Tag: 4th amendment

Supreme Court to Decide if Police Can Warrantlessly Raid Homes and Seize Guns of Innocent Citizens

Last week, the Free Thought Project reported on HR 127, the most tyrannical gun bill ever proposed. The bill would target the poor by forcing citizens to pay $800 per year to possess firearms that they are required to register. It also bans multiple legal guns and ammo types, turning tens of millions of Americans into felons over night. While this bill is, without a doubt, the worst gun bill in history, it didn’t lay out any guidelines for violating a citizen’s Fourth Amendment right. Next month, however, the Supreme Court will be considering exactly that — can cops enter a home to seize guns without a warrant?

That escalated quickly.

In March, the Supreme Court will hear the case of Caniglia v. Strom, which asks the question of whether the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement extends to the home.

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Arizona High Court Misses Opportunity to Uphold Internet Users’ Online Privacy

It’s an uncontroversial position that EFF has long fought for: Internet users expect their private online activities to stay that way. That’s why law enforcement should have to get a search warrant before getting records of people’s Internet activities. 

But in a disappointing decision earlier this month, the Arizona Supreme Court rejected a warrant requirement for services to disclose Internet users’ activities and other information to law enforcement, a setback for people’s privacy online.

In a 4-3 opinion, the Arizona high court ruled in State v. Mixton that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information held by online services that record their online activities, such as IP address logs. According to the Court, that information is not protected by either the federal Constitution’s Fourth Amendment or the state’s constitution, because people disclose that information to third-party online services whenever they use them, a legal principle known as the third-party doctrine.

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Court: Officers Did Nothing Wrong by Forcing ‘Completely Innocent’ Woman to Strip, Remove Tampon

As the following case illustrates, this doctrine is used to excuse the most heinous of behavior, even when if violates completely innocent women in utterly rapacious ways.

Angela Calloway has never been suspected of a crime, never arrested, and has never been to jail. She is, according to a lawsuit filed on her behalf, “completely innocent.” She does, however, know someone behind bars.

When Calloway went to visit this person behind bars, she was subject to an utterly horrifying experience at the hands of prison guards. She was forced to strip down and remove her tampon from her vagina which was then inspected by officers before being thrown away.

Naturally, Calloway felt that her rights were violated — namely her 4th Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure — so she filed a lawsuit against the federal prison in Virginia where her violation took place.

This week, however, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit justified the search, ruling that forcing a completely innocent woman to strip down and pull out her tampon in front of police to inspect it — is A-Okay — even forcing her to squat, cough, and spread her butt cheeks.

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Constitutional Attorney Issues ‘Opt Out’ Letter to Preserve Rights at Home During ‘Virtual Learning’

The Rutherford Institute has issued a precautionary “opt out” letter as a means by which families whose children are taking part in remote learning / virtual classes might assert their Fourth Amendment privacy rights and guard against intrusive government surveillance posed by remote learning technologies.

The Institute released its model “Parental Reservation of Rights – Remote Learning Surveillance” letter in the wake of a growing number of incidents in which students have been suspended and reported to police by school officials for having toy guns nearby while taking part in virtual schooling.

“Remote learning should not justify the expansion of draconian zero tolerance policies to encompass so-called ‘violations’ that take place in students’ homes and home environments. Nor should remote learning be used as a backdoor means of allowing government officials to conduct warrantless surveillance into students’ homes and home environments,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People.

“While COVID-19 has undoubtedly introduced significant challenges for the schools, the protocols adopted for navigating these circumstances demand a heightened degree of caution lest government officials heedlessly, needlessly and unlawfully violate key constitutional safeguards established to protect the citizenry against invasive and warrantless intrusion into the home.”

In issuing the model Reservation of Rights letter for use by parents with children enrolled in virtual classes, Rutherford Institute attorneys warned government officials against leveraging the current public health situation to further erode the privacy of American citizens: “At a minimum, schools must not use virtual learning platforms to conduct unwarranted surveillance of students’ homes nor use observations made from within the home as a basis for alleging a crime has been or is being committed.”

The issue arose after Isaiah Elliott, a seventh grader at Grand Mountain School in Colorado Springs, Colo., was reported to police by school officials for playing with a toy gun in the privacy of his own home during a virtual class on the morning of August 27, 2020.

Not only was the 12-year-old suspended for five days for “bringing” a “facsimile of a firearm to school,” but he was also traumatized when a police officer showed up at his home to interrogate him. School officials reported the incident to the El Paso County Sheriff’s office, and a deputy was dispatched to the school.

The deputy reviewed a video of the art class that was recorded without the knowledge or consent of students or their parents and saw the boys playing with the toy gun. A police officer was then dispatched to the Elliott home, where he confronted Isaiah, warning him that he could face criminal charges in the future.

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