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An appellate court in Baton Rouge ruled Thursday that a raid on a police officer's house in search of the blogger who had accused the sheriff of corruption was unconstitutional. The Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeals argued that Sheriff Jerry Larpenter's investigation into the blog ExposeDAT had flawed rationale: the alleged defamation was not actually a crime as applied to a public official.
The unanimous ruling from the three-judge panel comes after police officer Wayne Anderson and his wife Jennifer Anderson were denied assistance in local and federal court. "I love it when justice is tangible," Jerri Smitko, one of the Andersons' laywers, told The Intercept. "With that piece of paper it says that what they did was unconstitutional — that's a great feeling because you're holding it in your hand and it's vindication for people that they intended to oppress," she added.
The raid was sparked by the sheriff's investigation into who was behind the anonymous blog that accused local officials, including him, of corruption and fraud. Through a blog and a Facebook page called "John Turner," ExposeDAT used public records to show conflicts of interest. The sheriff sought warrants when Tony Alford, a local business owner, filed a criminal complaint about the blog. On August 2, Larpenter and his deputies raided the Andersons' house after they traced the IP address of the John Turner Facebook page through a warrant to AT&T. The information AT&T provided, according to an affidavit, gave the sheriff an address and a name: Wayne Anderson. The court found that the raid on the Andersons' house was unjustified.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2016, @05:50PM
We ain't free and we ain't brave...
We ain't free because corporations and the USG tell us what to think, what to buy, how much to buy and when to do all of this. Anything outside of the norm is flagged by automated systems and passed on to Uncle Sam because 'this one may be a terrorist'. We are all treated not-yet-convicted terrorists.
We are also not brave. Bravery means doing something despite the prospect of serious harm. I don't call flying drones over Pakistan from a container somewhere in VA very brave. Similarly, launching an ICBM from a sub is not brave.
Invading countries where the locals can only defend themselves with knock-off AK-47s (and still we lose), is not brave.
We keep lying to ourselves about both of these but we are too dumb to realize that we haven't displayed either of these in a long time.
We're a country of delusional idiots who are dumb enough to be rallied behind a flag or a simple a battle-cry with the attention-span of a canary.
And to top it all off, none of us would see anything wrong with flogging off our own mothers for a bag of sleazy porn (French or otherwise) because when there's money to be made, well... morality takes a back-seat.