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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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25 April 2001 - 3:38 pm
Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that police officers could arrest people without a warrant and take them into custody for offenses punishable only by a fine. The 5-4 ruling (in an odd twist, Justice Souter voted with the conservative majority while Justice O'Connor cast a dissenting vote, upsetting the usual conservative majority of Justices Rehnquist, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, and O'Connor) seems to leave the usual conservative arguments about fewer government intrusions into our private lives at the door in order to promote a more powerful police state. It seems to me that the first people to benefit from this ruling will be police officers practicing racial profiling, and I can only hope that this wasn't the justices' intention.
Applying a penalty, incarceration, for a crime, such as not wearing seat belts, that doesn't warrant the penalty is reprehensible. The argument I read in today's Post-Dispatch about the need to detain people in order to correctly identify them is weakened by the fact that every police car on the streets these days is equipped with a computer which could easily verify a person's identity.
Fortunately, many state laws already ban exactly what this ruling allows, and these state laws are not affected by the ruling. Hopefully, other legislatures will take up the cause now that the Supreme Court has let us down.
Posted by on 25 April 2001 at 3:38 PM
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