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A bizarre case comes out of the Texas court system -- landing squarely in the middle of a legal Bermuda Triangle where illegal searches meet civil asset forfeiture... and everything is still somehow perfectly legal. (via FourthAmendment.com)
[...] The Supreme Court of Texas examines the facts of the case, along with the applicable statutes, and -- after discarding a US Supreme Court decision that would have found in Herrera's favor -- decides there's nothing he can do to challenge the seizure. He can't even move to suppress the evidence uncovered following the illegal stop -- the same search that led to the state seizing his vehicle under civil forfeiture statutes.
[...] First, the court decides that the deterrent effect of suppressing the evidence is outweighed by the cost to society.
[...] The court moves on to dismiss the Supreme Court's 1965 decision (One 1958 Plymouth Sedan v. Pennsylvania), suggesting not only that things have changed too much over the past 50 years to consider it relevant, but also -- unbelievably -- that the seizure of a person's assets via civil forfeiture is not a form of punishment.
[...] By finding no remedy workable or worthwhile in the face of societal cost, the Texas Supreme Court has given law enforcement another way to salvage evidence obtained by illegal searches: simply seize the "container" (house, car, boat, etc.) the evidence was discovered in.
As defense attorney John Wesley Hall notes in his post on the case, this decision will also encourage more questionable asset forfeitures because the court here has declared it's unwilling to entertain notions of deterrence when dealing with "non-punitive" civil seizures.
Source: TechDirt
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 22 2016, @02:02PM
Thexalon, it's never that simple. It's not that simple when the people you are dropping bombs on are internationally despised and on the other side of the world, which is why groups like ISIS persist. Take the complexity of that situation and bump it up 2-3 orders of magnitude when the people you're talking about are your own citizens in your own country, all of whom are not islands but connected to a huge web of friends and family who will be fucking pissed if the US government drops napalm on them. That would result in a new group of rebels about 10-100 times larger than the one you just bombed out of existence. Then consider that not only are all those people well armed with actual guns, but have unlimited access to materials they could quickly improvise into all kinds of weapons. And, oh yeah, they can walk out and dynamite the pipeline leading to the NSA's data center pretty easily, drive a truck bomb down the Dan Ryan into the Loop, and do all kinds of things like that. Then consider that among those people there are a very considerable number of engineers, scientists, and other folks with very subject- and area-specific knowledge who are probably the people who built the systems the military and government rely on, so they know exactly what their weaknesses are and how to take them down.
That's a 20-second, off the top of my head read on it, but if you were to take 20 minutes on a deeper dive you'd quickly unfold many more dimensions to why that would be a very bad thing for the government to do.
Why else do you think they're trying to boil the frog slowly?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 22 2016, @04:59PM
And, oh yeah, they can walk out and dynamite the pipeline leading to the NSA's data center
Well now I think I know why L-3 is crawling the site.