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I hate to use the slippery slope argument but once you allow police to enter a residence with evidence as simple as something they might have heard through the

by talmand 13y ago

I hate to use the slippery slope argument but once you allow police to enter a residence with evidence as simple as something they might have heard through the door then there's no need to ever worry over warrants at all. How do you even prove what they heard or if they heard something in the first place? If the officer witnesses someone break into the residence then sure, but just hearing something? That doesn't pass the smell test to me, regardless of whether it was about drugs or not. What are the sounds of a house being burglarized anyway? The homeowner could just be moving stuff around in the living room when the cops bust down the door without knocking. That's property damage that the homeowner is likely stuck with and in some cases it ends badly with someone getting shot. This whole no-knock attitude that's been in place for decades is a sad joke.

rayiner 13y ago
> I hate to use the slippery slope argument Slippery slope reasoning is completely incompatible with 4th amendment interpretation, because the 4th amendment is all about what is "reasonable" (or rather, what is "unreasonable.") It's about compromising the legitimate needs of the police with the legitimate privacy interests of the people. You can't make compromises when your retort to everything becomes: "but if we keep going in this direction..."
- rhizome 13y ago
  Consider that the legal definition of "legitimate" is what's changed.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    That's the whole point to 'reasonable' though. It allows the effect of the law to change without changing the law itself. This has worked against the government as often as it's worked for the government. And on the whole it has been instrumental in driving social change for the better. The same Supreme Court that voted that equality could exist with "sepatate-but-equal" facilities later voted that separate-but-equal was not reasonable and full integration was required instead. This drives "strict Constitutionalists" batty but I find it's one of the key benefits of our system of government.
    - md224 13y ago
      Not sure I follow why this is a valid retort... grandparent comment was not arguing against the flexibility of "reasonable," but rather the direction the interpretation is being taken in. I agree that creating future-proofed laws with wiggle room can be beneficial, but that does not mean we have no need to be vigilant against that same wiggle room being used against us.
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      The problem with "reasonableness" is that there's no single definition of what's reasonable, so you'll get different courts giving different verdicts in similar cases. Instead, couldn't we define things very strictly, but require them to be revised every n years with the current needs and expectations of society?
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Dude, I can't even get my computer program to not crash on malformed MP3 files, and the computer program + computer does exactly what I tell it to do. There's no way to get a legal code that is both very exact and useful in the face of humans who have to implement it. And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be.
        nitrogen 13y ago
        And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be. Sure, there needs to be a low pass filter of some kind to prevent wild oscillations in the law due to delayed feedback, but we're getting oscillations now in the form of party swapping every 4-8 years. There must be some way to make the law less like a moving average filter and more like an adaptive Kalman filter so it can react quickly when necessary without throwing out the entire USC every election (though I have, in the past, proposed rewriting the entire body of laws from scratch once per generation, with a generational opt-in-based transition from the old set to the new set). Courts should be a last measure, IMO, due to the insane costs of facing one, rather than an integral process of deciding what the law actually is.
forgiveme10k 13y ago
I'd like to know what the cops are doing on your curtilage in the first place? Put up an 8ft fence!

by talmand 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

> I hate to use the slippery slope argument Slippery slope reasoning is completely incompatible with 4th amendment interpretation, because the 4th amendment is all about what is "reasonable" (or rather, what is "unreasonable.") It's about compromising the legitimate needs of the police with the legitimate privacy interests of the people. You can't make compromises when your retort to everything becomes: "but if we keep going in this direction..."

rhizome 13y ago
Consider that the legal definition of "legitimate" is what's changed.
- mpyne 13y ago
  That's the whole point to 'reasonable' though. It allows the effect of the law to change without changing the law itself. This has worked against the government as often as it's worked for the government. And on the whole it has been instrumental in driving social change for the better. The same Supreme Court that voted that equality could exist with "sepatate-but-equal" facilities later voted that separate-but-equal was not reasonable and full integration was required instead. This drives "strict Constitutionalists" batty but I find it's one of the key benefits of our system of government.
  - md224 13y ago
    Not sure I follow why this is a valid retort... grandparent comment was not arguing against the flexibility of "reasonable," but rather the direction the interpretation is being taken in. I agree that creating future-proofed laws with wiggle room can be beneficial, but that does not mean we have no need to be vigilant against that same wiggle room being used against us.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    The problem with "reasonableness" is that there's no single definition of what's reasonable, so you'll get different courts giving different verdicts in similar cases. Instead, couldn't we define things very strictly, but require them to be revised every n years with the current needs and expectations of society?
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Dude, I can't even get my computer program to not crash on malformed MP3 files, and the computer program + computer does exactly what I tell it to do. There's no way to get a legal code that is both very exact and useful in the face of humans who have to implement it. And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be.
      - nitrogen 13y ago
        And even if we could, I don't think revising it every n years is good policy. We should change the law when it's broken, but more importantly changes to the law must necessarily lag several election cycles behind the needs and expectations of society. A court can actually make the change quicker if need be. Sure, there needs to be a low pass filter of some kind to prevent wild oscillations in the law due to delayed feedback, but we're getting oscillations now in the form of party swapping every 4-8 years. There must be some way to make the law less like a moving average filter and more like an adaptive Kalman filter so it can react quickly when necessary without throwing out the entire USC every election (though I have, in the past, proposed rewriting the entire body of laws from scratch once per generation, with a generational opt-in-based transition from the old set to the new set). Courts should be a last measure, IMO, due to the insane costs of facing one, rather than an integral process of deciding what the law actually is.

forgiveme10k 13y ago

I'd like to know what the cops are doing on your curtilage in the first place? Put up an 8ft fence!