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> The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searc

• ryandrake 3y ago
  Not that surprising. Small Town Things. I'm sure there are backwoods places in the USA where the owner of the used car dealership, the mayor, the judge, and police chief are all immediate family. A thing is only illegal if it's enforced.
  • kolanos 3y ago
    My local magistrate is a former cop who lacks even a paralegal degree.
    • sramam 3y ago
      As a first generation immigrant to the US, the parent story struck a deep (dis) chord. Your comment brought back memories of growing up in India. The idea of a "Panchayat" was taught in schools as both an ancient form of local/self governance and a modern answer to effective governance in post partition India. Even Gandhi promoted it as a pillar of India's self-rule. Basically, village "elders" land up passing judgement on disputes. Most of these people were "respected" but uneducated. Their world views were very narrow. As can be expected, it wasn't uncommon for their biases to result in "justice" that would be totally unacceptable when viewed through a broader lens. After decades in the US, to discover that something like this can happen in 21st century USA is really unsettling. I'm having trouble explaining (even to myself) the anguish I feel. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  • MBCook 3y ago
    > [The paper] reported […] restaurant owner Kari Newell had kicked newspaper staff out of a public forum with [a politician…]. Newell responded […] with hostile comments on her personal Facebook page. > A confidential source contacted the newspaper, [with] evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to [drive without a] license. [That] could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license[…]. > [The claim was confirmed but the paper] suspected the source was […] Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce. [The reporter didn’t publish that and] alerted police to the situation. > Police notified Newell, who then complained […] that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true. Wow. No kidding it’s a small town. Restaurant owner acts poorly, pissed off future ex(?) leaks damaging info to the paper, she runs to the cops to say the paper did something illegal despite not publishing it, and the entire department raided the little paper? Yeesh.
• tedunangst 3y ago
  Does the federal law apply to local government?
  • fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Federal law applies to every part of the US. That’s why it’s a federal law rather than a local law. Federal >> state >> local
    • ta988 3y ago
      Does not mean it is enforced look at the cannabis status in different states and the lack of federal prosecution.
      • fnordpiglet 3y ago
        Except this is a procedural law, enforcement happens judicially in court. Cannabis is a law enforcement and prosecutor discretion thing. If prosecutors brought a cannabis case to court the judges would enforce the law. But the DOJ has opted to deprioritize cannabis enforcement unilaterally.
      • ceejayoz 3y ago
        It would be a serious mistake to mix up "they aren't currently" and "they can't".
      • stjohnswarts 3y ago
        of course not, they would need 10x their current police force to even start to do something like that. But if it's obvious constitutional laws are broken in an egregious way and the locals are obviously ignoring it, the Feds have stepped in many many many times in the past.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • wyldfire 3y ago
    The applicability of this particular statute (42 USC § 2000aa) - as with most of the Federal government's power - hinges on this clause: "...in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce..." It seems plausible that the paper might report on things that relate to or impact neighboring states. But like I said - even if the statute weren't there - what's wrong with calling them up and asking them to surrender whatever they're searching for under subpoena instead? Especially for the purported crime of "identity theft"?!
• x86_64Ubuntu 3y ago
  I'm not sure about the particular locale mentioned, but in places I've lived, magistrates need no law education of any kind, and have enormous power. https://www.sccourts.org/summaryCourtBenchBook/HTML/GeneralB.htm#:~:text=Members%20of%20the%20South%20Carolina,which%20he%20is%20to%20serve https://www.sccourts.org/summaryCourtBenchBook/HTML/GeneralB....
  • etherealG 3y ago
    But why? That’s such a strange rule.
  • barsonme 3y ago
    This particular magistrate judge used to be an attorney.
  • sramam 3y ago
    The geekery that is HN. TIL about scroll-to-text-fragment! https://caniuse.com/url-scroll-to-text-fragment https://caniuse.com/url-scroll-to-text-fragment
  • TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
    Rightly so. You don’t really want the bar to entry for the roll of magistrate to be too high. The page you linked states a magistrate must be at least 21, have a Batchelor’s degree, undergo a training program within one year of commencing the roll, with restrictions on their abilities until that and other milestones are met. This points to the idea that any reasonable adult, with a proven ability to pass at least a baccalaureate, ought be able to administer the law to at least a level of basic competency while they simultaneously commit to the career path by undergoing relevant training. Magistrates who are licensed attorneys have fewer restrictions and can progress faster. Is there some other set of rules you would prefer? Should the average higher-education-qualify adult be prevented from participating in the judiciary? That doesn’t seem like an argument a citizen of a democracy wound intentionally make.
