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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: 2) by HiThere on Sunday August 28 2016, @07:12PM
It's been in process since before the civil war. This strongly indicates that it is a systematic problem. The system was designed to work with strong state governments and a weak federal government, but rapid transportation and communication made that unworkable.
The proper action would have been to repeatedly amend the constitution, but the amendments that were able to get approved didn't address the underlying problems, and so we have troops on foreign soil in undeclared wars, a ridiculous interpretation of the interstate commerce clause, and man other farcical legal presumptions. Often this is because there *is* no national consensus. Consider the 2nd amendment. There is absolutely NO justification there for the government to decide what constitutes a "well regulated militia". Clearly most of the founders would consider that most people would own firearms and be organized to use them, but nowhere does it imply a role for the government in that. One could argue that it should be the job of the state government, but not the federal. However with a dense rapidly moving, and mostly urban, population is seems probable that regulation is, indeed, needed. This implies not that the current amendment should be new-speaked into meaning something that it doesn't say, but rather that there should be an amendment dealing with it. However there is no national consensus, so no such amendment would have a chance of passage. This is clearly something that should be left to the state governments, or if there is no state consensus, then to the county and city governments. Once a larger consensus can be attained, THEN is the time for laws with wider coverage, and only when there is a national consensus should there be even an attempt at a federal amendment.
Perhaps is should be easier to make amendment, but the laws need to be intelligible, so there should be a requirement that most high school graduates should agree on what any law means in order for it to be valid. (Sampling is valid, but be sure to use large enough random samples and to cover the entire demographic.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.