Don’t Trust, Do Verify
Why am I not surprised to find that this bears little resemblance to this?
UPDATE: The L.A. Times account of the case isn’t much better than Radley’s (no, really!), but does make the court sound a bit more divided than it really was. Staff writer David Savage writes:
Only Justice David H. Souter dissented from the order to reject the suit. In a separate statement, Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg concurred in the outcome without joining the court’s opinion.
In reality, Justice Souter did not dissent from the court ruling on the merits, only on the technicality of whether to hear the case (grant certiorari) at all. Radley makes the same mistake, describing the decision as 8-1 when in fact it was at 8-0 at best(worst?), and 9-0 at worst (best?). While it is true Justice Stevens’s wrote a concurring opinion, signed also by Justice Ginsburg, that opinion differed from the Court’s ruling on a tastes great / less filling theory. In a nutshell, the cops defended themselves on alternative theories: the search was constitutional, and even if it wasn’t they enjoyed qualified immunity. The court ruled that the search was clearly constitutional, and it was therefore unnecessary to rule on whether they enjoyed immunity. Justices Stevens and Ginsburg ruled that the cops clearly enjoyed qualified immunity, and it was therefore unnecessary to rule on whether the search was constitutional. Any way you slice it, Rettele and Sadler got pwn3d.
May 23rd, 2007 at 8:25 am
Radley is comparing the decision to what he wishes the law were as opposed to what it is.
I have done a few search cases and from my experience this was as good as a warrant search gets. No jimmied doors, no emptied drawers and slashed mattresses, no holes in the plaster, no missing small valuable items, no handcuffed occupants.
(I do not understand Radley’s “Castle Doctrine” from a legal point of view when there is a warrant in reference to the Anglo-Saxon system. My European acquaintances tell me there is something like that under the Civil Code. The search of a domicile must be attended by a judicial officer and that there is (was?) even a little ceremony where the “baillif” taps the threshold of the home with an iron bar as a symbolic breach.)