Best guess: Would depend what court you were before. Wisconsin thinks it is fine and New York thinks it isn't. The Wisconsin approach is more in line with the Supreme Court.
I just read the full text of the opinion, and your summary is pretty apt. The worst case for them was US v. Knotts, where the Supreme Court held that a more primitive device could be used without a problem. They pretty much said yeah well this technology is much more powerful. It also didn't help them that they didn't have any reason on the record for putting a GPS device on his car, and probably put them on tons of cars. The dissent, I think rightly points out the Supreme Court's Knotts/Kyllo/Karo distinction that tracking devices/enhanced sense devices do not violate the fourth when they are used outside the home, but are overly-invasive when used inside the home.
The reason I thought you were joking is that I was talking about police officers in general, while they are investigating crimes and the fact that they probably shouldn't be following their ex-girlfriends around doesn't really have anything to do with the point I was making. I don't know how much a TRO is worth against a cop because I've never tried to enforce one. Maybe you can tell me, because it seems like you have an unnatural interest in the subject.
I don't disagree with anything you said. However, if I was trying to overturn an established Supreme Court precedent, I'd try to find a more sympathetic plaintiff than Montanan gun owners. I just don't see any Supreme Court ruling a huge amount of federal law unconstitutional so people in Montana can have more guns. As I said before, if there is some sort of 2nd Amendment reasoning that would make this cause of action more likely to prevail, I'd love to hear it.
HA! Good luck getting the Supreme Court to overturn Wickard v. Filburn(1942). In that case the Supreme Court held it could regulate what a guy did with wheat he grew on his own land to consume on his own land because it affected interstate commerce(maybe indirectly affecting the price of wheat for example). Maybe they could work in a second amendment angle, but I don't think it is going to fly. Would love to hear someone else's opinion.
I think that is correct, although I think it is very rare to have a piece of evidence suppressed due to police misconduct. For starters, most people just plead guilty. Also, it is very easy to get a warrant, and very hard to get a warrant invalidated. Also, there are a lot of exceptions to every rule. As a friend of mine once said, "If you can't get a piece of evidence admitted, you're not trying hard enough."
2-Sorry, I thought we were talking about what was legal and what wasn't. Have fun shooting trespassers.
3-Oh sorry, when you said seek charges, I thought you meant seek charges with a chance that they would be enforced by a court. If you are seeking charges against an officer who is investigating you, the would be unlikely.
The part that I found fault with was the following: Throwing out the conviction is the only punishment that will work to deter abuses, because it is the only punishment that takes away the reward for illegal searches.
Distinguishing between removing an incentive and creating a disincentive is slicing the baloney a little thin. Look at it like this. If a cop makes 10 illegal searches, maybe one will be questioned in court(most of these people plead guilty). If the guy has a really good attorney, his conviction might get overturned. The cop has 9 searches where he received a gain and one where he did not. He is then free to play again. Only by punishing him by more than having the evidence suppressed in one case will there be a disincentive to keep going.
If they were all striving to be heroes, and got caught every time they messed up that might work, but it assumes that the officer is striving for some sort of non-job-related reward. Being praised for being a hero for catching a serial killer or something like that. Doesn't really happen too often in real life. In real life, they might get some notice in the department for an additional arrest. Taking away that reward by punishing them for illegal searches would be a far more effective punishment than withholding the evidence, and has the added benefit of not allowing an undoubted criminal out of jail on a technicality. It would also have the benefit of removing dirty cops from the police force rather than just having the evidence suppressed when they get caught.
While this solution solves the problem of the cop who is willing to risk any sort of punishment to catch a serial killer problem, it doesn't remedy the everyday problem of people's rights being infringed
There are a million ways to get a warrant with little evidence. The only reason they didn't have one in this case is they probably didn't know they needed it(3 judges agreed with them).
The police work wasn't sloppy, they surely knew they dd not have sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant, so they pretended to assume it wasn't necessary.
You assume that the police knew that a warrant wasn't necessary. Do you realize that 3 members of the highest court in New York agree that a warrant wasn't necessary(assuming that was what their dissent was about)?
A lot of people on this site are assuming that the police knew what they were doing was wrong. It could not be more unclear and some of the best legal scholars in our state seem to disagree. They might have had enough for a warrant, and decided that they didn't need it because they were tracking him in a public space. Or they might have assumed that the fact that there is a lesser right to privacy in a car would allow them to do it. This isn't your typical case of police kicking down a door without a warrant. This is a case of the judiciary interpreting the constitution as it applies to a technology which was inconceivable at the time it was written.
