Dean Weingarten has a good find at Ammoland.
Judge Eduardo Ramos, the U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York, has issued an Opinion & Order that a ban on stun guns is constitutional. A New York State law prohibits the private possession of stun guns and tasers; a New York City law prohibits the possession and selling of stun guns. Judge Ramos has ruled these laws do not infringe on rights protected by the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Let's briefly…… [read more]
“The submachine gun was a Heckler & Koch MP5 10mm,” the report elaborates. “An ammunition magazine for the weapon was also taken. Officials did not say how the weapon was secured.”
I want to know that information. I was shopping at Lowes several months ago and happened upon a smaller town chief LEO who was looking for a case for a patrol rifle. I suggested several brands (which wouldn’t have been able to be located at Lowes), or shopping on Amazon.
Either way, it goes to show that putting your patrol rifle – or in this case an NFA weapon – inside a secure case, bolted to the floor of the vehicle, is the least a LEO can do to secure his weapons.
But we can’t be trusted with machineguns, because laws are for little people, not LEOs.
It will be late February at the earliest before the justices announce whether they will hear the case, Peruta v. California, filed on behalf of five California gun owners and a gun-rights organization by Paul D. Clement, a solicitor general during the George W. Bush administration who since then has taken on a number of high-visibility conservative causes. The mere fact that the appeal is pending is bound to play a role during the confirmation hearings for the next Supreme Court nominee; during the campaign, President-elect Donald J. Trump called on “Second Amendment people” to vote for him as a bloc to prevent a President Hillary Clinton from being able to fill the Supreme Court vacancy with a justice opposed to gun interests.
With minor exceptions, California bans the open carrying of firearms. State law allows the concealed carrying of a loaded handgun by those who pass a background check, take a training course, and demonstrate to their local sheriff or police chief that they have “good cause.” The definition of “good cause” is left up to the local law enforcement officials authorized to issue the licenses. While most of these officials accept a stated desire for self-defense as good cause in and of itself, the sheriff of San Diego County has set a higher threshold. An applicant there must prove a particular need for carrying the concealed gun, like a documented threat or having obtained a restraining order against a specific individual. Under this standard, the sheriff’s office denies most applications.
The plaintiffs argue that given the ban on open carry — which is being challenged in a separate lawsuit filed last August in Federal District Court in Los Angeles — the San Diego sheriff’s restrictive policy on concealed carry means that as a practical matter, “the typical law-abiding resident cannot bear a handgun for self-defense outside the home at all.” The question is whether there is any such right.
Significantly, in ruling against the plaintiffs last June by a vote of 7 to 4, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit didn’t actually answer that question. That fact may deter the Supreme Court from hearing the appeal — or, depending on the justices’ appetite for a major gun case, it may prove irrelevant. The justices have the power to frame just about any question they want to answer. If they want to decide the core question of whether the Second Amendment gives the right to carry a gun, in some manner, any manner, outside the home — which is to say, if four justices think they can count on an eventual fifth vote for that proposition, then this will be the case to grant.
Farther down in the opinion piece, she cites Scalia’s position on the second amendment, viz. “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited …”
Ms. Greenhouse is a lecturer at Yale Law School, and she has the same reflexive instincts as, unfortunately, Justice Scalia, and most certainly any progressive law graduate, prosecutor or judge. Even Justice Scalia couldn’t extricate himself from the notion that the constitution “secures” rights.
We’ve addressed this before. All of life, from marriage, to work, family, church and state, is the covenant. Without understanding life within the framework of covenant, one cannot understand it at all. The constitution, including the second amendment, is a covenant. It contains a set of stipulations within which we have agreed to live, and while success in following them brings blessings and peace, failure to honor them brings curses and conflict.
The right to bear arms isn’t secured by the government, and the extent to which the government attempts to bar the exercise of moral rights and duties will be proportional to the conflict it spawns. And yet we also attempt to peaceably resolve our differences and persuade the parties to honor the covenant that is supposed to govern our actions because we wish to be slow to conflict.
In this instance, Peruta may not be ripe. We need a replacement for Scalia first, and even then I don’t know how Kennedy would vote. He joined Heller, but Heller was a weak decision and Kennedy may not go along with increased recognition of the right of self defense. It will be interesting to watch this case, but what would be worse than never getting a hearing in front of the Supreme Court would be to get a bad decision that actually denies the right to self defense outside the home.
In either case, when it comes to recognition of fundamental rights and duties, men cannot be patient forever. The covenant looms large, and there are curses for causing its wreckage.
