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All the Evidence the Government Will Present In the Silk Road Trial Is Online
apexcp writes: In less than a month, one of the biggest trials of 2015 will begin in New York City. The full list of government evidence and defense objections found its way online recently, shedding light on both the prosecutor's courtroom strategy and the defense team's attempted rebuttals. Also important is what's not presented as evidence. There's not a single piece of forensic documentation about how the FBI originally found Silk Road servers, an act the defense has called "blatantly criminal."
"The government's argument is that, as the site's alleged administrator, Dread Pirate Roberts, anything that occurred there is his fault."
EXCELLENT! when do Jamie Dimon & Lloyd Blankfein's trials start?
The media love the idea of the Dark Net (Capitals strongly encouraged). They don't actually know what it might be, but it's just such a great media-friendly term they can't pass it up. Even if they have to search for a definition to apply after starting to use it.
I'd like to see a reference for that, actually.
My understanding is that if the police have a legal reason to be looking where they're looking, they can respond officially to whatever they find. To use your example, if they pulled you over for speeding because their radar gun was malfunctioning, they would have had a legal reason to stop you, and a legal reason to do a basic search (like looking in the car windows for weapons). If they see a bag of weed openly, incidental to the search for weapons, they can legally arrest you for it in a completely separate case from the speeding incident. The speeding ticket would easily be thrown out, but the fact that they found you with drugs is unrelated, because it was found during a legal search (unless the officers knew their radar gun was malfunctioning, and use it as a pretense for searching cars, but "bad cops" wasn't stated in your example).
The whole flow of logic is presented nicely at The Illustrated Guide to Law, as is often the case.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
its happened to me
I was pulled over doing 52 in a 45. the problem was there was no posted speed limit (the sign was covered with burlap, road work was starting within a day or 2) In NY, if there is no posted speed limit, the speed limit is 55, so I was not speeding per the law. After the fact, they found a dime bag in my car (dumb friend, fell out of his pocket onto my back seat)
It took me 6 months of going to court but after proving that the speed limit sign was obscured (by the town) I got the initial contact thrown out. And because the cop had no right to pull me over, he had no right to search my car, therefore the possession charge was also thrown out
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Author of the article here. I agree, that's not a great sentence. An editor put that in an attempt to define what the Dark Net is to readers. I missed it when re-reading it. My excuse is that this is like 5000+ words and I had just spent hours getting through everything and putting it together. To the editor's credit, he was also working long hours late at night to get this out today, so I don't blame him either. So let me reiterate that yeah, I think that's a poor definition that unnecessarily casts anonymity it a bad light. Anyone who reads other stuff I've written about privacy knows that's not how I feel. Sorry!
(legally) found the site, any further evidence should be tossed out of court.
for example, you get pulled over for speeding, but you were not speeding and can prove it, cops find a bag of weed on you. that gets tossed out as soon as you prove you were not speeding. same thing should apply here
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court disagrees with you:
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/15/...
Correct - even if the officer if pulling you over for something they thought was against the law but turns out it's legal
http://www.scotusblog.com/case...
The supreme court just found that even if a cop did something not exactly lawful, if the breaking of the law was reasonable then that's fine and forget the 4th amendment.
In a decision issued this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the police in a case arising from an officer’s “mistake of law.” At issue in Heien v. North Carolina was a 2009 traffic stop for a single busted brake light that led to the discovery of illegal drugs inside the vehicle. According to state law at the time, however, motor vehicles were required only to have “a stop lamp,” meaning that the officer did not have a lawful reason for the initial traffic stop because it was not a crime to drive around with a single busted brake light. Did that stop therefore violate the 4th Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure? Writing today for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts held that it did not. “Because the officer’s mistake about the brake-light law was reasonable,” Roberts declared, “the stop in this case was lawful under the Fourth Amendment.”
Roberts’ opinion was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, and Elena Kagan. Writing alone in dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized her colleagues for giving the police far too much leeway. “One is left to wonder,” she wrote, “why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being seized whenever the law may be susceptible to an interpretative question.” In Sotomayor's view, “an officer’s mistake of law, no matter how reasonable, cannot support the individualized suspicion necessary to justify a seizure under the Fourth Amendment.”
No, what happened to you was odd. It's always been the case that if the cop had probable cause for conducting the search the results are admissible. If he heard screaming coming from inside your house and thought someone was being murdered so he busted inside but it turned out it was just the TV (but he genuinely thought it was real) he can still bust you for the brick of cocaine sitting on your coffee table.
So he could always get you despite being mistaken on the facts. Now it's the case he doesn't even have to be right on law. The Supreme Court just ruled that the cop doesn't even have to know the law he stopped you under.
What is inadmissible, though, is evidence obtained intentionally without warrant or cause. The cop cannot break into your house without a warrant or probable cause and snoop around, find something and then come back in the daylight with a warrant and bust you. And that's the question here. I don't understand how they can present the evidence of wrong doing if they don't say how they obtained the evidence. If they illegally hacked into his servers...then no, it shouldn't be admissible. There has to be a valid chain of custody, and we don't know if the chain is valid if we don't know where it started.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
While the prosecution will probably have to cough up the goods after a hearing ordering them to do so, I'm pretty sure not dotting the proverbial i's during pre-trial briefing doesn't qualify as "blatantly criminal".
And how many times has the traffic stop been bogus?
Your tail light is out... (It was not out and I had the wiring checked)
You were swerving in your lane... (Louisiana used this one while the state had forfeiture laws. That was until they pulled over a reporter from a Dallas TV station)
I have been stopped for doing 56 in a 55. Think about that, speedometers are not even that accurate.
I friend of mine that is a cop once told me that he could pull anyone over at any time. Why? Because there are 1000's of traffic laws and you are breaking one every time you drive. When I asked which one I was breaking as we were driving down the street he responded "You are not preceded by a man caring a red flag." Seems the law was and may still be on the books from the early 1900's.
There's some scary Supreme Court precedent just handed down. The cop can be ignorant of the law, i.e., think you broke a law when you didn't, and then conduct a search, and that search is now legal thanks to a brand new Supreme Court decision. That's right, ignorance of the law is no excuse, except for cops.
Pick your poison:
http://thinkprogress.org/justi...
http://www.foxnews.com/politic...
Of course this is supposed to be limited to "reasonable" ignorance, but look at Smith v. Maryland. A one time, short term, metadata collection on a specific individual where there was certainly probable cause for a warrant if the cops had not been lazy, is today interpreted to mean that all metadata can be collected for every person, for all time, in the absence of probable cause. Or how the Executive branch interprets "imminent" to include "maybe possibly at some point of time in not so near future." This ruling is a free pass for the cops to do whatever the hell they want and claim ignorance of the law. Just give it 30 years.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
No, what happened to you was odd.
It's actually quite normal for the Supreme Court to pick cases where the lower courts normally can't agree on. In this case, the Supreme Court ruling was given on December 15th, 2014. So today, being December 19th, 2014, implies that there wasn't a definitive answer on this question until four days ago.
It's always been the case that if the cop had probable cause for conducting the search the results are admissible.
You're extrapolating. In the case of the Supreme Court case, the driver (allegedly) gave the cops consent to search his car. In the case of the parent poster, he doesn't say whether he consented to the search, or not.
Granted, "consent" can mean very little these days, just take a look on Youtube. To some police officers, even leaving your car door closed -- but unlocked, when stepping out of your car on the command of the police officer, implies that you've given them consent to search your car.