Hudson v Michigan

One of the great tragedies of the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs is the erosion of our constitutional liberties that it promotes. Not too long ago a Supreme Court drug war decision against the people of California’s right to have medical marijuana, Gonzales v Raich, gutted the concept of federalism and in his dissent Justice Thomas said that, “If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything -- and the Federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers."

Well, the Supreme Court, with the help of its two new Bush appointees, has done it again and this time the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure has gone further by the board in the name of fighting drugs. The Orange County Register led off its editorial on the judgment this way; “In Hudson v. Michigan, handed down Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court carved out yet another ‘drug war exception’ to the Fourth Amendment, which was written to protect Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons and homes.” In Hudson v Michigan the court allowed evidence obtained by the police in violation of the knock and announce rule to be used to convict someone of cocaine possession.

In his majority opinion, Justice Scalia demonstrated just how out of touch with reality that he is by saying, “we now have increasing evidence that police forces across the United States take the constitutional rights of citizens seriously. There have been ‘wide ranging reforms in the education, training, and supervision’ of police officers.”

Radley Balko of the Cato Institute (and Liberty and Power) has posted a scathing reply to Scalia where, after pointing out that a lot of the recent training referred to has been largely in paramilitary tactics, he writes, “Police aren't better trained at respecting civil liberties, they're better trained at finding ways to get around them. The ratcheting up of the drug war in the early 1980s has made police abuse of civil liberties routine.”

Such abuse by the police has become so rampant that an entire reform organization, Flex Your Rights, has come into being devoted solely to this issue. They know a great deal about the day to day practical respect that police show for individual rights and their man Scott Morgan in his reply to the Justice says, “Scalia’s fantasies aside, this ruling is actually a lot worse than many well-meaning observers might realize. Civil remedies against police in this context are virtually non-existent. By refusing to exclude evidence obtained in violation of the ‘knock and announce’ rule, the Court invites police to raid homes with increasingly indiscriminant ineptitude.” Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog also see some very troubling implications in the decision including the eventual demise of the “exclusionary rule” itself.

Now, I do not know if George Bush’s ultimate plan is to turn America into a totalitarian police state, though it certainly seems that way sometimes, but if that is his aim he has indeed installed two new Supreme Court Justices who seem more than willing to assist the project.

Cross Posted on The Trebach Report