Iowa would eliminate a prohibition on possession of machine guns, as well as short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns, under a bill introduced by state Sen. Jason Schultz.
Schultz, a Republican from Schleswig in northwest Iowa, told The Des Moines Register Thursday he simply wants to make Iowa law no stricter on firearms possession than federal law. Senate File 108 would permit Iowans to obtain machine guns and the other specified firearms after undergoing an extensive federal background check, filling out paperwork and obtaining a tax stamp.
“I haven’t heard anything but support” from firearms groups and individual law enforcement officers, Schultz said. Under current Iowa law, a person who possesses a machine gun, short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun can be charged with a Class D felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
The legislation would be consistent, Schultz said, with a bill signed by Gov. Terry Branstad last year that allows Iowans to legally obtain a firearms suppressor, which reduces the amount of noise and visible muzzle flash generated by firing a weapon.
Ben Hammes, Branstad’s spokesman, said Thursday that the governor will reserve judgment on Schultz’s proposal until he sees it in its final form.
It’s ridiculous to have a law against something like an SBR anyway. Readers in Iowa need to go to the mattresses on this one. The governor is apparently lukewarm, and he needs to be persuaded to get on board.
Of course this doesn’t remove these items from the NFA list, which will take federal action and therefore all of us together. But it takes Iowa one step closer to removing the laws that infringe on their rights.
It’s difficult to be patient. It’s hard to wait and let stories develop. It’s hard work to investigate and vet sources. But just occasionally it’s both gratifying and amusing to be a part of things like this, albeit small on my part.
Watching the developments over the last couple of days brought a smile to my face and made me glad to be alive and able to appreciate what I’ve seen. The MSM has absolutely self destructed, little progressive heads have exploded all over the place, and it’s wonderful to sit back and observe the festivities over something so allegedly fake and fabricated as #Pizzagate.
But first things first. This began months ago when a journalist named Ben Swann began studying #Pizzagate, I’m sure using the sources found by the citizen investigators. He did a fairly short presentation for CBS46 in Atlanta on Pizzagate. By my estimation it was fairly benign and moderate, but he was certainly honest and careful. It was a good piece of investigative journalism making use of the discoveries by the citizen investigators. Here it is.
Queue the fireworks and exploding progressive heads. It was the first MSM piece that didn’t claim to “debunk” Pizzagate, but rather, gave it an honest hearing. That cannot be allowed among the rank and file. The attacks started and will continue for some time I’m sure.
Further, Ben Swann articles were scrubbed from reddit, and the most interesting thing of all is that we’ve learned that CBS46 took down their post of the video. Here is a phone call where they admit it.
A “URL problem.” This is priceless. Above I said that the hit pieces were crafted like Ben Swann had ended journalism as they all know it. Of course, that isn’t what happened. That occurred long before now at the hands of the MSM. No one cares about them anymore, so their own “get thee to thy fainting couch” reactions over their lost credibility are wasted effort.
But ironically, if it’s ever to be rebuilt, it will have to be with people like Ben Swann. Let me interpret for you what’s happened. There are those true believers in the “big state,” those “journalists” who believe that the government can do no wrong, who believe that the progressives have the correct vision for the world and that a monopoly of force should and must be used to enforce that vision. They will never believe that anything nefarious could occur. The state is righteous by definition.
This is a point of interest for my oldest son, Joshua, who quips from time to time about how the old conservatives and liberals have swapped places. Not the neo-cons, many of whom are in bed with the progressives, but the conservatives like me – those who believe that government must have checks and balances and that the best government is the smallest and least intrusive government.
I’m not so sure that we’ve actually swapped places like he thinks, as the hippie movement always had statism at its core, it was just that they weren’t in power and others were. Besides, neocons aren’t really conservatives anyway. What we’re watching now is the logical consequence and necessary outcome of the Bohemian flower child generation. These are the children of the hippies, both literally and ideologically.
But there is a second category of “journalists” who lament Ben Swann’s presentation, and they’re are the most interesting to me. Years ago when my son Daniel was in the Marines and I was a military blogger, I wrote a story on their operations entirely from email communications with Lt. Col. William Mullen (now Brigadier General). I couldn’t do it any other way. I tried to go to Iraq and report on his battalion, but I started too late and the funds weren’t there. I added some of what I knew without my conversations with Mullen, and it turned into a decent article. Not great, perhaps not even really good, but decent. Decent enough to publish, and that’s about it.
