Posts Tagged → house
US Supreme Court decides straight forward case with weird outcomes
Fernandez v. California was decided yesterday by the US Supreme Court. Everything about it is just…weird.
In a holding that is enraging advocates of private property rights, limited government, and citizen privacy, the Court’s conservatives were joined by two liberals to allow the police to enter a private home without a warrant, even if one resident says they cannot enter, because another resident said they could enter.
In other words, if the police get a resident of a home to grant permission to enter that home for the purpose of searching for something illegal, which the police now do not have to specify in writing, the police may enter. What they are looking for could be unknown, or undocumented. Maybe they are on a fishing expedition, just looking for anything they could use against the person who said they did not want the police to enter. It seems like planting evidence would be a lot easier, now. In any event, your home is no longer your castle, if a pissed off teenager inside decides to take out their misplaced teenage aggression against their loving parents.
Seems like a recipe for disaster.
Justice Ginsburg wrote a dissent, noting the obvious erosion in Fourth Amendment rights against illegal searches and seizures that result from holdings like this. Ginsburg is the court’s most liberal member, an extremist who has spoken out against the US Constitution she is sworn to uphold, and an authoritarian statist who otherwise just loves, loves, loves state power over citizens.
And here’s the really weird stuff: The facts involve “illegal guns,” which in California is anything down to and including a Daisy BB gun, and documented domestic violence.
The person blocking the police from entering the home to search it was the Mr. Wife-Beating Fernandez, a scumbag who held his cringing wife prisoner under brutal circumstances. After he was momentarily out of the picture and not a direct threat, she allowed the police to search the house, where they found the illegal guns (let’s be clear – California is on the path to making all gun ownership illegal, except by the police, which is otherwise known as a police state, a separate topic).
Thus did Mr. Macho Wife Beater get into even more and more serious trouble with the legal system, and thus did he subsequently attempt to suppress the evidence the police found, which really put him away behind bars for a while.
Ginsburg and other liberals typically trumpet the rights of domestic abuse victims, but here they are clearly ranking them beneath the rights of the gun-owning wife beater. Weird.
Conservatives like Alito typically champion the rights of gun owners and are split 50/50 on privacy rights. But here they are so obviously opening up the flood gates of potential abuse by police. No warrant? No documentation for probable cause? Husbands and wives typically cannot testify against each other, but here they are now allowed to defy one another in the family ‘castle’ so the state apparatus may enter at will.
Seems like a pretty huge detonation of American citizens’ privacy rights. Weird.
It’s official: Sunday hunting in VA
Two weeks ago the Virginia state House passed a Sunday hunting bill out of a committee that had bottled up similar bills for decades before. It was a surprising statement that it actually got through committee. Then it passed the full state House, which surprised even its most ardent sponsors.
Well, today the Virginia state Senate passed the companion bill. It allows hunting on private land on Sunday, a private property rights win if there ever was one. If you pay property taxes, say on a remote mountainside property, and you are deprived of 14.2% of your full use of that property for some vague reason, you might get frustrated. It is your property. You can shoot 1,000 bullets at a target on Sunday, but you cannot shoot just one at a squirrel. Laws like this are by their definition arbitrary, the bane of democracy.
Virginia’s governor says he will sign the bill into law.
Welcome to the modern era, Virginia! We are envious of you.
Kudos to Kathy Davis of PA-based Hunters United for Sunday Hunting (www.huntsunday.org), who has devoted the past two years of her life to this issue, and who helped a great deal with getting the Virginia law passed and the lawsuit filed there. The lawsuit compelled the state legislature to act, before a judge ruled against the state and the entire state was opened up. While I would like to see public land open for Sunday hunting, I am satisfied with private land as a start to implementing it state-wide. This really is an issue of the most basic American rights.
Visiting DC? Try this landmark
With original carved woodwork, tiles, and other intact original surfaces the Christian Heurich House is worth the five bucks admission fee. The basement was built as a traditional German inn or pub, and includes the nicest torchier I have seen. Antlers linking three old halberds together, this torchier undoubtedly was part of a larger set used to illuminate the day’s take, arranged just-so on the ground after a traditional hunt. Photos are not allowed, so I did not take one. Hopefully the association will publish a book on the place where you can see it all in detail.
http://www.heurichhouse.org/