cannabisnews.com: Calif. Judges Slip Leash On Narco Searches 





Calif. Judges Slip Leash On Narco Searches 
Posted by FoM on September 17, 1999 at 12:12:09 PT
By Jessica Loos and Dean Latimer 
Source: High Times
If you're friends with someone who's ever been in any legal trouble, then your rights are automatically compromised in the state of California, the state Supreme Court has determined. NORML's San Francisco coordinator, Dale Gieringer, puts it bluntly: 
"If you live with someone else, they can be used against you." Ruling on a drug case which had been dismissed by a Contra Costa county judge on grounds of improper search, and then appealed by the prosecutors, the Supreme Court in Sacramento has greatly expanded the permissible latitude for police to enter private homes without a warrant. Thereby they have established a pattern of "new law" which troubles California defense attorneys accustomed to raising the Fourth Amendment's protections against warrantless searches and seizures. Know Any Criminals? Prepare to be Raided!Local police in Contra Costa were justified, a majority of the Sacramento justices ruled last month, in searching the roommates of a man who was dating a woman on probation--on the grounds that the woman had given up her personal Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless searches as a condition of her probation. In deciding this precedent, the court "set the history of personal liberties back more than two hundred years," acknowledged Justice Janice Brown in a dissenting opinion. Actually, in pre-Revolutionary America, the Redcoat troops of King George III needed no excuses at all to bash into people's houses and ransack their belongings for evidence of "traitorous" activity. In 21st-Century California, cops will at least have to articulate some quasi-legalistic grounds for doing so, however specious--and the case on which this new warrantless-search precedent was established gives them unmistakable clues for doing so. In this incident, a cop stopped a man on the sidewalk for carrying a "long object," engaged him in conversation, and wound up busting him for carrying dope and a knife. In court later, the cop told how he just "happened" to know beforehand that this defendant's girlfriend was on probation; and since her boyfriend had now been busted, this inspired the cops to go where she was living and "routinely" search the place, which turned up drugs and two guns--in the bedroom of two entirely separate people who were sharing the rent with the original guy with the "long object. Inspired police work or just a shabby set-up? The Supreme Court ruled that it was inspired police work, thus going against federal court decisions on the issue, as California defense lawyers have been quick to point out, in some alarm. Searches of even a probationer's home, the feds have ruled, are subject to the same rules as other warrantless searches, in that they must be made exclusively for the purposes for which they are intended. In this case, obviously the search of the woman probationer's property was used as a ruse to gather evidence on other people, to whom the warrantless exception to the Fourth Amendment did not rightfully apply. And the evidence collected here, defense lawyers point out, actually pertained to parties even once more removed from the individual for whom the ruse was originally intended by the officers!Know Any Sick People? Flush Your Stash!Defense lawyer Stanley Arkey of Thousand Oaks, who has won medical-marijuana cases for Los Angeles patients Dean Jones and Steve McWilliams, points to the disturbing similarity between this new state Supreme Court search-latitude precedent and the US Supreme Court's recent ruling that highway cops can now charge all the passengers in a vehicle with "possession" of any illegal drugs carried by any single one of them. Attorney Gerald Uelman of Oakland, who is defending several medical-cannabis buyers' cooperatives against federal efforts to close them down, also expresses concern about California's new slip-the-leash doctrine for "drug" searches. The Sacramento court might very well start a national trend, he suspects, by making it easier for police to invent ruses to target the families and acquaintances of people already in the criminal-justice system. "I don't know that it's been done before as a pretense, when the probationer wasn't really the object of the search. Courts beyond California may jump on the same bandwagon." Medical-marijuana advocates in California have particular reason to be concerned about the broadening of police search powers there to include the friends and acquaintances of people identified as potsmokers. In an attempt to ensure that sick people who grow and use pot under the state's medical-marijuana law aren't arrested, legislators have proposed a system under which qualified patients may enroll for identification cards to protect them from arrest. And while presumably the police will be prohibited from busting patients who have duly registered themselves in this identification system, the proposed rules say nothing about prohibiting police from targeting the families and housemates of people who thus identify themselves as potsmokers.California NORML's Web Site.http://www.norml.org/canorml/ FILED 09/17/99Jessica Loos and Dean Latimer - Special to HT News
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