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Motorcyclist Wins Taping Case Against State Police
stevegee58 writes "Slashdot readers may recall the case of a Maryland motorcyclist (Anthony Graber) arrested and charged with wiretapping violations (a felony) when he recorded his interaction with a Maryland State Trooper. Today, Judge Emory A. Pitt threw out the wiretapping charges against Graber, leaving only his traffic violations to be decided on his October 12 trial date. 'The judge ruled that Maryland's wire tap law allows recording of both voice and sound in areas where privacy cannot be expected. He ruled that a police officer on a traffic stop has no expectation of privacy.' A happy day for freedom-loving Marylanders and Americans in general."
Let's hear it for a sudden outbreak of common sense from the judiciary!
Now, of course, this judge is going to get pulled over every day, even if he walks to work.
A happy day for freedom-loving Marylanders and Americans in general.
But a sad loss for power tripping pigs.
A public employee's expectation of privacy? They are public servants and as such should never have an expectation of privacy while on duty. I'm happy about the decision. We need more like it....
... that cameras are not allowed in many/most court rooms.
"a police officer on a traffic stop", or "a non-uniformed police officer on a traffic stop using a non-labeled vehicle, not identifying himself as police before pointing a gun like a crazy man"?
What about the asshole cops and prosecutor that put this sick joke of a "wiretapping case" on the taxpayers tab?
Anyone losing their jobs? Suspensions?
If this isn't malicious prosecution, what the fuck on earth is?
If we all just walk away from this without going any further, expect another case just like it next week, and another the week after. The point is intimidation, after all. Plus eventually they'll get some idiot judge who agrees with them.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
He'll spend a lifetime in that county getting pulled over for crossing the yellow line and not signaling on lane changes.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Sue the city and the cops for malicious prosecution.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
If their legal theory had held up, next thing we know we'd have had homeowners facing 10+ years in prison for "wiretapping" burglars' conversations on CCTV.
(Ooh, and the burglar was whistling "Happy Birthday", so you're liable for $160,000 in damages to the RIAA as well ...)
Idiot cowboy cop racks up tens of thousands of dollars in damages to be paid by taxpayers to issue a $125 traffic citation. Where do they even find inept morons like this?
I'm happy to hear the verdict, but it always strikes me as sad how we only seem to win the most obvious of court cases these days. I mean, who in their right mind would think it is not OK to videotape in public, or that we needed to "protect" the police from video cameras?!
From the stupid fucken judiciary that hasn't outlawed torture yet (despite it being on the books), who let the government get away with warrantless wiretapping, assassinations of american citizens, and who thinks its ok for an $80,000 per song downloaded verdict....
I'm happy with this verdict, but overall I'm still massively frustrated.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
You mean the police are not above the law... hmmm, i thought some of us are more equal than others. Heaven forbid the police have to act within the law :O
And what about that redneck cop that bursts out with a gun and no identification?
if that is his habit, eventually the natural consequences will take care of him, hopefully whoever is involved is not vilified as a "cop killer" but he probably will be. either that or he'll fall down the stairs and land head first on a bullet on the way to the police station
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Holy crap, if ever there was a board in dire need of some epic trolling, it's that one.
Oh, the N. Koreans are fucked. No question about it! And while I understand your frustration, let's at least put things into perspective.
That said however, if we don't remain ever-vigilant, our current path will lead to absolute tyranny. Not today, not tomorrow. But someday it will happen if we collectively keep our heads in the sand by not holding our elected officials accountable.
Life is not for the lazy.
Antonin Scalia is a constructionalist obstructionist who yet again applied Alice-in-Wonderland thinking in interpreting the Constitution to rule incorrectly as part of a lifetime of putting "individual" rights over "collective" rights, something that he doesn't use to protect you and me, but to protect the few "individuals" (i.e. corporations) who are attempting to turn this country into even more of a de facto fascist state than it already is.
Stevens schooled him in that opinion, even quoting from the case Scalia cited, Katz v. United States, a demurral showing that the deciders of Katz knew there would be exceptions, under which Kyllo eventually fell. Privacy ends where your emissions enter the public air, whether you are emitting noise, radio waves, the odor of a meth lab, photons bouncing off your naked body through an open window, or thermal radiation. The police or your neighbors can receive those emissions passively at a distance and act on the information as reasonable suspicion or probable cause.
The hitch in this case is that having a hot garage is evidence of nothing in particular and gave the police no cause to do anything. Even if the garage is being used as a hot-house, there's no evidence it's a hot-house for illegal plants. They must have had other evidence. The opinion suggests they did the thermal imaging because of a prior suspicion. At the end it says it's up to the original courts to figure out if that evidence is still sufficient to have justified the search. Likely it wasn't, or the cops wouldn't have done the thermal imaging. And whether coupling a hot garage to the other evidence is sufficient is unknowable without knowing what the other evidence is. I get the feeling I'd come down on the side of saying it isn't sufficient and the cops should have just done some more surveillance.