That means if a murder suspect parks in front of a gun shop, the jury gets to hear about it, even if the suspect gets a slice of pizza next door. With nobody there to bear witness, the information gathered cannot be interpreted accurately and only serves to prejudice the suspect and/or waste the court's time deciding what to make of it.
This has nothing to do with the warrant/no warrant debate. GPS tracking is universally allowed with a warrant as far as I know.
You are arguing that having evidence thrown out is a greater deterrent to a police officer than the loss of his job? I could not disagree more. The end result in this case is that a guilty burglar had to appeal to the highest case in the state before the evidence was thrown out. The officer probably doesn't give a rat's ass that the evidence was suppressed. I don't think we should punish the officers for making good faith judgments about legal gray areas, but if we did, I think it would be a far greater deterrent than the occasional suppression of evidence.
Can't say that I agree with the bit about bad cops. As shown by the circuit split(not to mention the split opinion in NY), this is a legal gray area. If legal scholars disagree as to whether or not this is constitutional, you can't really fault the detective.
2-Not at all true. There are a bunch of ways a detective can legally follow you on to private property. They also don't need to be following you due to the open fields doctrine.
3-Oh really? How is a detective supposed to get the probable cause required for a warrant without being allowed to follow people? I bet you also think they need warrants to frisk people.
You are making the incorrect assumption that profit necessarily requires prediction.
As I understand it, he buys cheap CDS's(Credit default swaps are cheap when the risk of failure is perceived to be low) with a small part of his portfolio and puts the rest in something safe that pays off a reliable amount of interest like T-Bills. If the market doesn't fail, he pretty much breaks even. If the market fails his swaps pay out huge.
I guess in some sense you could argue that he did predict that eventually the market would have enough of a correction to make him some money, but it wasn't really a prediction so much as a strategy that he engaged in over the long term. When I think of guys who predicted the downturn, I think of guys like Paulson who crunched the numbers, bet against the housing market and profited when it crashed.
How in the hell did this get modded insightful? Two consenting parties to an exchange magically makes things legal, or just, or something? If you are allowed to make up your own rights, then you have the right to do everything, and anything that restricts that is unjust. However, when most people talk about rights, they are talking about a guarantee made to them by a government. Pick a government, any government, none of them recognize these stupid privileges you made up for yourself.
People keep saying copyright is a recent invention, and somehow assume that if we go back to a world without copyright artists will still thrive. The difference is that we now have technology which allows us to get the media instantly and free. Sure, some musicians will be able to get by with live performances. What about authors? How is an author supposed to survive in a copyright-free world once e-readers have matured?
Artists should not have to rely on the good will of the public to ensure that they are paid for their work. I cannot believe how many people on this site think it is perfectly alright to steal someone's work while complaining about parasitic middlemen, like once the record companies no longer exist, people will stop stealing music and start paying for it directly.
Had Blockbuster's total access plan where you can get 3 at a time mailed and trade in the envelopes for up to 5 dvds a month in store. Then they changed it so the dvds you rent in the store get added to the movies you have out and they don't send another one and called it "no late fees." So basically I was paying extra money to save them postage and when I called to complain they tried to tell me that it was better than what I had because there were no late fees. I told them just because you're reading this off your response tree doesn't make it true. Previously they had unlimited in-store rentals, so they've changed my plan twice since its inception.
I was so ticked off that I switched back to netflix, which I quit because of throttling and got to cash in my one month of one free extra dvd I got in the class action suit. The service has greatly improved since I left. They have way better selection than blockbuster and I sometimes use the online streaming to play things on my ps3, I just wish it was natively supported and I didn't have to pay for a program(playon) to do it. Then again, the program also supports other online video sites and I am able to stream every episode of Star Trek TOS from CBS, which is great. The only downside is that I have to pay one dollar extra per month to get access to blu ray's, but it is so much easier to get the movies I want sent that I don't mind.
Everything I've read about carbon sequestration says that we have all the technology required for it, but that it is obscenely expensive and is just a trick to make us think that fossil fuels are going to be greener some time in the near future.
Sorry if I was unclear. It is important to note that Amazon is a huge business and the things that they are mailing have been sold to residents of the state. Amazon does business with millions of New Yorkers. They are going to have sufficient contacts with the state for personal jurisdiction. Take a look at a case called international shoe if you want, it is a similar issue.
