Hurray for police states

curious

liberty or license
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Big discussion on another site that I read about this. Scary enough, something like 38 states now have laws to this effect. The right to resist an unlawful arrest was integral to the founding of our nation.

Texas has an interesting dilemma. Surprisingly, it is one of those 38, but at the same time, it has the strongest castle law in the US, and it specifically says unlawful entry (and does not exempt police).

So if it is illegal for me to resist an illegal arrest, but the police unlawfully enter my home to execute this illegal arrest, can I defend myself?
 
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This isn't really an anti-terror law.
 
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I didn't think a warrant was required for "imminent danger" situations. My guess is some pansy district attorney didn't feel comfy about proving "imminent danger" in a domestic disturbance case, so now we've had to put in some kludge of a law to cover the situation. I expect one would have to read the "fine print" of the ruling to see if there are stipulations on when it is applicable, but I can't see such a ruling standing up to SCOTUS scrutiny without some sort of limitations.

That said, I dont' see the police knocking down doors for fun. If you don't give them a reason to pay you a visit, this ruling is really a non-issue from a functional standpoint.
 
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Locally a few years ago a police officer was in fresh pursuit of a criminal who entered into a 3rd party’s domain. The officer caught the criminal and was taking him back to a car when he was shot by the home owner who couldn’t see in the dark that it was a police officer and a cuffed prisoner on his property. I don’t recall any criminal charges from this, but fresh pursuit of a criminal is well established legal reason to be on someone’s property even without permission or a warrant.

The right to resist an illegal arrest stems from old English common law. While on the surface it sounds fine, in today’s US, were over 200 years of criminal law gets applied in every case, it comes the to the point where nitpickers can find fault in every arrest regardless of how well the officer did on a very dynamic, stressful, and often live-threatening scene. Calling an arrest unlawful and saying the severe beating or even death of a public servant was justified has become way WAY too easy, so laws had to change. The court system is more than capable of releasing through Habeas Corpus or motions before trail most of all criminals and including anyone wrongfully put into that group.

A quick read-through of the article, officers had a legal right to enter the home; the wife gave consent by saying “let them in”. The property is community property (it belongs to her husband AND her). It is her property rights that were being trampled on by her husband, not her husband’s rights being trampled on by police. The 4th amendment says “unreasonable” search or seizure. The police were called there for a disturbance (they did not show up on a whim), they were denied access to evidence they had a legal right to (they had an obligation by the law to ensure the wife was physically OK). The husband tried to prevent them from performing their public duties. In TX the husband was either interfering with the duties of a public servant, or hindering a police investigation (maybe both), before any use of force was applied. The officers had to arrest him to do their lawfully established duties. All this is according to the article alone.

This decision is not making a police state in the least bit. Police have always had the right to enter a home without a warrant with permission (in this case the wife’s) or in exigent circumstances, but the areas they can search and what they can do is limited. Would you prefer a police officer stand outside a burning home and let a baby burn to death because he doesn’t have a warrant? And if he enters to save the baby and finds a lady laying on the floor shot with a gun and a hand gun laying the room, should the hand gun be thrown out as evidence just because the officer did not have warrant? Even though finger prints on the gun could help prove the circumstances of the lady’s injury/death? Or should they set out side a house with someone bleeding to death waiting for a warrant, listening to them screaming in agony and calling for help? No way!

Nothing in US law has changed from this decision. No tradition has changed (expect we give women more rights than they had 200 years ago, when our country was founded she might not have had the right to let police in, I don’t know). So I fail to see how this decision makes a police state. If anything it upholds long standing legal traditions concerning warrants and warrantless legal searches. If this decision makes us a police state, then we have always been a police state.

And yes I’m off work today or I wouldn’t have had time to type all this,
=)
LB
 
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And if he enters to save the baby and finds a lady laying on the floor shot with a gun and a hand gun laying the room, should the hand gun be thrown out as evidence just because the officer did not have warrant? Even though finger prints on the gun could help prove the circumstances of the lady’s injury/death?

That's not really how it works in practise: evidence is evidence. Breaking and entering into a house and finding a wife stabbing her husband to death doesn't mean we can't catch her because the evidence was collected as a result of doing something illegal, it merely means the cop in question will be punished for breaking and entering.

Übereil
 
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It's call fruit of the poisonous tree, if the officer entered illegally any evidence would be suppressed before the trail begins. If there is still enough evidence for a conviction then it may still be worth the legal fight, but illegally obtained evidence is not admissible in most cases. This is outlined in TX Code of Criminal Procedure that governs this area of the law. Good faith would allow illegally obtained evidence if at the time the officer observed/collected the evidence, he had a reasonable belief that he was acting within the law (i.e. his search warrant he used was dismissed as being invalid but the officer did not know that at the time of the search). This would be a legal headache but it could, in theory, get through in TX were there is good faith laws.
LB
 
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It's call fruit of the poisonous tree, if the officer entered illegally any evidence would be suppressed before the trail begins. If there is still enough evidence for a conviction then it may still be worth the legal fight, but illegally obtained evidence is not admissible in most cases. This is outlined in TX Code of Criminal Procedure that governs this area of the law.

