Post: #1

Quote:The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that evidence found by police officers after illegal stops may be used in court if the officers conducted their searches after learning that the defendants had outstanding arrest warrants.

Supreme Court Says Police May Use Evidence Found After Illegal Stops

Note, this may merely be an unanswered traffic ticket.

Post: #2

This stood out

Quote:And according to the Justice Department, about 16,000 of the 21,000 residents of Ferguson, Mo., are subject to arrest warrants.

Post: #3

The problem with this case is that the officer was supposed to have arrested this man because there was a warrant out for his arrest. However, the officer had no idea of the warrant, and stopped the guy anyways unlawfully, and accidentally discovered the arrest warrant.

Basically, the judges ruled that the officer's intentions do not matter. It didn't matter if he knew if there was an arrest warrant or not, an officer accidentally doing his job is as valid as an officer intentionally doing one.

In a perfect world, I can see why the officers would be able to know if everyone they saw had a warrant out or not. But in the real world, policemen are not smart enough to possibly remember the thousands of warrants, so the courts have ruled unlawful stops of those with warrants to be good enough for the sake of the system.

This is a clear case of an overwhelmed system making adjustments to keep up with volume by infringing upon rights. I can't blame them for ruling the way they did, but we should realize that the bigger problem is all the arrest warrants issued in the first place. Is it all for drugs or because of violent crime? If the latter then society is seriously broken but if the former, it would have been far more preferable to revise the drug laws before weakening probable cause doctrine.

However, notice the judges did not state it is lawful. They did say it was unlawful. So as long as there is no warrant for your arrest, if you are unlawfully stopped there is nothing they can do to you. But if there is, you are fucked. Moral of the story, don't get tangled up in the system.

Post: #4

(06-20-2016 09:31 PM)porscheguy Wrote:  This stood out

Quote:And according to the Justice Department, about 16,000 of the 21,000 residents of Ferguson, Mo., are subject to arrest warrants.

That's racist.

Post: #5

(06-20-2016 09:31 PM)porscheguy Wrote:  This stood out

Quote:And according to the Justice Department, about 16,000 of the 21,000 residents of Ferguson, Mo., are subject to arrest warrants.

Remove the very young and the very old who likely have no warrants and that statistic is phenomenal.

If they'd simply said there are 16k warrants for 21k people you could assume that people had multiple warrants but the wording is very specific.

I can only assume that this suburb is some kind of cosmic nexus of racial micro and macro aggressions coupled with an inexplicably unaddressed yet utterly pervasive institutional racism.

No. Not even that covers it. There must be a massively ignored lack of opportunity, jobs and education, also coupled with a complete failure to protect the kids from drugs which is likely another form of passive racism at best.

The important thing is that (white) America takes responsibility for it's prejudiced failures and provides the kind of financial investment in the people of Ferguson that takes into account not only the problems that must be fixed but the suffering these people have endured thus far.

Post: #6

(06-20-2016 09:31 PM)porscheguy Wrote:  This stood out

Quote:And according to the Justice Department, about 16,000 of the 21,000 residents of Ferguson, Mo., are subject to arrest warrants.

That is like an "Escape from New York" level of a criminal population.