If a judge issues a decision about a citizen in another state it does carry weight. Article 4 of the US constitution says this.
It really isn't as unfair as you're making it sound because the person against whom the default judgment has been filed will have been served with notice of the proceeding. I don't know why they would have to extradite someone with a default judgment against him in a civil trial. If you don't want to show up to court to defend yourself, no one is going to make you. You're just going to owe a ton of money because you didn't feel like showing up to court.
So to answer your question, merely mailing something to a state is probably not enough to get personal jurisdiction, but if you do business with a state, you're going to be in trouble.
I thought it was well known that Maxim's reviews for games were known to be written without playing the game on the basis of a few screenshots. I seem to remember them reviewing something before the review copies had been distributed or something like that.
If the school has the policy, one can generally assume that it is in response to a lawsuit rather than the school's administrators being complete fascists.
Not quite sure what you mean by a case "coming to court." If someone sues a school district, they have to pay a lawyer to defend them. Sure, a judge could dismiss the case, but these are often fact-sensitive inquiries. Here is a case from Wisconsin that might explain the school's policy. Child attacked teacher. Child's mother complained to the sheriff who(rightly) did nothing. Mother complained to the DCF who investigated and didn't find anything. Mother then sued for not providing a proper educational environment. Here is an excerpt:
Alex R., ex rel. Beth R. v. Forrestville Valley Community Unit School Dist. No. 221
375 F.3d 603
C.A.7 (Ill.),2004.
On October 11, Alex began pacing in the back of his classroom and speaking loudly. He swung his backpack near students and desktop computers and charged his individual aide, striking her. Alex then began rolling around the room, first near students' desks and then near the legs of a folding table holding computer equipment. School staff removed Alex to another classroom, where he imitated karate-style chops and kicks. He also charged his teacher, ramming her into the classroom door, clawing her, and, as a photo taken by the District reveals, leaving scratch marks on her chest.
Beginning on October 12, Alex served a five-day suspension for this incident. Also after this episode, Alex's mother filed a charge with Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, alleging that Cheek kicked Alex without justification during these events. The ensuing investigation did not find that the teacher engaged in any wrongdoing. Alex's mother also complained to the sheriff's department, but the investigation by law enforcement resulted in no charges being filed against the teacher. In the wake of these events, school superintendent Lowell Taylor wrote a memo to staff members, dated October 16, in which he instructed that "[f]light risk will be responded to by summoning law enforcement. Faculty and staff should not put themselves or others at unreasonable/substantial risk because of Alex's violent tendencies."
As you can see, a litigious parent can cause lots of trouble if the teacher ever gets involved physically.
I live in New York and pay sales tax for everything I buy on Amazon. It was my understanding that rather than fight it in court they just started charging sales tax.
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Best guess: Would depend what court you were before. Wisconsin thinks it is fine and New York thinks it isn't. The Wisconsin approach is more in line with the Supreme Court.
I just read the full text of the opinion, and your summary is pretty apt. The worst case for them was US v. Knotts, where the Supreme Court held that a more primitive device could be used without a problem. They pretty much said yeah well this technology is much more powerful. It also didn't help them that they didn't have any reason on the record for putting a GPS device on his car, and probably put them on tons of cars. The dissent, I think rightly points out the Supreme Court's Knotts/Kyllo/Karo distinction that tracking devices/enhanced sense devices do not violate the fourth when they are used outside the home, but are overly-invasive when used inside the home.
The police may do this in Wisconsin without a warrant. In New York they need a warrant. I don't understand the rest of what you wrote.
It says it in court decisions interpreting the constitution. Like the Wisconsin decision cited above for example.
The reason I thought you were joking is that I was talking about police officers in general, while they are investigating crimes and the fact that they probably shouldn't be following their ex-girlfriends around doesn't really have anything to do with the point I was making. I don't know how much a TRO is worth against a cop because I've never tried to enforce one. Maybe you can tell me, because it seems like you have an unnatural interest in the subject.
I don't disagree with anything you said. However, if I was trying to overturn an established Supreme Court precedent, I'd try to find a more sympathetic plaintiff than Montanan gun owners. I just don't see any Supreme Court ruling a huge amount of federal law unconstitutional so people in Montana can have more guns. As I said before, if there is some sort of 2nd Amendment reasoning that would make this cause of action more likely to prevail, I'd love to hear it.