    • x86_64Ubuntu 3y ago
      >...That doesn’t seem like an argument a citizen of a democracy wound intentionally make. They are rubber stamping warrant requests without any consideration of the Constitution, how is what I'm proposing anti-democratic?
• tootie 3y ago
  I can't imagine they presented anything close to probable cause. The fact that they had personal information is grossly insufficient to suggest any kind of crime let alone identity theft. I hope that magistrate gets looked at very closely.
• stjohnswarts 3y ago
  Doesn't surprise me, a lot of these elected judges got there via nepotism and "charisma" and barely passed the bar on their 5th try, -if- they even need a law degree depending on jurisdiction.
• brightball 3y ago
  Are there consequences of any kind for judges?
  • marcusb 3y ago
    Not in the same way as you and me. They can be voted out of office (if elected,) impeached, or censured, but they enjoy judicial immunity[0] for their acts as a judge. They cannot be sued for acts they commit as a judge, no matter how egregious[1]. 0 - this is as close to absolute immunity as exists in the law. In fact, you could, with a straight face and clean conscience call it absolute immunity. 1 - no, seriously. They can, for instance order an underage girl to be sterilized in an ex-parte hearing and face no consequences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stump_v._Sparkman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stump_v._Sparkman
    • TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
      Oh settle down. Stump v. Sparkman, 435 U.S. 349 (1978), is the leading United States Supreme Court decision on judicial immunity. It involved an Indiana judge who was sued by a young woman who had been sterilized without her knowledge as a minor in accordance with the judge's order. The Supreme Court held that the judge was immune from being sued for issuing the order because it was issued as a judicial function. The case has been called one of the most controversial in recent Supreme Court history. The most controversial case in recent Supreme Court history being from 45 years ago speaks directly to how rare this level of controversy is.
      • marcus0x62 3y ago
        > Oh settle down Maybe you should be more riled up. The point is it happened and there were no consequences or accountability for the judge involved. If you think more minor “controversies” don’t happen every single day, enabled by this sort or legal reasoning, I cannot help you.
• efitz 3y ago
  I’d love to see stats on what % of search warrants are NOT signed off by a judge (I’d bet hardly any), and how many search warrants later found to be inaccurate, end up with disciplinary action towards the police (I’d bet almost none). The 4th amendment isn’t worth anything if judges will sign off on everything that crosses their desk.
  • overlordalex 3y ago
    Here's a taste - the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (often referred to as the FISA court) authorizes security agencies to spy on US citizens. The court proceedings are secret, and the party being surveilled is unable to participate and is not aware of any of the proceedings. In terms of warrants issued: > From 1979 through 2012, the court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has rejected only 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance applications by the government > "The FISA system is broken. At the point that a FISA judge can compel the disclosure of millions of phone records of U.S. citizens engaged in only domestic communications, unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence…there is no longer meaningful judicial review," Mr. Rotenberg said. Story by the Wall Street Journal https://archive.ph/lafXz https://archive.ph/lafXz
  • chaps 3y ago
    I've tried looking into this in Chicago. Fax records that would show how often a fax is made to the specific fax number aren't accessible because Chicago PD uses a third party service to send faxes, and they don't keep logs. They do it by having the third party company host a physical host at CPD's office, which the agency says they don't have access to. When I tried to get records showing how often search warrants happen and what their details are, they give inconsistent amounts of records for identical time windows. First FOIA request gave 9k records, second was 11k, third was 18k. And colleagues were able to find more with requests for emails. When I appealed to the IL AG office, they sided with CPD saying that a sufficient search was done, despite our proof showing that a marginally expanded search resulted in more records. All made worse by the Judicial branch being un-FOIAable. It's all pretty fucked.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
    Well good. If there was a statistically relevant problem, we wouldn’t hear about this sort of malfeasance in the news. The fact that there is almost always one or another incident making the news only indicates that rare events occur frequently at sufficiently large scale. The overwhelming majority of search and arrest warrants are authorised because they should be, and, well, like any job role, mistakes shouldn’t be dealt with by disciplinary action that results in the work being ground to a halt. Where serious wrong doing occurs we should expect disciplinary action, and we do see that occasionally as it makes the news. There’s definitely an argument to be made that maybe some police are too prone to abuse their powers, but the answer isn’t perfect law enforcement, the answer is how much malfeasance and corruption is tolerable, because we’ll never have none, and the only thing worse than corruption is perfect law enforcement.