And this from the country that invented pragmatism...

Übereil
 
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We protect the criminal far better than the victim, Ubereil. The Constitution was aimed that direction, but was a pendulum swing from the predations of the English Crown and probably pushed too far. Of course, the liberals (and yes, it is the liberals driving that bus) have moved the laws to where there's a maze of technicalities to allow the genuinely guilty to walk away and no similar structure to protect the actual victims, but that's a slightly different discussion.
 
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Shall we call it "protecting the victim's rights to justice as delineated under the Constitution and applicable federal, state, and local laws", Captain Vocabulary?
 
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Interesting article. I certainly don't doubt that for some inmates, a place similar in structure to that can work very well to prepare them for re-entry into society, but one thing I noticed in the article is that all the people interviewed are decidedly Norwegian. Norway has a decent sized immigrant population, primarily Arab if I understand correctly. I didn't see any names there that would indicate prisoners from that group are there.

So it begs the question: Is their ability to be successful once leaving prison more about the types of prisoners they send there or about the cultural background of those prisoners?

Also as a side note, seems crazy that the maximum sentence for any crime is 21 years. How do they handle someone like a serial killer?
 
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You have to apply to go there. It follows that the prisoners accepted for such a program would be the most likely to succeed going forward anyway. Skew the population and it should surprise nobody that the results are similarly skewed.

The idea of giving the prisoners some job training is smart and missing from traditional prisons, but it seems rather offensive that a society would celebrate supplying a better living standard to people that have chosen to live outside the rules of that society than it would to people that follow the rules.
 
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it seems rather offensive that a society would celebrate supplying a better living standard to people that have chosen to live outside the rules of that society than it would to people that follow the rules.

If people "chose" this, why is the crime statistics in the US so high? Is it because Americans more often than other western nationalities chose to not follow the rules? Is it because people in general choose to not follow American rules? Or perhaps a consistent predictable statistic year after year might have more to do with America itself rather than those who live there? Perhaps it's in the drinking water?
 
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Also as a side note, seems crazy that the maximum sentence for any crime is 21 years. How do they handle someone like a serial killer?
We have something called forvaring. A prisoner sentenced with this will be evaluated at end of jail term. If deemed unfit for release, the person can be kept in prison for a new specified duration. This process can be repeated indefinitely and in effect equal a real life sentence.
 
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If people "chose" this, why is the crime statistics in the US so high? Is it because Americans more often than other western nationalities chose to not follow the rules? Is it because people in general choose to not follow American rules? Or perhaps a consistent predictable statistic year after year might have more to do with America itself rather than those who live there? Perhaps it's in the drinking water?
That's a rather philosophical question and I don't know that anyone could give you a definitive answer. My opinion, FWIW, is that your second question is closest to the mark. The American culture is more individualistic, which is going to make Americans more amenable to moving outside societal boundaries. I would further offer that our liberal friends have done their level best to eliminate personal responsibility and measurable consequences for making that choice, making it less personally costly for people to operate outside those bounds. The risk/reward balance is totally out of whack and it's predictable and expected that we'd be in the mess we're in.
 
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That's a rather philosophical question and I don't know that anyone could give you a definitive answer. My opinion, FWIW, is that your second question is closest to the mark. The American culture is more individualistic, which is going to make Americans more amenable to moving outside societal boundaries. I would further offer that our liberal friends have done their level best to eliminate personal responsibility and measurable consequences for making that choice, making it less personally costly for people to operate outside those bounds. The risk/reward balance is totally out of whack and it's predictable and expected that we'd be in the mess we're in.

Sweden is more independent than the US, yet with a much lower crimerate. It's also a country with a comparable soft justice system. American anthropologists in Sweden are usually surprised by how people behave. They place easily stealable stuff out in the open and you can spend an entire day downtown without spotting a police car.

Social psychology and sociology have presented quite a lot of data to answer the question how to reduce crime. Probability within populations is one of several ways the concept "free will" have been debunked.

This doesn't, as some suggest, makes the justice system invalid, to the contrary. the probability of crime where there's an existing justice system go down.

Law is only one way to prevent crime. Sweden have a branch of the government known as the Crime-Prevention Council that year after year apply the latest science on how crime works in order to reduce crimerate, reports that is then handed over with suggestions to the government on how to prevent future crimes.

Few people are psychologists, they usually use their own thought patterns and apply them on mankind as a whole. Trying to imagine someone elses behavior when one is safe, secure, stable and well rested can easily create the illusion that crime is rational.

Most crimes are irrational with no thoughts on the justice system whatever, they simply follow very predictable patterns, patterns that can be manipulated by external forces. The idea that crime is calculated and a choice is an unfortunate placeholder that reduces the will to implement effective crimeprevention systems that acts as such forces.

For established people, the strength of punishment is irrelevant. Their status depends on not being recognized as a criminal and the loss of social status, friends and honor. For irrational crimes, the strength of punishment is irrelevant since no calculation is done between risk/reward. The only one who do risk/reward calculations are people with some psychological disorders which are very few.

But social psychology can also explain why a culture insists on the issue still being in the justice system even though that justice system is already one of the harshest and largest in the western civilization.
 
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