201–208 of 208 posts
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I took a class in college from a lawyer who said he started as a cop but wanted to understand the law better so he went to law school at night. When he graduated the chief (or whatever) told him he couldn’t practice law and be a cop, and even though he had no intention of actually being an attorney, they let him go.
Literally too smart to be regime muscle.
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Go back and reread the comment you replied to. The exception can only happen once, because the precedent doesn’t exist until that ruling is made.
Got it, Constitutional rights were violated, but our Constitution, the highest law in the land, has it written in that precedent is put above the Constitution.
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There is a point: protecting the accused against unconstitutional searches. That certainly seems important. Whether the police violated the constitution in good faith or not is irrelevant when it comes to the rights of the accused.
There's no point in protecting one individual against an unconstitutional search that proves him guilty. The constitutional issue is the ability to have conducted the search in the first place. The only reason we suppress accurate, but unconstitutionally obtained evidence is to disincentivize the action in the future. This "good-faith exception" strikes that balance pretty ideally. The defendants rights were violated…
It disincentivizes constitutional crapshoots where they throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It incentivizes using already known-good techniques where possible.
“This method” is also frequently scoped very narrowly. Next time they can get the data from a slightly different place, and it’s suddenly a new case. Or they filter the time or device info slightly differently. There are a bajillion permutations one could argue about in good faith.
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We all have to go to law school. How could you live in the world without breaking the law if you didn't know what the law was?
There have been many periods in US history where sets of laws were purposefully created that criminalized activities that nearly ~100% of the population engage in. The intent of those isn't to stop those activities, and there's no intent of prosecuting everyone. The intent is to be able to prosecute any individual person or someone close to them, at any arbitrary point in time. Many of today's lawmakers no longer hav…
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> Punishing judges for ruling in ways which are later overturned would destroy rule of law at a fundamental level. Not where people's most fundamental rights are concerned. What it would do is cause judges to err on the side of caution before making a ruling that would violate the constitution which is exactly what we want judges to do.
Then a Republican judge could just rule that obviously constitutional things were unconstitutional and punish all judges who don't agree, right?
Right now there is currently zero accountability. At best, when a judge violates people's constitutional rights some small number of those people will be able to get an unjust ruling overturned at which point they might be released from prison or might get some monetary payout at the expense of taxpayers, but the judge is still free to do whatever they want without consequence knowing that at least a few people will be unable to assert their rights.
Considering that unaccountable judges are where we're starting from, I think having a means to make judges accountable can only improve things. Given the choice between judges being able to violate people's rights without any accountability or a system where judges have some level of accountability for the most egregious violations of our rights, even while that system requires us to make sure that it isn't being clearly abused, I think we're better off with the option to get some accountability where it's needed.
It doesn't need to be a perfect system to be a better one, and it feels like we could put some guardrails in place to keep the amount of obvious abuse down. It's difficult to believe that judges willfully violating people's rights without consequence is an unsolvable problem, let alone one that couldn't possibly be improved somehow.
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Jeremy Kettler -- bought a silencer completely made and sold within his state (no interstate commerce) and believed based on the Kansas Second Amendment Act (I think that was the name) which legalized intrastate NFA items that it was 100% legal. His own state representatives had advertised to their constituents that the law exempted silencers that never crossed state boundaries. The buyer and seller did it openly and…
The SAFA case is complicated, granted, and rare; it reached the appellate circuit for a reason. CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability. Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed.
What justification do you have for the view that it is right that in some US states you can be convicted of a crime despite never having done anything wrong, with no negligence, no recklessness, no intent, no knowledge, nothing? Because that goes against the most fundamental precept of criminal law: the requirement of both actus reus and mens rea. With no guilty mind there is no criminal liability.