a safe cracker who did get it open, it took him a long time and he commented it is better than even most modern bank vault locks as it has deliberate variations in the lock shaft and tumblers to give misleading "feelings." He had to record those until he could rule out false readings until he got it open.

Most of our vehicles have a small safe (cheap) bolted down in the truck or interior. They can be locked either by key, combo padlock or both. A locked box is a challenge to the topic of "expectation of privacy" as a lock box is at statement of privacy expectation. While easy enough to open with a metal grinder, that would establish no consent was given as well.
However, the issue has never come up and it is more about potential vehicle break-in/theft.

 

If there ever is a constitutional convention or amendments, I would like to see a right to privacy added.

What do you think of the new helmets that allow people to look thru walls (ie into houses)? Should they even be legal for private citizens to buy and shouldn't a search warrant be required before government/police could use such equipment?

 

There already is a "right to privacy" guarantee in the constitution.

Amendment I
(Privacy of Beliefs)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment III
(Privacy of the Home)
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
(Privacy of the Person and Possessions)
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment IX
(More General Protection for Privacy?)
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Read more about this @ http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/conlaw/rightofprivacy.html

The problem is that court rulings and laws are weakening or taking away those rights. That is exactly why we MUST stop the Politics as Usual in Washington and elect people who will follow their oaths to uphold and defend the constitution.

 

I believe this just needs to be litigated, well.

 

There can be no strict liability as a crime element for rights declared inalienable or indefeasible in State Constitutions.

 

I am NO "friend" of "clops" but I will make my equanimity clear by saying this: NO, they DON'T have the "authority" to stop you for "anything"---- it MUST BE a suspected legal violation.

And YES, you STILL have the right to be "secure" in your home. I will give an example. Recently a tenant of my apartment building here in DC called the police on me about "harassing" her. When the cops came to my door I opened it to them and spoke to them while standing in the doorway--- in front of the door BUT BEHIND the threshold. They wanted me to come out into the hallway to talk with them and I REFUSED, KNOWING that IF I did so they could LEGALLY arrest me at any time, BUT NOT while I still stayed in my residential "domain" WITHOUT them having a warrant. They even had the nerve to threaten me with arrest IF I did not come out but I stood by my RIGHTS and they respected it. In other words, they did not pull me out of the doorway and handcuff me. However, I noticed that one had his foot blocking the door so that I couldn't close it on them. When I came out to show them the witness I had to counter the girl's claims, they eventually arrested me regardless!

The point is they were restrained enough NOT to make the mistake of IMproperly arresting me and thereby giving me a technicality to plead to an as excuse for wrongful arrest even though there would have been no evidence. BUT they still displayed the propensity to do it and from NOW ON I will REFUSE to open my door IF and when they come and will only speak with them while it's closed. I WILL NOT open it UNLESS they have a WARRANT.

 

Should the People, start quibbling about not delegating wartime social Powers without formal declarations of war and wartime tax rates to prove the exigency exists and we are not merely getting "Congressionaled, Continentally".

 

Have you ever considered the meaning of the Ninth Amendment?

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights SHALL NOT BE CONSTRUED to deny or disparage others (rights) retained by the people. Yes, privacy is included.

The point being that an exhaustive listing of all the rights of man is impossible and impractical.

 

They need probable cause, many people now live in States with legal medical marijuana, and those people have a medical marijuana license, so, NO, they can't just enter without a search warrant sworn on oath or affirmation as to what is to be searched for the correct address to be searched, what is to be searched within limits etc... Otherwise the parameters of the Warrant when exceeded become the poisonous tree, and anything found becomes fruit of the poisonous tree and inadmissible as evidence in Court, that is how a LEO loses a case by not following exact procedural law.

 

The courts are divided on the issue of smell => probable cause => warrantless search.

http://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2015/04/is-it-legal-to-search-based-on-the-smell-of-marijuana.html

So in many cases if the police just claim they smelled marijuana (whether or not it's true), some courts will go along with that as adequate authority to conduct a warrantless search.

 

yes, it denies and disparages general intent laws and strict liability laws, in any conflict of laws.