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In Scathing Dissent, Justice Sotomayor Says Supreme Court Just Gave The Green Light To Racist Cops
by Aviva Shen Jun 20, 2016 1:18 pm
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that police can still arrest someone for an outstanding warrant even if they had no right to stop the person in the first place.
The opinion, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, reverses a Utah Supreme Court order to suppress evidence discovered by a police officer during an illegal stop. After getting an anonymous tip about unspecified drug activity at a house, Officer Douglas Fackrell monitored the house for several days and ultimately decided to stop a random visitor to the house. That unlucky visitor turned out to be Edward Strieff. Fackrell had no reason to stop Strieff, yet he asked for identification and discovered a minor traffic violation on his record. Fackrell arrested him for the outstanding warrant and searched him, finding a bag of methamphetamine.
Thomas reasoned that even though the initial stop was unlawful, the discovery of the minor traffic warrant legitimized the search that produced the drugs.
Police protests have zeroed in on exactly this kind of discriminatory police practice in recent years, from the use of stop-and-frisk in New York to the shakedowns of poor people in Ferguson, Missouri, where virtually every family lives in fear of being thrown in jail due to an outstanding warrant for an unpaid fine.
This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants
The ruling, according to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, is essentially giving the green light to police to continue stopping and arresting black and brown people for little to no reason beyond their race and class.
In a searing dissent joined in part by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sotomayor describes a police state that regards black and brown Americans in particular as second-class citizens. She issues a direct warning to those Americans whose profiling the court has sanctioned.
This Court has given officers an array of instruments to probe and examine you, she writes. This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact. That justification must provide specific reasons why the officer suspected you were breaking the law, but it may factor in your ethnicity, where you live, what you were wearing, and how you behaved. The officer does not even need to know which law you might have broken so long as he can later point to any possible infraction even one that is minor, unrelated, or ambiguous.
more...
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/06/20/3790300/sotomayor-dissent-illegal-stops/
still_one
(92,502 posts)babylonsister
(171,109 posts)not afraid to express her disgust!
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)SwankyXomb
(2,030 posts)Nothing good has come from the Supreme Court with that attached.
Nye Bevan
(25,406 posts)shraby
(21,946 posts)pnwmom
(109,024 posts)still_one
(92,502 posts)bighughdiehl
(390 posts)But remember kids, its those nasty liberals that are actvist judges, the conservatives are strict constitutionalists. Rush Limbaugh says so, it must be true. Nothing to see here, move along now. Oh and by the way, those nasty liberals are the ones that are for "big government"...cuz somehow excessive police power does not count as "big government". My head is spinning.
malthaussen
(17,235 posts)The anger just oozes from every line. I note that even Justice Ginsberg refused to endorse the fourth part of that dissent, and she and Jusice Kagan wrote their own. Which is slightly cooler than Sotomayer's, although one doesn't have to guess how they feel about it.
Did you catch that Kagan and Ginsberg dissented "respectfully," whereas Sotomayer just dissented? The devil's in the details, methinks.
As for me, I agree with Sotomayer 100%, in all four parts.
-- Mal
blackspade
(10,056 posts)Cops have been fetishized even by the SCOTUS