A friend named Bill Ardolino, who was a legitimate combat reporter, wrote me with both congratulations and lamentations. He liked the piece and congratulated me for getting the story. He lamented the fact that he considered it “his story” that I scooped. Half jokingly, but still, I could tell that he had wanted to write what I had written.
Bill went on to write a much better report from Fallujah in 2007 than I did, so I didn’t really scoop him. But here’s the thing. Ben Swann really did scoop the rest of the MSM put together. They are rattling their cages, chomping at the bits, barking at the walkers, or however you want to put it, waiting for the government – there’s that notion again of government omniscience – to tell them it’s okay to write about it because charges are coming down, or investigations are underway, or court dates have been set.
The editors are holding them back. Investigative journalism is over in America. All of the moral preening in the “journalism” community, all of the pining away for how things used to be, all of the time spent in journalism classrooms, is all just so much flotsam and jetsam. It’s just all irrelevant, and no one outside of their little circle of self righteous watchers cares. The watchers have turned into talking heads and pundits who interpret official talking points for the masses, nothing more.
Citizen investigators are beating everyone to the punch, and we finally see a courageous journalist who dares to go out and speak truth to power, and lo and behold, it’s not his detractors who did the piece. Outrage! Ben got their scoop, and they’re pissed about it. He was first out of the gate, and so he must be censored, even by his own station.
The MSM sucks, and it doesn’t just suck, but it sucks really, really badly. It’s worse than totally worthless. It has a deleterious affect on the culture. I work around many people every day, and I’m sure readers do as well, whose initial reaction to anything the MSM writes is either to ignore it or believe exactly the opposite simply because the MSM said it – not just conservatives, but everyone. If fake news is a problem, it begins and ends with the MSM. I’m not sure it’s possible for the collective community to recover, but if it stands any chance, doing what they did to Ben Swann is diametrically opposed to what they should be doing. Their instincts are so bad I’m disinclined to believe that they can ever recover.
Wednesday, January 18, Senator Gerald Allen (R-Tuscaloosa) pre-filed legislation in the Alabama State Senate to allow Alabamians to lawfully carry guns without a permit. Allen’s permit less carry proposal would remove a needless restriction on Alabamians’ Second Amendment rights and make it easier for citizens to protect and defend their families and property.
“Alabama should be leading the way on constitutional gun rights. More than ten states across the country already allow their citizens to carry guns without a permit. It’s time we give our citizens the right to bear arms without first seeking the government’s permission,” Allen said. “We already allow open carry without a permit, and there is no logical reason for continuing to require a permit for concealed carry.”
Under Allen’s proposal, the requirement for a permit would be repealed, but Alabamians could still apply for a pistol permit in order to carry a gun in states that have reciprocity laws with Alabama. Currently, Alabama conceal-carry permit holders can carry guns in Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida, among other states, due to state reciprocity laws. A pistol permit holder would also retain the benefit of foregoing a background check when purchasing firearms.
“You will still need a permit if you’re going to legally carry a gun in other states, so I anticipate that a large majority of gun owners in Alabama will continue to purchase a permit from their local sheriff,” Allen remarked. “My goal is to remove unnecessary burdens on law-abiding citizens who own and carry guns, since most criminals and thugs don’t bother applying for a permit anyways.”
It’s good to see Alabama joining the ranks of states where legislators are sponsoring constitutional carry bills. Be aware that the “Boss Hogg” sheriffs and sheriff’s association in Alabama will fight this since it potentially infringes on a constant stream of dollars to the coffers of law enforcement to buy their nice Dodge Chargers, comms gear and machine guns.
But if there is to be infringement, it’s better that it be with the state sheriffs rather than with the people who have constitutionally guaranteed rights.
We know it’s working out just fine. That’s not what we learn from this most recent report. The cited article is from “Everything Lubbock,” and what we learn from their LEOs is important and interesting.
Assistant Chief Jon Caspell with Lubbock Police recalls similar “buzz” about the law and questions for the police department.
“There really was a lot of talk about it and the potential it might have, but really we haven’t seen hardly impact at all,” Caspell said.
Both Caspell and Palmer said they really haven’t seen people around Lubbock excercising their right to open carry.
“Even walking around in public and teaching in classes I really don’t see anyone really carrying that way,” Palmer said.
[ … ]
Palmer explained some insight he shares with his students:
“I also explain how disadvantageous it can be if you give away the fact that you’re carrying a gun to a potential bad guy, they already see you as a threat first rather than being able to be reactionary and maybe stopping something from happening,” Palmer said.
Another facet of the Open Carry law is that law enforcement can ask people they see openly carrying to show their license.