They have the ability to make your life difficult. Not even spiteful things like "I'll throw out your traffic tickets." They know they law, they know when you are breaking it and with what you can be charged. Further, they have connections and sway with the prosecutors. They also make rather credible witnesses. If the cops decided to wage a campaign against a judge, good bet they'd wind up on the wrong side of criminal charges. While they may be used to people taking their word of a defendant, wouldn't be the case with a judge. Of course the judge in that case would probably also be sympathetic to their colleague and so on.
Going after a judge would be just about the worst thing the cops could do.
You obviously don't know anything about Antonin Scalia apart from what Moveon.org and the DailKos tell you to "think".
Ah yes, good form old chap. Someone says something you disagree with on the internet, and you respond first with "you're ignorant and influenced by news/propaganda sources I personally don't agree with." Allow me to respond in kind.
(ahem)
You're just brainwashed by faux-news!
I would replace 'not tomorrow' with 'probably not tomorrow'. Stuff can happen surprisingly quickly.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I hear conspiracy theories like this but I've never seen any evidence of it happening. Reason is that the cops would get in trouble. If they follow someone all the time and harass them, that is precisely the kind of thing plenty of lawyers would be happy to take to trial. Also, this particular guy is known to record things. So if you have someone waiting outside his house all the time, following him everywhere he goes to pull him over continuously, well expect in short order to wind up on the receiving end of a lawsuit, or maybe even a federal civil rights suit.
All this is aside from the issue that their captain would probably get pissed off if they were wasting time on this rather than issuing tickets like they are supposed to.
I seriously think some /.ers need to get out a little more, and get some news from places other than online.
In this scenario, I'd be happy to see the turn-about, because I'm against the whole concept of cops issuing speeding tickets as it's currently done. The REAL point to the whole exercise is SUPPOSED to be about improving motorist safety. (At least, that's sure what the cops are constantly heard to claim, whenever someone protests the high cost of a ticket.) IF this were really true, the right way to approach the problem would be handling out tickets for unsafe driving practices, period. That means, for example, treating all speed limit signs as "recommendations". Stop the nonsense of automatically ticketing any driver exceeding that posted limit by X miles per hour at the second they went by a radar or laser speed gun! Instead, observe how people are driving. Give out tickets to the people who swerve into a lane of traffic without signaling, or the idiot who slams on his/her brakes on the interstate suddenly, without good reason. And yes, occasionally issue a ticket for driving excessively slow or fast too -- but not JUST because of the sign. If everyone is driving approximately the same speed, whether it exceeds the "speed limit" or not, look for the odd one out who won't drive with the flow of traffic. He or she presents much more of a danger or impedance to the traffic than anyone else in that group! For that matter, it wouldn't hurt to take the type of vehicle into account! (You can't take turns safely at as high of a speed in a large truck or SUV as you can in a sports car. So for one, the speed might be perfectly "safe" while it's not for the other.)
The fact is though, speeding tickets are a big revenue generator (AKA. tax), thinly veiled with the lie about it being for "your safety".
Law enforcement has their head so far up their ass they do have an expectation of privacy.
Can you hear me now?
Have gnu, will travel.
My point was that was an ad hominem attack. I expect better from slashdotters.
Manners aside, I'm not convinced that slashdot actually has a liberal bias any more than I'm convinced CNN does. Furthermore, if there is bias, I'm of the opinion that the answer is not intentional bias in the opposite direction, since obviously I'm not convinced Fox has done anything beneficial for cable news with that same approach.
My point was that was an ad hominem attack. I expect better from slashdotters.
You must be new
My SIG is a P226
Why do you say forums.officer.com needs trolled? As far as I can see, most posters there agree with the decision, and also say that the cop was an idiot for pulling his gun.
There are idiots in any group. Most cops are reasonable folks. The problem is only: you never know which kind you have...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Now that you've finished raving like an idiot, let the grownups tell you how the world REALLY works.
In the REAL world, cities pull funding from traffic ticket money. This has come to the point where even giant metroplexes rely on month-to-month ticket and fine monies for their operating budget - for a stellar example, look at the news from a couple years go from the city of Houston (3rd largest metroplex in the US) when then-mayor, now governor-candidate Bill White stood up in a city council meeting and tried to blame the city's entire budget shortfall on "the police not writing enough tickets."
Since they require this revenue, the pigs are given ticket quotas for each month. By hook or by crook they are ordered to meet these minimums. If they don't, they get written up. If they get written up enough, they theoretically get either fired, or denied promotion. So the pigs have every fucking incentive to be as corrupt as they need to be to write the tickets up. And by the time they graduate out of traffic detail (the lowest rung on the ladder), any semblance of honor or honesty they may once have had is long fucking gone.
THAT is the reality.
Well, I obviously wasn't there during your particular incident, but often, a cop that takes the time to give someone a good ass-chewing IS the good cop. From the cop's perspective, citing and going is easier and takes less time.
Sometimes they'll see that you have a clean driving/criminal record (indicating that you're probably normally a good boy/girl), and figure that a lecture might do as much to prevent a future infraction as a citation, without the permanent consequences for you. (more likely for younger individuals that are probably being stupid rather than malicious)