HA! Good luck getting the Supreme Court to overturn Wickard v. Filburn(1942). In that case the Supreme Court held it could regulate what a guy did with wheat he grew on his own land to consume on his own land because it affected interstate commerce(maybe indirectly affecting the price of wheat for example). Maybe they could work in a second amendment angle, but I don't think it is going to fly. Would love to hear someone else's opinion.
I think that is correct, although I think it is very rare to have a piece of evidence suppressed due to police misconduct. For starters, most people just plead guilty. Also, it is very easy to get a warrant, and very hard to get a warrant invalidated. Also, there are a lot of exceptions to every rule. As a friend of mine once said, "If you can't get a piece of evidence admitted, you're not trying hard enough."
I hope you're joking, but in case you aren't, it would depend whether he was investigating her and whether there was a restraining order against him.
2-Sorry, I thought we were talking about what was legal and what wasn't. Have fun shooting trespassers. 3-Oh sorry, when you said seek charges, I thought you meant seek charges with a chance that they would be enforced by a court. If you are seeking charges against an officer who is investigating you, the would be unlikely.
Distinguishing between removing an incentive and creating a disincentive is slicing the baloney a little thin. Look at it like this. If a cop makes 10 illegal searches, maybe one will be questioned in court(most of these people plead guilty). If the guy has a really good attorney, his conviction might get overturned. The cop has 9 searches where he received a gain and one where he did not. He is then free to play again. Only by punishing him by more than having the evidence suppressed in one case will there be a disincentive to keep going.
If they were all striving to be heroes, and got caught every time they messed up that might work, but it assumes that the officer is striving for some sort of non-job-related reward. Being praised for being a hero for catching a serial killer or something like that. Doesn't really happen too often in real life. In real life, they might get some notice in the department for an additional arrest. Taking away that reward by punishing them for illegal searches would be a far more effective punishment than withholding the evidence, and has the added benefit of not allowing an undoubted criminal out of jail on a technicality. It would also have the benefit of removing dirty cops from the police force rather than just having the evidence suppressed when they get caught.
While this solution solves the problem of the cop who is willing to risk any sort of punishment to catch a serial killer problem, it doesn't remedy the everyday problem of people's rights being infringed
There are a million ways to get a warrant with little evidence. The only reason they didn't have one in this case is they probably didn't know they needed it(3 judges agreed with them).
The police work wasn't sloppy, they surely knew they dd not have sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant, so they pretended to assume it wasn't necessary. You assume that the police knew that a warrant wasn't necessary. Do you realize that 3 members of the highest court in New York agree that a warrant wasn't necessary(assuming that was what their dissent was about)?
A lot of people on this site are assuming that the police knew what they were doing was wrong. It could not be more unclear and some of the best legal scholars in our state seem to disagree. They might have had enough for a warrant, and decided that they didn't need it because they were tracking him in a public space. Or they might have assumed that the fact that there is a lesser right to privacy in a car would allow them to do it. This isn't your typical case of police kicking down a door without a warrant. This is a case of the judiciary interpreting the constitution as it applies to a technology which was inconceivable at the time it was written.
That means if a murder suspect parks in front of a gun shop, the jury gets to hear about it, even if the suspect gets a slice of pizza next door. With nobody there to bear witness, the information gathered cannot be interpreted accurately and only serves to prejudice the suspect and/or waste the court's time deciding what to make of it. This has nothing to do with the warrant/no warrant debate. GPS tracking is universally allowed with a warrant as far as I know.
You are arguing that having evidence thrown out is a greater deterrent to a police officer than the loss of his job? I could not disagree more. The end result in this case is that a guilty burglar had to appeal to the highest case in the state before the evidence was thrown out. The officer probably doesn't give a rat's ass that the evidence was suppressed. I don't think we should punish the officers for making good faith judgments about legal gray areas, but if we did, I think it would be a far greater deterrent than the occasional suppression of evidence.
Can't say that I agree with the bit about bad cops. As shown by the circuit split(not to mention the split opinion in NY), this is a legal gray area. If legal scholars disagree as to whether or not this is constitutional, you can't really fault the detective.
2-Not at all true. There are a bunch of ways a detective can legally follow you on to private property. They also don't need to be following you due to the open fields doctrine. 3-Oh really? How is a detective supposed to get the probable cause required for a warrant without being allowed to follow people? I bet you also think they need warrants to frisk people.
