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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: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday August 29 2016, @12:27AM
In the case of police in the US, it's because for decades the majority of white people were more afraid of black people than they were of police, and willing to tolerate and even support police abuse of black people if it meant they could feel safer from black people, and the legislators wrote the laws accordingly. That's less true than it was even 20 years ago, but it's still true enough that there isn't the political will to change the laws that were written to favor police over citizens (with the unwritten understanding that the police are supposed to only take advantage of that when dealing with racial minorities).
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.