Assistant Chief Caspell said to his knowledge, everyone LPD has checked with willingly hands over their paperwork .
“We don’t have any reports that we’ve had any difficulty for the most part, the type of person–generally speaking– that wants to open carry is someone that wants to enforce the law. They understand what the law is therefor the reasons behind it,” Caspell said.
Caspell said he can’t speak for other Texas cities, but he believes in Lubbock, the law has been implemented smoothly.
“Lubbock seems to be more of a gun-friendly community and because of that culture here we just haven’t seen a whole lot of problems. Maybe that phrase, “in like a lion, out like a whisper,” might be a good phrase here,” Caspell said.
He added that just because someone is openly carrying in a holster doesn’t mean they are licensed. Caspell encourages anyone who is suspicious of another person they see carrying a weapon to give police a call.
There are three aspects of this report that deserve comment. First of all, I don’t advocate open carry any more than concealed carry. I advocate carrying the way you feel the most comfortable and tactically suited to the situation. But if there are never any open carriers, then this right will be seen as a permission that is rarely used. That’s not a good outcome.
Second, I’ve stated before that you get to hide the fact that you’re carrying a gun to a perpetrator is the most hideously awful argument against open carry I can conceive. It’s tactically absurd, inasmuch as if the perpetrator intends to perpetrate a crime, he’s going to regardless of whether you have a gun. You will still have an opportunity to prevent it, and it’s more likely that you’ll be the first to engage the perpetrator.
That’s not a bad outcome unless you wish to see women and children perish before you do. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). I’m not knocking concealed carriers as cowards. Much of the time I’m a concealed carrier. I’m knocking those who knock open carry for the reason that a concealed carrier gets to wait to engage. I don’t carry a weapon in order to wait to engage. You don’t hear LEOs making the argument that openly carrying their weapon is a tactical disadvantage. Let’s don’t look stupid by making that argument for ourselves.
Finally, this attitude by the chief LEO is disturbing and possibly illegal. He has actually gone on record advocating that people call the police for a response when no law is being broken, or at least, when no one can demonstrate prima facie that a law is being broken. I must remind LEOs reading this article once again that the Fourth Circuit had to slap down the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department over stopping someone for openly carrying a weapon and actually arresting him for something else.
“… where a state permits individuals to openly carry firearms, the exercise of this right, without more, cannot justify an investigatory detention. Permitting such a justification would eviscerate Fourth Amendment protections for lawfully armed individuals in those states.”
It simply could not be clearer. Moreover, every stop must be a so-called Terry Stop, regardless of what Texas state law says. In this way I see the Texas law as unconstitutional. LEOs should not, and do not, have the right to stop merely to ask for identification unless they have good reason to believe that a law is being violated. So says the Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court of the United States. I said all of this before the Texas state legislature passed this bill, and they didn’t listen to me. I would like to see this challenged in federal court, but before we ever get to that, I’d like to see constitutional carry in Texas in order to make this moot. If Texas delays, as I suspect they will, then someone should challenge this in federal court.
The first is “permitless carry,” granting anyone in Minnesota the right to carry a gun wherever they go. The gun lobby prefers to call it “constitutional carry,” and it would invalidate all state laws on carrying or possession of weapons in public.
The second is “stand your ground,” which has two prongs. In your own home, you can shoot to kill in order to prevent a felony — such the stealing of a TV or the writing of a bad check. Anywhere else, you can shoot to kill if you feel like you’re being personally threatened. You don’t have to try to run away first. And you won’t have to prove that you had a solid reason to be afraid in the first place.
These gun bills (HF188 and HF238) were both introduced in the Minnesota House on Thursday, signed by a litany of Republican authors. They do not yet have Senate versions, but the Senate too is controlled by Republicans this year so it’s may be a matter of time.
So here’s how it currently works in Minnesota.
In order to carry a gun, you have to get a permit from your county. They’ll check if you can legally have a gun — that you haven’t gotten that right revoked because you were convicted of a felony or because you beat up your spouse. Then you have to take a class and pass a range test. After that, you can walk around with that gun on your hip.
Minnesota also allows you to kill in self-defense. Obviously, if someone’s threatening your life, you aren’t expected to just lay down. But you do have to prove that you at least tried to get away, that killing was your last resort, and that any reasonable person in your position would have done the same thing.
“This is huge,” says The Rev. Nancy Nord Bence, executive director of gun control organization Protect Minnesota. “Yes, it’s bad that now you could shoot someone if you think they’re going to steal your TV in your house. That’s terrible. But the part we have to really pay attention to is this completely changes our understanding of how we prove self-defense in this state and what self-defense means.”
