I’ve got a knock-knock joke for you about the new supreme court ruling. Ready?
Knock-bang.

Yeah, we talked about that, too, Brian. Dave’s take is that it’ll get a lot of suspected criminals shot, because the cops tend to be better shots (and would be more prepared) than the small-time criminals.

â€These remedies apply to all violations, including, of course, exceptional cases in which unannounced entries cause severe fright and humiliation.â€

…â€if those violations were committed against persons who lacked the means or voice to mount an effective protestâ€

A Question: What if, Mr. Chief Justices, unannounced entries were to the wrong house? What if the entries resulted in the death of the occupant(s)? Or, the death of the policemen?

There seems to be very light-weight thinking going on, here, at the Supreme Court. Is it the heat? The humidity? Senility?

They don’t call them â€police states†because a lot of police live in them. It’s because such states put the primacy of their police function above the primacy of their private property protection function.

It’s now more important that police be able to police than for private citizens to be able to retain their privacy.

I was hoping it would never come to this. It’s clear that now is the time to buy a gun, before the UN takes them all away.

/i kid, i kid…

But seriously. How insightful that the founders included the 2nd amendment to allow Americans to protect themselves from our OWN oppressive government. Rulings like this are the reason I can’t support any ban on assault weapons or munitions like teflon-coated hollow points. If they’re coming into my house to kill me, that’s where their constitutional rights stop and mine start…

EW: I began reading it earlier this week; and, I believe, one of the links I provided has an elaborate presentation by the losing attorney.
Alito and Roberts seem like temperate people, but I pitty the preteen with the french fry illegally on the public transport, whom one of those justices approved of arresting; and the other justice approved of another preteen’s being stripsearched by a policewoman; the girl was not named on the warrant but was progeny of a named person.
If you review the New Yorker article, you see a picture of Kennedy as a justice with a career-viewing conscience, but he is a very conservative centrist. I parted company with demagogues who managed to say SDO’C was a centrist; yet, to be thoughtful and respectful of her memory, she waited her opportunities to help people of an independent frame of mind, having grown up as she did in far southeastern AZ. My sense of Kennedy is he seeks to protect his own opportunities to learn, so he may enhance his contribution on the court. This is in contradistinction to Scalia, for example, who refused to recuse in a case about which he had ranted at a European conference a week prior; the video and excerpted transcript were making the rounds of the legal discussion groups online, but there is really a distinction between those two associate justices’ approach to their work on the supreme court. And Roberts is trying to herd these willful souls into lofty opinions in unison which often is far from consensus. My hope for Kennedy is his low key contributions during Katyal’s argument in Hamdan indicate he is making that one of his central decisions this term; also there is a lot of discussion about the voter cases’ likely being authored this week by two fairly liberal justices, though that authorship assignment is strictly hearsay at my listening post. Certainly your vantage must be close to the best source.

So the guy I really want is Kennedy’s significantly-more-conservative soulmate.

Is that who Roberts is? Scalia I think is known to have actively antagonized Kennedy. Great. Alito is too extreme to attract a guy like Kennedy, but friendly-face Roberts could be the one to gently usher Kennedy back to the conservative fold.

Very scary thought, texas dem. But you may well be right.

On this court Rapanos-Carabell 4-1-4 is a Kennedy gift to environmentalists, or maybe to the Army Corps of Engineers, or maybe to developers filling wetlands; in that decision this week Roberts proffered to future readers a narrow precedential way to look at the split as vindication of the position in which Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts agreed with partial Kennedy alignment, as way to evade environmental protections; though Kennedy kept his careful opinion narrow enough to allow some future plea leeway to claim other than the view Roberts suggested. At that pace Roberts will expend his supply of hapless toads quicker than he imagines; but TDem has it right, that Roberts is in the running for the fanciest lariat looping toward Kennedy.
One of the most intriguing policies of Stevens is his avoidance of the certification pool method of giving the clerks influence. It would be worthwhile getting to an array of Justices in which Stevens could relax as the centrist he is at heart. But that realignment almost certainly will develop by other means. There is an interesting post elsewhere on this site today by epockets discussing Bush and Congress on science policy. I think Gore has sensed that is Bush Republicans’ Achilles heel in the next electoral cycles; it is a difficult and rarified attack, but Katrina FEMA changed science and social safetynet into palpable issues.

This diverges a way from Hudson and the waning of the exclusionary rule. I once had training by some folks who performed warrantless searches; they were government employees whose job it was to verify our agency did due diligence. To gain entry to client premises they simply would knock on the door and ask in very bullying tones to enter. A lot of people will acquiesce with that kind of pressure from a person who is stating they work for government. I myself once let a distraught policeman in the house I was renting when he could not find an emergency; same thing as several commenters upthread discussed; he knew he was close but the only way he could tell, he fretted at the door at 5:00 a.m. to me, was if he could use the telephone within the home; he said his switchboard could tell from the caller id on my telephone whether he was close or even in the residence he sought. I guessed I knew who he was trying to find, it was a neighbor who was very sick and probably had a lifeline autodialer; which is why I permitted the police to enter without a search warrant. The landlord read me the riot act when he found about the incident though. Sometimes you have to rely on your instincts to work together to help someone. I will give Hudson another read and return after a while. Doubtless, the fourth amendment parsimony on the current court will record more such decisions into the archive all too soon, unless the court composition changes; or, as I am hoping, the VT, TX, and Hamdan cases afford some pushback to the rightmost majority on this court. Kennedy is likely to have ample opportunity to write his thoughts on many cases, if that triad develops the way I expect. But Roberts would prefer otherwise.

One of Scalia’s contributions to the regressive Hudson decision was the contention that modern research has shown police to be less in need of oversight than in earlier eras; to substantiate this somewhat fanciful depiction, Scalia cited academic research by a now emeritus professor from Univ of Nebraska, Samuel Walker. The prof has written a disclaimer in the LATimes decrying the application of his writings in the opposite direction of their intent; in fact, he says in the LAT, his conclusions in his published research show that only proactive programs for oversight nurture the conditions which may optimize fairness, especially with respect to the evidentiary exclusion rule which had its origins in 1961 as one of the two watershed rulings in this realm by the Warren supreme court, the other being the Miranda rule. We could talk about what has been happening with Miranda dilution recently, as well: in some other thread.
John

My life’s been pretty dull these days. Such is life. I’ve basically been doing nothing.

I can’t be bothered with anything recently. I’ve just been sitting around doing nothing. Today was a loss. I just don’t have much to say. Nothing seems worth thinking about.

Sex offenders should be, should not be castrated

Blame the parents of a murderer parents for the crime