Constitution must adopt to our ways of living?

[backseatjuan]

So the cop stops you to check if you're a citizen or not. What you do? Tell him, Oh Yes Sir, I am a citizen, here are my papers? hahahaha


Here is a dude using his 4th amendment right
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fDCXzqgD99o


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.

-The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution




You people are giving your rights away.

 

[synergy1]

the foresight of our founding fathers continues to astonish me. The fact that something written in the 1700s is applicable today should show how easily history can repeat itself.

Thankfully, most of these kind of things dont happen where I live. its not to say it won't, but its good to be aware..

 

[backseatjuan]

This type of thing happens in Russia, traffic cops (not to confuse with real cops) love to stop for no reason to check if something is expired. They can't do it though, to stop someone they need a probably cause. To check your driver's license and insurance is not a probably cause. So we treat them just like in that video, works great especially if you have car DVR.

 

[Bible_Belt]

In Illinois, filming a police officer like that is considered an "illegal wiretap." It's a felony to film a cop or anyone else, even if they are committing a felony themselves as you film.

I think Michigan made DUI check points illegal with a state law against them, but DUI check points are considered Constitutional in every other state. It follows that a "citizenship checkpoint" would be Constitutional as well. But I don't exactly see the pressing public safety interest that is served by it, which is the DUI argument.

The problem is, if you actually wanted your case to go to the Supreme Court, you have to exhaust all of the state law appeals process first. You go through trial court, appellate court, and possibly state supreme court before you even get to file a Fed case. Then that case goes through trial and appellate levels. After that, there is about a 100 to 1 chance that The Supremes will find you interesting enough to hear about. The Supreme Court justices do, however, literally sleep through a lot of the court arguments. Clarence Thomas likes to prop up his feet and read a book. Even if you got through all of that and "won," you've likely already been in jail for about ten years, and there is no compensation whatsoever when they finally let you out after having imprisoned you under an unconstitutional law.

The police may also legally detain and imprison you for up to three days without telling you anything or formally charging you. And that's if they don't call you a terrorist. Under the post-9/11 changes in the law, terror suspects no longer have the right of habeus corpus - which is basically getting your day in court. That right has been considered fundamental for twice as long as the US has existed, but not any more. They can call you a terrorist, throw you in a hole, and that's it for you. You'll never get the chance to make your case in front of a judge - ever.

I think those checkpoints exist because California is broke and needs all the citation revenue they can get. Harassing the state's meter maid is not going to be productive. That guy is lucky they didn't give him his three free days in jail.

 

[backseatjuan]

^^You don't sue the police as a whole, you sue an officer that detained you illegally, or an officer that put his hands on you when you refused to go through such a check point. You sue the day light out of him, because clearly police has no right to ask you are you a citizen.

 

[Deep Dish]

Bible_Belt:
I think Michigan made DUI check points illegal with a state law against them, but DUI check points are considered Constitutional in every other state.

It’s also illegal in Oregon, too.

 

[Bible_Belt]

^^You don't sue the police as a whole, you sue an officer that detained you illegally, or an officer that put his hands on you when you refused to go through such a check point. You sue the day light out of him, because clearly police has no right to ask you are you a citizen.

Yes, you can do that. But the standard required for you to actually get money requires the most blatant of constitutional rights violations, which is basically a Rodney King, 'police beat'em up' case. Unless they handcuff you and then beat the crap out of you, or you can prove that the arrest was racially motivated (which is nearly impossible), then you don't get money from the US government at any level. They call it "immunity of the sovereign." The only way you can sue the government for money is when Congress has passed a specific law allowing you to do so, such as the Civil Rights Act.

From a lawyer's perspective, there is no money in Civil Rights Law. An attorney once told me that when another lawyer introduced himself as a civil rights attorney, he would respond, "that's nice, but what do you do for a living?"

 

[backseatjuan]

^^No. You can't sue police for doing their duty, but you can sue them for gross miscunduct while doing their duty. Gross miscunduct is taking your camera away and handcuffing you for example if you film one of their check points. So yes you can sue them individually for braking your 4rth amendement right, for setting up a check point and making you waite there.


http://www.copblock.org/16250/aclu-sueing-escondido/

 

[Bible_Belt]

The link you provided is a lawsuit for specific performance, as opposed to damages. That means they just want the judge to say something is ok or not ok. But they don't get money, even if they win.

