9 ms·

I was trying to decide if this was appropriate to post to hn. It shocked the conscience to the extent that people I know who are involved in government/mil/etc

• DannyBee 13y ago
  There are so so many things wrong with this situation i don't even know where to begin. The judge granted a warrant, an almost facially invalid one (and it turns out, completely invalid for other reasons), but will still be immune from anything here. The DA will be immune from anything here. The Officers will claim qualified immunity, and may or may not win. At least there is supreme court precedent that should have put them on notice: Winston v. Lee - 470 U.S. 753 (1985) "(a) A compelled surgical intrusion into an individual's body for evidence implicates expectations of privacy and security of such magnitude that the intrusion may be "unreasonable" even if likely to produce evidence" Here, it wasn't even likely to produce evidence. The doctor will certainly be sued for, among other things, battery, false imprisonment, etc. (Looks close, they threw some other stuff in there. Here is the complaint: http://www.scribd.com/doc/181747773/Complaint-David-Eckert-v-City-of-Deming-Hildago-County-Gila-Regional-Medical-Center http://www.scribd.com/doc/181747773/Complaint-David-Eckert-v... )
  • rdl 13y ago
    The ironic thing is the whole expedition was to produce evidence for a criminal trial, so unless stuff gets "lost" everything will be well documented. If things do get lost, people pretty much need to hang.
  • zachrose 13y ago
    The professional breaches of ethics are shocking and horrible, but the worst part of this is that it's bad test case for the legality of more and more invasive/dangerous bodily searches. If the warrant was invalid to begin with, my concern is that a court won't be able to strike down the medical procedures as unconstitutional because the search itself was unconstitutional on simpler grounds. I hope Eckert will win a civil suit, but my guess is that the worst part of this story will be the lack of deep constitutional scrutiny. I am not a lawyer.
    • rhizome 13y ago
      One way for the issues to get a decent amount of scrutiny would be in the officers' appeal of their loss of certification, and the medical workers' appeal of their loss of license.
    • gte910h 13y ago
      The best outcome in my mind here is that the doctors lose their medical licenses permanently. They are the professional that should have laughed the cops out of the hospital.
      • dragonwriter 13y ago
        > The best outcome in my mind here is that the doctors lose their medical licenses permanently. The best outcome, I would think, includes a number of people spending several years in federal prison for deprivation of rights under color of law (18 USC Sec. 242) [1], as well as any licensed professionals involved losing the relevant professional licenses. [1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242
        • DannyBee 13y ago
          Good luck ever finding a federal prosecutor who gives a crap about this rather than spending time making their bones on drug cases ...
          • 13y ago
  • rayiner 13y ago
    I would like to say that I'd be surprised if any court would find that the right not to be cavity searched without probable cause was not clearly established, but nothing surprises me any more.
    • DannyBee 13y ago
      Who knows what they'll find to be good faith these days. It's pretty sad at times.
  • elohesra 13y ago
    Thanks for linking that. It appears that we've found the real reason the officers decided to put the man through this ordeal: (Excerpt from complaint -- emphasis mine) 24. Plaintiff asked Defendant Rodriquez if he was free to leave, which Defendant Rodriquez contends that he found rude. 25. Defendant Rodriquez told Plaintiff he suspected Plaintiff of having illegal drugs in his car and proceeded to interrogate Plaintiff on the matter. The officer felt that he'd not been shown correct respect by the victim and then decided to make him pay. To be honest, I'm not sure how much I blame the doctors in this fiasco, because I don't know what sort of legal protections are available to them if they were to refuse to carry out the invasive operations. Do doctors in the US typically have a legal counsel who can advise them if a warrant is valid, or what operations an officer with a warrant can demand? I know I'd have no idea if a warrant were valid, or what the officer could compel me to do.
    • chris_wot 13y ago
      A doctor cannot be compelled to do a body cavity search.
      • BigTuna 13y ago
        I think it's been well established at this point that anyone can be compelled to do anything by law enforcement. The supposed corrective mechanism comes after the fact so you're helpless in the interim. Take Mr. Eckert's case for example. What would have happened if he had started screaming in the hospital for someone to call the police? My money's on nothing. "Just a mental case, nothing to see here" they might say. You truly have no recourse in the moment.
• benched 13y ago
  I'm also in awe over the number of people who played along. This reminds me a little of the film Compliance, which I happened to see last night. I think humans are very susceptible to stories. Once a narrative gets rolling, people seem to just act out the part they invent for themselves inside whatever they perceive the story to be. The story has a life of its own. All that aside, I thought there was little about police behavior that would surprise me. This surprised me a little. Butt-clenching as probable cause? Seriously?
  • samstave 13y ago
    >Once a narrative gets rolling, people seem to just act out the part they invent for themselves inside whatever they perceive the story to be. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0wHeekgPqk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0wHeekgPqk
  • mchaver 13y ago
    I am curious if there is any research related to this idea: "Once a narrative gets rolling, people seem to just act out the part they invent for themselves inside whatever they perceive the story to be".
    • mchaver 13y ago
      I guess the Stanford Prison Experiment would be a prime example.
