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Chief Justice John Roberts wrote on behalf of the court that the officer's mistake in believing that it was illegal to drive with one working light was not sufficient to violate Heien's right to be protected from an unlawful search under the U.S. Constitution's Fourth Amendment.
I thought a driver's ignorance of the law is not a sufficient defense!
How can it be OK for a police officer to be ignorant of the law but not an ordinary citizen?
The issue is that he consented to the search. No one should ever consent to a search regardless of the circumstances.
Police are required to have a warrant for a search unless they can demonstrate probable cause which normally requires something be in plain sight or some other obvious way of being noticed.
The issue is that he consented to the search. No one should ever consent to a search regardless of the circumstances.
Police are required to have a warrant for a search unless they can demonstrate probable cause which normally requires something be in plain sight or some other obvious way of being noticed.
Maybe my personal experiences are long out of date, but...
Young man with long hair and a beard driving from LA to Denver, December 1971, driving an old beat up car. Young man gets pulled over in Magdelena, New Mexico for no reason (no I was NOT speeding and NO there was no broken tail light) and cop tells me that a car of my description has been reported snugging drugs and he needs to search my trunk. Well, I figured I could sped a couple of days in a holding cell while things got sorted out (or maybe billy clubbed just for the hell of it) or I could open my trunk. Cop liked my attitude and looked into the trunk filled with my crap and decided I was not worth the effort. 4th amendment be damned but he went home feeling like a man and I was on my way.
I have been illegally stopped and search in New Mexico, Petaluma CA, San Rafael, CA, and Sunnyvale CA. The last one was because I was young, and driving my brother and my sister to 7-11 for a late night slurpee and the cop had some kind of bee up his bunwahs.
For a very long time, cops have felt themselves to be a law unto themselves.
The sad thing is that if they spent more time making friends in the communities they server, rather than hassling the citizens of the communities they serve, maybe there would be less of this nonsense and more success enforcing the law against the real criminals.
As an officer of the law they uphold the constitution not the Bible.
While adultery may be a sin. It isn't a crime. Unless you are in the military. Or maybe certain parts of the country?
Fight of the millennia, Lilith versus Eve.
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