 

[backseatjuan]

For damages you can sue individual police officers in small claims court, I'm looking for links. But basically if you have a plane ticket and are in a hurry and they stop you, illegally, for DUI checkpoint or a citizenship checkpoint, you can sue them individually for the sum of money that you lost, and you will win because they broke the law.

Here is a good site deal with illegal check points. DUI checkpoints are illegall as well. 11 states prohibit them

Alaska
Idaho
Iowa
Michigan
Minnesota
Oregon
Rhode Island
Texas
Washington
Wisconsin
Wyoming

https://www.checkpointusa.org/

 

[Bible_Belt]

Think about it. If everyone who was mad at a cop could sue them personally for money and win, then no one would be a cop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_United_States

County and municipal officials, when sued in their official capacity, can only be sued for prospective relief under Federal law. Under state law, however, the Court in Pennhurst noted that even without immunity, suits against municipal officials relate to an institution run and funded by the state, and any relief against county or municipal officials that has some significant effect on the state treasury must be considered a suit against the state, and barred under the doctrine of sovereign immunity.

You can sue for money if there is a specific statute that allows you to do so. That's "abrogation," basically the government saying if they mess up in a certain way, they want people to be able to sue and recover. Here is an article about one such piece of proposed legislation: http://theintelhub.com/2012/04/22/c...police-who-arrest-them-for-filming-in-public/

Most of the time, most people's reasons for being mad at a cop will not be addressed in an abrogation statute, and there will be no way to recover damages.

fwiw, an Illinois judge earlier this spring did declare the Illinois eavesdropping law unconstitutional. The legislature quickly re-wrote a new law that exempted cops from the recording ban. That's because the point of the law is to protect corrupt politicians from being caught on film taking bribes, not cops. I would get fifteen years in jail for recording a politician taking an illegal bribe, which is much less than the punishment the politician would get. That's business as usual in the corrupt state of Illinois.

 

[ElChoclo]

Bible Belt your legal system seems more archaic than a lot of others. Almost like it was frozen in time at the point of the American revolution. Grand juries for example.

Also, your legislatures seem to spend their entire time inventing ways to circumvent the rights which were built into your legal system. If those rights were not entrenched, with legislators like them, you would be a short hop away from something like a Stalinist state.

 

[SharinganUser]

Though they were being constitutionally unlawful, I don't think that they were really putting in a lot of effort into it. They stopped him and were wrong in doing so, but to be fair they didn't arrest him for not complying, unlike what I have seen in other similar videos.

I am not saying that to excuse their behaviour, I am simply pointing out that they could have been bigger *******s if they wanted to be.

 

[Bible_Belt]

Bible Belt your legal system seems more archaic than a lot of others. Almost like it was frozen in time at the point of the American revolution. Grand juries for example.

Also, your legislatures seem to spend their entire time inventing ways to circumvent the rights which were built into your legal system. If those rights were not entrenched, with legislators like them, you would be a short hop away from something like a Stalinist state.

I had a professor who was a retired prosecutor. One of his sayings was "a grand jury would indict a potted plant."

Most of our personal rights in this country come from the Bill of Rights, which just barely got tacked onto the Constitution after a lot of arguing. And yeah, other than for minorities and women, it's been downhill ever since in regard to personal rights and freedoms.

For example, to search your house, the police need a warrant. However, to read the text messages on your phone they just ask the phone company, and all of them cooperate. If you have "on-star" or probably even just one of the newer Internet-connected cars, it's perfectly legal for the police to ask onstar to turn on the mic in your car remotely without you knowing, and record everything you say. And it's not like onstar ever says no. If the police wanted to physically get into your car and place their own recording device in it, they would need a warrant. But under the terms of your onstar contract (or your cel phone contract), onstar will tell you in the fine print that they "co-operate with all law enforcement inquiries." That means everyone with a cel phone or a new car doesn't have the same level of 4th-Amendment protection as someone without those devices.

The idea of the Bill of Rights is that they are supposed to be fundamental for everyone. But that's never really been true. By the time that women and minorities had caught up in regard to rights, we had begun to use technology and the complexity of modern society to strip rights away from everyone.