    • toomuchtodo 13y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment "Twenty-four male students out of seventy-five were selected to take on randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards in a mock prison situated in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. Certain portions of the experiment were filmed and excerpts of footage are publicly available."
• maratd 13y ago
  > It is possible there is a reasonable explanation Ok, I'll bite, what could possibly be a reasonable explanation for excavating a man's anus half a dozen times?
  • thex86 13y ago
    What is shocking is, they conducted everything. I mean, why? It's like they really wanted the drugs to be there.
    • rcthompson 13y ago
      Well, I guess after you've unlawfully probed a person's anus once, you're kind of committed, and your best hope for avoiding a backlash is to justify it by actually finding something.
  • rdl 13y ago
    I mean in that we have a news article from a biased (if biased in ways I generally agree with; I like Reason) news source, and a filing from one side in a civil case. I generally do trust police, and especially federal judges. Everyone involved in the drug war has gotten corrupted, and to some extent the lawlessness south of the border causes lawlessness in enforcing the law north of the border; Nietzsche and all that. So, before hanging people, I'd rather get more evidence. But on its face this isn't so much a miscarriage of justice so much as a string of felonies committed by law enforcement and medical professionals.
    • pavs 13y ago
      > I generally do trust police You probably never lived in NY.
      • rdl 13y ago
        I actually have a friend who became an NYPD officer (!!!) at some point last decade. Generally I've never had problems with individual police. I think the drug war is bad for a wide variety of reasons, and the militarization of domestic policing (mainly over drugs, and now terrorism) is bad for everyone (including the police), but it's not because I've personally had problems with police. I'm a white, upper-middle-class, works-with-USG/DOD, contracted in war zones, lots of friends in government/police, etc. person, so I have it exceptionally easy, sure. I've met bad individual officers, but it's rare, so yeah, I generally do trust police, based on my personal experience. One of the worst tendencies of policing organizations is the "thin blue line", so they need to take aggressive action in cases of internal abuse to overcome that.
• droopyEyelids 13y ago
  I think civil liberties issues are some of the most important things we can be discussing. The hacker idea involves bending rules of all sorts, and to do that involves understanding those rules and how the game is played. Furthering the appropriateness of having the discussion here is the fact that other venus are more appropriate to other aspects of hacker culture, and the dearth of content available otherwise. (We have github or twitter for technical discussion, and success stories and productivity articles are essentially naval-gazing)
  • rdl 13y ago
    The gory anal rape aspect of it is what made me pause; I agree about the 4A issues themselves.
• rdtsc 13y ago
  The sad thing is, on average most people could be convinced to go along with this, to condone it, participate in, justify it. One doctor didn't go along and claimed it was immoral. Good. Now what about the other ones? They are authoritarian followers. They love to submit to authority. They take great pleasure in telling others how they "served" and aided an investigation. Someone in uniform coming in and barking orders, and a line of willing "helpers" forms right away. Authoritarian followers are very dangerous and there is a surprising high number of them in this country, from what I can see. It is surprising given the rhetoric about how freedom, individualism, respect for human rights and liberty. Those are always touted as foundational principles. ( For those wondering what I am refering to, it is this book/article by Bob Altemeyer http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians... ) Sadly perhaps, I sort of assume cops are corrupt already, I've just seen enough of corruption to kind of fall into that stereotype. It doesn't surprise me that they would want to abuse their power or would want to exercise sadistic tendencies given the opportunity. So that doesn't surprise me. My present disgust is centered on the doctors and nurses who participated in this. Kind of strange coincidence not too long ago we heard in the news about the doctors working with the CIA and the military that tortured prisoners. Doctors are someone most people usually trust. But if you talk to people from other countries, you often hear how they distrust doctors. Ok, that sounds strange at first. They could distrust politicians, police, the military, but it is really sad when one stops trusting doctors. This is why though, because they have seen doctors do immoral things, they have seen them kill their relatives and harvesting their organs, or taking bribes to save lives, or refusing to treat people who have participated in anti-government protests and so on. Are we headed the same way? EDIT: grammar clarification and I can't spell
  • _delirium 13y ago
    I don't know how much of a solution it is, but I think there could be some bureaucratic/authoritarian pushback against this kind of thing if the American Medical Association more stringently enforced its ethics rules relating to the Hippocratic Oath. As a baseline, medical procedures should be for the benefit of a patient and performed with their consent, otherwise they are inappropriate and a breach of professional ethics. This is already enforced stringently in one very narrow domain: licensed doctors cannot assist states in either conducting, or even planning the preparations for, their processes of death penalty by lethal injection. This has caused them some practical problems, because they basically have to get amateur doctors to give advice. The AMA's rationale is that executing someone is not a legitimate medical treatment, and definitely doesn't have consent. But this principle seems like it should apply more broadly than the fairly extreme case of actually executing someone.
• 8ig8 13y ago
  Because of drugs. And how much drugs could this guy even have in his anus if he was doing something criminal? Think of all the resources (money) involved here. Now think of all the resources involved in trying to defend these actions. Now think of all the other things we could do with those resources.
• DanBC 13y ago
  > I was trying to decide if this was appropriate to post to hn. Posting it to HN is fine. The problems are the terrible quality of some comments, and the lack of downvoting of shallow unthoughtful nonsense.