[ … ]
“Look at the fear of immigrants we have in this state,” Nord Bence says. “You have been told that we have to worry about these Somali immigrants because they’re terrorists, and now you see a guy who looks like a terrorist, and you have no duty to retreat before using deadly force, and the presumption of innocence is with the shooter. … It’s going to lead to a wholesale arming of communities that feel threatened by this because if you were, say, a Somali immigrant in St. Cloud right now with all of the racial tension that’s going on, this bill is reason for you to be afraid.”
Then the author (or editor) gives us this picture.
I think the major problem with this discussion is that it assumes that situations of self defense can be neatly pigeonholed and bifurcated into those in which the person or persons intend to do you harm, and those in which they are in your home unannounced and uninvited but only intend to walk away with your television set.
You don’t know which situation it is if someone is in your home unannounced and uninvited, and if you claim you do you’re naïve. You simply don’t know the intentions of the heart, and moreover you don’t know how the situation will evolve. You cannot sit down and eat dinner while the perpetrator steals your television, only to find out later that he intended all along to rape your wife and beat you to death and burn you to a crisp with gasoline.
Furthermore, that’s my problem with LEOs who recommend that you simply sit still and allow perpetrators to wave guns around while they rob an establishment. If you do, the breaths you take may be your last, and if you have a weapon, you’d better consider using it. Not only may the perpetrator shoot you intentionally, he may do it negligently while he’s waving the gun around if he has no trigger discipline.
Finally, go and read the article the author uses to illustrate the point on shooting people looking for dogs. The person who was looking for her dog didn’t break and enter, and it’s illegal to kill people for trespassing and I’m sure it will be under the new law. In the picture shown above, the girl holding the shotgun had better be prepared to shoot, while deliberate with her judgment if it could be a family member who happens to have a key. She better know who has keys and who doesn’t, as well as their typical schedules.
In every possible way, the articles linked here and the opinions they convey are tactically stupid. The only real problem I see here is that Benelli M4 may knock that little girl for a couple of loops. You’d better pack that buttstock into your shoulder, little miss. You’re sporting the same gun the U.S. Marines used for room clearing in Now Zad, Afghanistan.
Not my words because I haven’t studied it enough, but George has. He refers a lot in this video to the Clinton endeavors in Arkansas. If you have the time to do it (it’s almost two hours long), you can watch this video as the best analysis of the Clinton’s nefarious activities in Arkansas and the body count that continues to rise around the Clintons. I’ve watched it.
Remember that we extensively discussed the idiotic and immoral raid on baby Bou Bou’s house in search of someone who wasn’t there? The horrible and inept “criminal justice system” didn’t even hold the people who perpetrated that evil act accountable for it. A grand jury couldn’t even convince themselves that they should have continued legal action against the police, and the raid ended up crippling the poor child and causing multiple surgeries.
The police state in America is so screwed up that it can’t even learn from such a disaster as that. “Officer safety” must return home at the end of his shift, and the war on drugs must go on. True to form for the police state, I missed that yet another flash bang was thrown at a baby in Indiana after the raid on baby Bou Bou. This time, at least the court had doubts and threw out the evidence collected in the raid. Fortunately, no one was harmed.
The Evansville (IN) Police Department has seen a drug bust go up in a cloud of flashbang smoke. A search warrant for drugs and weapons, based on an informant’s tip, was executed perfectly… if you’re the sort of person who believes it takes a dozen heavily-armed officers, a Lenco Bearcat, and two flashbangs to grab a suspect no one felt like arresting when he was outside alone taking out his trash. (via FourthAmendment.com)
The state appeals court decision [PDF] hinges on the deployment of a flashbang grenade into a room containing a toddler. Fortunately, in this case, the toddler was only frightened, rather than severely burned. But it was this tossed flashbang that ultimately undoes the PD’s case. The evidence is suppressed and the conviction reversed.
Scattered throughout the opinion are some amazing depictions of the PD’s SWAT team at work — and how those officers seem to believe the violence of their entries during warrant service are somehow just the new normal.
Things like the following paragraph. First: some background. In some cases, it’s (theoretically) more difficult for law enforcement to obtain no-knock warrants. Facts need to be asserted that show that warning the occupants of a residence in any way would most likely result in the destruction of evidence and/or an armed response. Some judges are more willing than others to hand these out, but either way, the standard warrant boilerplate can’t be used.
