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U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#171

Post by School-Cotton »

da_chicken wrote: post #158
TremendousJudge wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated question, but who is paying for all these lawyers? Timbs himself out of his pocket?

Wikipedia says he was represented by the Institute for Justice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbs_v._Indiana Otherwise, yes, Timbs would have to pay. You can file a petition to ask the court to waive your court costs (there's a Latin legal term for it that I believe means "with pockets turned out" or "with pockets empty" but I can't remember it), but your lawyer's time isn't covered by that.

I think in forma pauperis is the phrase you're looking for (but its literal meaning isn't what you suggest).

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#172

Post by x220 »

lostapathy wrote: post #42
qrbLPHiKpiux wrote: post #3

What is scary is that something like the Patriot Act can be signed in overnight and something like this will take decades.

The interesting thing, though, is that once a civil right is established and incorporated against the states, it's basically unassailable under our system. So while it takes a long time to get those rights properly enshrined, at least they seem to be safe.

The NSA regularly violates the fourth amendment and never gets punished for it. How are those civil rights working out for you in practice in the US? How's the 10th amendment working out?

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#173

Post by icebraining »

moftz wrote: post #107
dba7dba wrote: post #75

What I'd like to know is if private property that was seized in the past will be returned? One of my friend's dad had a hip surgery and was bed bound for a few weeks. The family had to be at work so they hired a live in helper who was an older woman in her 60s. This older woman's story was a tragic one to hear. She had immigrated from Asia to US with her husband and family and had managed to buy a 3bed house. Well li…

The landlord is supposed to proceed with eviction if a crime occurs on their property. The police will even tell the landlord that if they don't evict, they will seize the house under "nuisance laws".

Which is insane, because the police shouldn't be putting people in harm's way by pushing them to piss off drug dealers who have the keys to their homes!

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#176

Post by School-Cotton »

jhayward wrote: post #142
dragonwriter wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the rest of the court found the the excessive punishment protection of the eighth amendment was applied to the states through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment as an essential right and therefore a component of “liberty” as used in the due process clause. Thomas disagrees with this fairly conventional incorporation argument and the idea of the protection as a fundamental right, but feels instead that a…

Note also that corporations are 'people' but not 'citizens' and would likewise be disenfranchised from the protections provided by the bill of rights and the constitution when it came to state law. edit: there seems to be some lawyering about the difference between the meaning of 'people' and 'persons' that I do not understand at this time.

Corporations are not people, and the Supreme Court has never found that they are -- this soundbite is a misunderstanding of Citizens United v. FEC.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#177

Post by basch »

ls612 wrote: post #14
whatshisface wrote: post #6

> Justice Thomas agreed with the result in the case, Timbs v. Indiana, No. 17-1091, but said he would have gotten to the same place by a different route. While the majority relied on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, Justice Thomas said he would have ruled “the right to be free from excessive fines is one of the ‘privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’ protected by the 14th Amendment.”…

That’s not quite right. The Bill of Rights originally only applied to the federal government, until after the civil war when the 14th amendment was passed. Since then the clause in that amendment saying no one can be deprived of life or liberty without due process has been interpreted to mean most of the bill of rights also applies to the states. This ruling said as much for the 8th amendment prohibitions on excessiv…

It's actually a different part of the same sentence.

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#178

Post by lostapathy »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #123
lostapathy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing, though, is that once a civil right is established and incorporated against the states, it's basically unassailable under our system. So while it takes a long time to get those rights properly enshrined, at least they seem to be safe.

>So while it takes a long time to get those rights properly enshrined, at least they seem to be safe. Our rights are so unassailable that I need to repeatedly pay a non-negligible amount of money to the government bear arms and get the approval of my local police chief if I want said arms to be reasonably modern. /s Some animals are more equal than others. Some rights are more unassailable than others. At least I can…

Keep in mind that the 2nd amendment hasn't even been incorporated against the states for 10 years yet (McDonald v Chicago). So while the right has been incorporated, the court has yet to really rule on the scope of what that means.

Just 10 years ago, it wasn't clear that you as an individual actually had that right, as it pertains to state restrictions - things have certainly improved.

Edit: I guess my original point I failed to make is that the courts have actually affirmed less rights than most people realize, but when they do (finally) do so, they tend to stick around.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#179

Post by Spivak »

tyingq wrote: post #149
gowld wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't legal; that's what this case is about. The authorities sometimes break laws.

Of course, nobody will go to jail for it. I'm happy for the ruling, but it doesn't seem to do much to discourage future abuse, since nobody actually gets held accountable.

I'm not sure why you want someone to go to jail for this incident specifically. The police acted in a manner that, at the time, they believed to be lawful. When the state was sued they also thought the police acted within the law, backed the officers, and won their appeal. Then after both sides made the best case they could, the supreme court ruled their actions were ultimately unconstitutional.

Do you really expect a random police officer to be a constitutional scholar? Dude should get his car back along with some damages to make up for the time/money he had to waste on this case but I don't think anyone should be going to jail over it.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property

#180

Post by da_chicken »

vonmoltke wrote: post #162
aqme28 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constitution really clearly delineates between "persons" and "citizens." I hate the notion that none of the protections apply to noncitizens. Additionally, a lot of the constitution is actually phrased as limits on the government rather than rights as citizens.

> Additionally, a lot of the constitution is actually phrased as limits on the government rather than rights as citizens. This is because the Constitution is supposed to be an enumeration of what the government is allowed to do. The limitations are there to narrow the scope of those enumerated powers. In this context, enumerating most rights of citizens would have been redundant. The enumerated citizen rights were th…

> Unfortunately, Commerce Clause abuse and the effective neutralization of the 10th Amendment has created the opposite situation where the government can do anything it wants as long as it isn't specifically prohibited, and citizens are only guaranteed rights if they are specified.

I mean, that's true, but it's also true that it's extremely difficult to get 50 states to jump forward at the same time, particularly when corporations comparatively have no hurdles at all over the same geographic region. Getting 50 of anything to do something at the same time is nearly impossible. If we want to do something about many significant, widespread problems, we need the power of a centralized Federal government. As the saying goes, the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Our Constitution wasn't written with the management of 50 states and citizens numbering nearly 350 million in mind. Our founding fathers expected that there would have been multiple constitutional conventions by this time. It's easy to see the dilution of individual voices[0]. Our founding fathers though that one representative for every 40,000 individuals was inadequate, and changed it to be closer to one for every 30,000. Today, it's one for every 700,000 on average.

No, I don't think that adding more representatives would help the problem, but our political system, invented in the 18th century, is nearly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people in this nation.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...

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