Looking at those maps will cure lots of wrong ideas about who should win the elections.

A valuable dissent from a horrible decision

In a US Supreme Court case decided on June 20, 2016, Justice Sotomayor's dissent says "this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time. It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged."

Clearly the case is worth thinking about. The case is Utah v. Strieff, and here's a little about it.

A narcotics officer got an anonymous tip that drug sales were going on at a house. Over a week of surveillance, he saw lots of people go in and out of the house, and suspected that the tip was correct. At a nearby parking lot, he stopped a man who had just left the house, identified himself, and asked the man what he was doing there. A radio call found that the man had an outstanding traffic warrant. The cop arrested the man on that warrant, searched him right there, and found drugs and paraphernalia on him. The man moved to exclude those items from trial, on the ground that the initial stop was unlawful. Lower state courts let the evidence in, but the state supreme court reversed that and kept it out. The US Supreme Court reversed the state supreme court and let the evidence in.

The Supreme Court found a "loophole" in a famous case from 41 years ago, Brown v. Illinois. A pair of cops arrested a man illegally as part of investigating a murder. They read him his Miranda rights after he was in an interrogation room. He made a voluntary confession, without any threats or muscle by the police. At trial, he moved to keep his confession out of evidence, on the ground that his arrest and interrogation were illegal. The Court said that the main point was whether a confession was voluntary, and that being Mirandized did not prove a confession was voluntary. The Court found the confession inadmissible at trial.

In the Brown case, the Court talked about "attenuating factors" which might soften the effect of an illegal arrest, but didn't do so in that case. In Monday's Strieff case, the Court's majority (5-3) found "attenuating factors" so big that the illegality of the arrest did not matter. The majority found that the officer's initial stop was illegal, but his discovering an outstanding traffic warrant, entirely unrelated to the stop, "broke the causal chain" between the stop and the discovery of evidence, so the evidence could come in at trial.

The majority also noted that the officer's stop was not random, but was part of the investigation of a suspected drug house, and the opinion also notes that if police made a practice of such stops in "dragnet" fashion, the outcome might be different.

The above has been in legal language, simplified but still dry. But Justice Sotomayor wrote an eloquent dissent, which includes "This case allows the police to stop you on the street, demand your identification, and check it for outstanding traffic warrants -- even if you are doing nothing wrong. If the officer discovers a warrant for a fine you forgot to pay, courts will now excuse his illegal stop and will admit into evidence anything he happens to find by searching you after arresting you on the warrant. Because the Fourth Amendment should prohibit, not permit, such misconduct, I dissent."

If you want to read for yourself, here's a link to the Court's opinion -- http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-1373_83i7.pdf -- and here's a link to an article about the case, emphasizing Sotomayor's dissent: https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/f1f7d0d2-36f9-11e6-8f7c-d4…

    Public records are just that, records that document the activity of the pubic’s government, which of course, the public finances. The public pays for the activities of its government through taxes, and the government is required by law to document and maintain archives of those documents, and finally, to provide such information as may be requested by anyone in a reasonable time frame at nominal cost to the requester.

    Chief Civil Deputy County Attorney Britt Hanson has a fixation, about to be publicly exercised for a second time this year before the County Board of County Supervisors (BOS) Tuesday, December 15 at the regular BOS meeting. (Agenda item: Adopt Ordinance 48-15 amending fee schedules to provide for a standardized cost of copying and electronic media for purposes of public records requests.) 

    Hanson is blaming requestors of large amounts of information for somehow costing the County money it doesn’t have. He complains that it is especially painful when large amounts of information are requested, gathered by a government employee, scrutinized by an attorney for necessary redaction, and then upon review, the requestor decides not to take any of the documents. 

    So this Tuesday, Mr. Hanson will ask the BOS to approve a scheme whereby a requestor is liable for as much as 55 cents per page of documents requested, and rates for scanned documents set at one page scanned per minute! We can be sure that there is much more to this move than money, though.
    Clearly, this rate scheme, cleverly disguised as an emergency austerity plan, is designed to reduce the number and kind of requests made in Cochise County for public information relative to the activities of our government. Last time Hanson raised the issue at a work session in the summer time, all three BOS members, in the presence of reporters from numerous local publications, said they would be happy to talk more about “transparency”, another obvious code word, but not about charging for the time it takes to gather public information, which circumvents the letter of the law that prohibits charging for an employee’s time . Perhaps the Supervisors were thinking, Britt, we’re already paying people to do the work, so what’s the problem?

    Or could they have been thinking, what if we had our public records on line giving the public immediate access electronically saving a lot of employee time, paper, and wear and tear on our machines?

    Could they have been wondering if Hanson had noticed that the FBI, upon receiving a request under the Freedom Of Information Act, automatically assumes there must be others who will be interested in this same information, so they make sure the information is posted on line to make it easy to get to, and, so they don’t have to handle this request again.

    ATTEND TUESDAY’S MEETING OR WRITE A LETTER

    Mr Hanson is not only not thinking outside the box to find a win-win solution to cost cutting, it doesn’t look too much like he’s thinking inside the box either. Or is this second request another sinister attempt to keep information out of the hands of low income local residents who may not like what they learn from it?

    Suggestion: consult the Clerk of the City of Los Angeles and find out how they did it… putting all those millions of records on line so people could access it for free. Or does that run the danger of creating just a little too much transparency Mr. Hanson?

    PS: Mr Hanson is also the Bisbee City Attorney, so whatever is implemented for the County is likely to be put into place in Bisbee. We’ve seen that duplication of Hanson inspired heavy handedness cross over to Bisbee administration already this year, like banning County and City public employees from participating in the Homeless Task Force in Bisbee. And how did that come about? Members of a subcommittee asked too many questions about County policy. See a trend here?