So, here’s the difference between a “knock and announce” warrant and a no-knock warrant, as deployed by the Evansville PD.
The SWAT team rode in a Lenco Bearcat that followed a patrol vehicle to the residence. At least a dozen officers were involved. Upon arrival and prior to entry, three officers and a police vehicle approached the rear of the residence and at least nine officers, most armed with assault weapons, approached the front of the residence. At 10:30 a.m., the police knocked on the residence and one of the officers announced, “Police – Search Warrant – Police – Search Warrant,” and another officer announced over a loudspeaker “Search Warrant. 314 Illinois.” State’s Exhibit 1 at 3:55-4:00. One second later, the SWAT team knocked down the door with a battering ram.
ONE SECOND. Technically, still a knock-and-announce warrant, even though the residents had been given no chance to respond.
Within the next couple of seconds, a flashbang grenade was tossed into the front room, which contained a playpen and a baby’s car seat. The toddler was in the playpen.
After the flash bang grenade was deployed, Detective Gray entered the residence and picked up a nine-month old baby crying on top of blankets in a playpen just inside and “very close to the door.” Id. at 332. The room also contained a baby’s car seat and a toddler’s activity center in the line of sight of the front door. One of the officers moved the car seat with his foot to proceed further into the residence.
The officer who tossed the flashbang said he could see more than what was captured by his helmet cam, but still admitted he could not see everything in the room into which he tossed the grenade. This grenade was thrown within two seconds of the officers’ announcement that they had a warrant and roughly one second after the door was breached.
Officer Taylor testified that his perception of things involved a much wider view than what the camera could see. At a time stamp of 4:01 on the video, a member of the SWAT team rammed the door open several inches with a battering ram. From an angle to the right, Officer Taylor tossed the flash bang into the house at 4:02, and it detonated at 4:04. The video at 4:02 shows only a portion of the right rear of the couch and the wood floor on which it sat. The video reveals that about five minutes after the initial entry someone stated: “Make sure you get a picture . . . are you taking a picture of that?” State’s Exhibit 1 at 8:50-8:55. This appears to be a reference to a charred stain on the floor. The person then stated: “Because the baby was in this room, but I put it right there for a reason.” Id. at 8:55-9:00.
The lower court found these tactics unreasonable on the whole and granted suppression of the evidence obtained during the search. The state argued that suppression wasn’t the proper remedy and anything resulting from the “unreasonable” use of a flashbang grenade in a toddler’s room was something to be addressed in a civil lawsuit.
The appeals court disagrees, finding nothing justifiable about the SWAT team’s violent entry into the home.
The video shows almost no time lapse between when the door was battered in and the tossing of the flash bang. The door was barely opened when the flash bang was immediately tossed into the room, and the angle at which Officer Taylor was standing to the door did not allow him an opportunity to see what was inside the room. Indeed, Officer Taylor acknowledged that he could not see portions of the room in which the flash bang was placed. Specifically, he testified that he could see “from the couch over to the left, I can’t see the corner, the left corner inside the room and I can’t see the hallway in front of it, that’s why the flash bang goes in the threshold.”
That’s the flashbang, delivered two seconds after the police announced their presence. This is only part of it. The attempt to salvage the fruits of the search with a claim that the house potentially contained dangerous criminals also receives no judicial sympathy. The state makes assertions, but cannot back them up.
The State does not point us to any other evidence indicating the criminal history of Watkins or the other occupants of the house. The record contains no evidence that law enforcement could not have safely presented the person matching Watkins’s description with the search warrant during the time that he was outside the house and before he re-entered it.
The court basically gets it right in terms of the correct way to do this kind of police work. Observe the residence, proceed with entry when no one is at home, and then present an arrest warrant to the perpetrator when he returns.
Or better yet, we could give up this ridiculous war on drugs. Either way, it will never be necessary to throw grenades into homes towards babies for any reason under the sun, unless you’re immoral and a coward. As for the objection that they didn’t know a baby was there (if that is indeed the objection), that is no excuse. They should have done the rudimentary investigative work to find out. That’s what detectives are for.
The smart people are supposed to work as detectives. Call them first. They can think about smarter ways of doing this sort of thing. Finally, rather than just throw out evidence, the court should have imprisoned the officers who did this and the judge who approved it for violation of the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the constitution. They deserve to be in the state penitentiary with the general prison population.
The constitution is a covenant under which stipulations we are all supposed to live. Failure to do so means that the covenant has been broken, and breakage of the covenant means that punishments are supposed to ensue.
