Your home is your castle? Not in Indiana

No one says they do. You just don't have the right to stop them. The courts can sort it all out later. It's probably the right decision, both legally and practically. You don't need people taking free shots at police officers.

 

no, it's not the way it works at all.

 

Cops have a shit ton of discretion when it comes to searches, seizures, frisks, and so on and so forth.

 

so an asshole cop sees an attractive woman loading groceries in a Wal Mart patrking lot and has the right to follow her home and enter her home, just because he's a cop? As someone who has friends who needed to file complaints with police officers who wouldn't leave them alone, this ruling can suck my ass. You better have a warrant or a damn good reason for being there. If not, the donut shop's down the street.

 

No one is saying the cop has a right to enter. The decision says you don't have a right to stop him. You can sue after the fact. You can press charges after the fact. There are lots of remedial solutions other than escalating a tense situation with an armed police officer.

 

Oh well, okay. As long as we get that. All this legislation does is give ammunition (pun intended) to the tin foil hat wacko brigade which believes this country's becoming a police state.

 

This is no surprise to me. In a way, my college buddies and I ran into this headlong well before this was ever a court case. And it wasn't even with a cop.

About 1991 or so, I was living in a house and the gas company needed to do repairs on a gas main out in the street. They needed access to our gas line inside the house to do the work safely (they claimed). Not they they bothered to tell us, or anything, we found this all out later. They just showed up one day and decided they needed to get in the house.

Unfortunately, they never bothered to knock on our door (we were all sleeping), so the morons attempted to enter the house through my roommates' window. He wakes up and sees someone crawling into his room through a window, someone who never identified themselves. Not knowing what the hell is going on, he panicked and tried to hit him with a toilet plunger or something.

Gas company calls the cops and cuts off gas to our house. When we go out and explain what happened, the gas company claimed we were "violent" and that they couldn't do work on our property.

Dickhead Muncie PD, never wasting an opportunity to stick it to Ball State kids, says they can't do anything about it, even though they know it was just a misunderstanding.

Our gas was off for three days until our landlord threatened legal action. The bitch of it was that the gas company went about their work anyway ... turns out they never had to enter our property to begin with, or if they did, they didn't care about any inherent danger.

That was the day I learned that property rights in Indiana don't mean shit so long as you have local yokels willing to watch the other person's back to provide cover for their own illegality.

 

The cop may not have the right to enter, but he still has free reign to do so as long as he feels the circumstances justify it. Do you see how that is ripe for abuse?

Is that where we are now, just let the government do what it wants and trust the courts to sort things out later? Like Ragu said, if we're just supposed to stand aside while illegal search and seizure takes place, exactly how are we protected from illegal search and seizure?

 

The exclusionary rule.

Civil actions after the fact.

Criminal charges against the police.

 

Don't you just love Muncie and the whole city vs. college war?

 

That's what I was thinking. There are ample remedies after the entrance, but when entrance is being contemplated, the law officer pretty much holds all the cards.

 

Ask Atlanta's Kathryn Johnston about that.

Oh that's right. You can't. She's dead. Shot by cops who broke into her house, using a search warrant that was obtained using fabricated evidence and didn't even apply to her house. She had the nerve to attempt to defend herself from what she had every reason to believe were intruders using a gun. (And apart from the badge, they were intruders.)

Ms. Johnston was 92 years old, by the way.

Your post, and any other post defending this, assumes that cops always act with good intentions, despite volumes of evidence to the contrary.