Courts are deciding on a regular basis that law enforcement agencies of all types need no warrant to enter your property or home and that owners have no right to resisit or deny them entry. Two recent examples show that the Fourth Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, is dying a slow death.
In one case, Justice Steven David said. “We believe … a right to resist an unlawful police entry into a home is against public policy and is incompatible with modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” David said. “We also find that allowing resistance unnecessarily escalates the level of violence and therefore the risk of injuries to all parties involved without preventing the arrest.”
Incompatible with the Fourth Amendment? Maybe there is another Fouth Amendment I don’t know about. And there wouldn’t BE any risk of escalation or injury if government officials were in the habit of knowing and obeying their legal limits.
In the second case,, police entered into private propoerty to install a video camera. Granted, they could see the illegal activity of growing marijuana and wanted to record events for use later. The problem here is that they entered private property and set up the camera WITHOUT a warrant – they obtained the warrant after the fact.
Again, the judges ruled that this warrantless invasion of private property was within the scope of legal activity.
These are the kinds of decisions that slowly chip away at our rights such as private property and the right not to be illegaly searched. These decisions build “case law” which will be used in the future by judges deciding other cases.
Combine this activity with all of the new technology that makes surveillance and tracking so easy and commonplace and you can see HOW WE ARE LOSING OUR FREEDOMS.
VIA: TRUTH DEFICIT
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