You are making the incorrect assumption that profit necessarily requires prediction. As I understand it, he buys cheap CDS's(Credit default swaps are cheap when the risk of failure is perceived to be low) with a small part of his portfolio and puts the rest in something safe that pays off a reliable amount of interest like T-Bills. If the market doesn't fail, he pretty much breaks even. If the market fails his swaps pay out huge. I guess in some sense you could argue that he did predict that eventually the market would have enough of a correction to make him some money, but it wasn't really a prediction so much as a strategy that he engaged in over the long term. When I think of guys who predicted the downturn, I think of guys like Paulson who crunched the numbers, bet against the housing market and profited when it crashed.
How in the hell did this get modded insightful? Two consenting parties to an exchange magically makes things legal, or just, or something? If you are allowed to make up your own rights, then you have the right to do everything, and anything that restricts that is unjust. However, when most people talk about rights, they are talking about a guarantee made to them by a government. Pick a government, any government, none of them recognize these stupid privileges you made up for yourself.
Artists should not have to rely on the good will of the public to ensure that they are paid for their work. I cannot believe how many people on this site think it is perfectly alright to steal someone's work while complaining about parasitic middlemen, like once the record companies no longer exist, people will stop stealing music and start paying for it directly.
I was so ticked off that I switched back to netflix, which I quit because of throttling and got to cash in my one month of one free extra dvd I got in the class action suit. The service has greatly improved since I left. They have way better selection than blockbuster and I sometimes use the online streaming to play things on my ps3, I just wish it was natively supported and I didn't have to pay for a program(playon) to do it. Then again, the program also supports other online video sites and I am able to stream every episode of Star Trek TOS from CBS, which is great. The only downside is that I have to pay one dollar extra per month to get access to blu ray's, but it is so much easier to get the movies I want sent that I don't mind.
Everything I've read about carbon sequestration says that we have all the technology required for it, but that it is obscenely expensive and is just a trick to make us think that fossil fuels are going to be greener some time in the near future.
If a judge issues a decision about a citizen in another state it does carry weight. Article 4 of the US constitution says this.
It really isn't as unfair as you're making it sound because the person against whom the default judgment has been filed will have been served with notice of the proceeding. I don't know why they would have to extradite someone with a default judgment against him in a civil trial. If you don't want to show up to court to defend yourself, no one is going to make you. You're just going to owe a ton of money because you didn't feel like showing up to court.
So to answer your question, merely mailing something to a state is probably not enough to get personal jurisdiction, but if you do business with a state, you're going to be in trouble.
I thought it was well known that Maxim's reviews for games were known to be written without playing the game on the basis of a few screenshots. I seem to remember them reviewing something before the review copies had been distributed or something like that.
I don't think that there was a judge involved. I think New York threatened to sue and Amazon decided it would be easier to just charge sales tax.
Not quite sure what you mean by a case "coming to court." If someone sues a school district, they have to pay a lawyer to defend them. Sure, a judge could dismiss the case, but these are often fact-sensitive inquiries. Here is a case from Wisconsin that might explain the school's policy. Child attacked teacher. Child's mother complained to the sheriff who(rightly) did nothing. Mother complained to the DCF who investigated and didn't find anything. Mother then sued for not providing a proper educational environment. Here is an excerpt:
Alex R., ex rel. Beth R. v. Forrestville Valley Community Unit School Dist. No. 221 375 F.3d 603 C.A.7 (Ill.),2004.
On October 11, Alex began pacing in the back of his classroom and speaking loudly. He swung his backpack near students and desktop computers and charged his individual aide, striking her. Alex then began rolling around the room, first near students' desks and then near the legs of a folding table holding computer equipment. School staff removed Alex to another classroom, where he imitated karate-style chops and kicks. He also charged his teacher, ramming her into the classroom door, clawing her, and, as a photo taken by the District reveals, leaving scratch marks on her chest. Beginning on October 12, Alex served a five-day suspension for this incident. Also after this episode, Alex's mother filed a charge with Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, alleging that Cheek kicked Alex without justification during these events. The ensuing investigation did not find that the teacher engaged in any wrongdoing. Alex's mother also complained to the sheriff's department, but the investigation by law enforcement resulted in no charges being filed against the teacher. In the wake of these events, school superintendent Lowell Taylor wrote a memo to staff members, dated October 16, in which he instructed that "[f]light risk will be responded to by summoning law enforcement. Faculty and staff should not put themselves or others at unreasonable/substantial risk because of Alex's violent tendencies."
As you can see, a litigious parent can cause lots of trouble if the teacher ever gets involved physically.
I live in New York and pay sales tax for everything I buy on Amazon. It was my understanding that rather than fight it in court they just started charging sales tax.