Hello right wing "No Knock", meet right-wing "Castle-doctirine"

F

FUCK THE POLICE

911 EVERY DAY
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2006/06/15/no_knock_meet_castle_doctrine/


"No Knock" Meet "Castle Doctrine"
By Nathan Newman - June 15, 2006, 11:50AM

Two conservative legal doctrines are on a collision course. Today, the rightwing majority upheld the right of the police to enter homes without warning.

But recently, states like Florida have been passing NRA-backed "Castle Doctrine" bills that give homeowners the right to assume an unknown intruder is there to do bodily harm and can therefore be shot without any obligation by the homeowner to establish that the intruder is actually a danger.

Now, the text of such Castle Doctrine laws don't actually protect you if you shoot a police officer, but if the police don't identify themselves when they enter a home, it'll create a pretty bad legal tangle for juries when defendants can claim they thought the officer was an unknown intruder against whom they had the right to shoot on sight.
 
Have you not seen film of it employed?

It has always been a situation in which the Cops had rules to follow and the criminals dont.

They knock a second before they break down the door. It tells anyone inside that they will not be shooting you if you just get on the ground and show your hands. Lets remember that sometimes there are innocents in the house and that sometimes the cops get the wrong adress.
 
We should extend the castle doctrine against agents of the state.

any [citizen]...having looked into the acts of a jobholder and found him delinquent, may punish him instantly and on the spot, and in any manner that seems appropriate and convenient – and that, in case this punishment involves physical damage to the jobholder, the ensuing inquiry by the grand jury or coroner shall confine itself strictly to the question whether the jobholder deserved what he got. In other words, I propose that it shall no longer be malum in se for a citizen to pummel, cowhide, kick, gouge, cut, wound, bruise, maim, burn, club, bastinado, flay, or even lynch a jobholder, and that it shall be malum prohibitum only to the extent that the punishment exceeds the jobholder's desserts. The amount of this excess, if any, may be determined very conveniently by a petit jury, as other questions of guilt are now determined.... If it decides that the jobholder deserves the punishment inflicted upon him, the citizen who inflicted it is acquitted with honor. If, on the contrary, it decides that the punishment was excessive, then the citizen is adjudged guilty of assault, mayhem, murder, or whatever it is, in a degree apportioned to the difference between what the jobholder deserved and what he got, and punishment for that excess follows in the usual course....

The advantages of this plan, I believe, are too patent to need argument. At one stroke it removes all the legal impediments which now make the punishment of a recreant jobholder so hopeless a process.... Say a citizen today becomes convinced that a certain judge is a jack-ass – that his legal learning is defective, his sense of justice atrophied, and his conduct of cases before him tyrannical and against decency. As things stand, it is impossible to do anything about it.... Nor is anything to be gained by denouncing him publicly and urging all good citizens to vote against him when he comes up for re-election, for his term may run for ten or fifteen years, and even if it expires tomorrow and he is defeated the chances are good that his successor will be quite as bad, and maybe even worse.

But now imagine any citizen free to approach him in open court and pull his nose. Or even, in aggravated cases, to cut off his ears, throw him out of the window, or knock him in the head with an ax. How vastly more attentive he would be to his duties! How diligently he would apply himself to the study of the law! How careful he would be about the rights of litigants before him!

H.L. Mencken
Click to expand...
 
Desh said:
Have you not seen film of it employed?

It has always been a situation in which the Cops had rules to follow and the criminals dont.

They knock a second before they break down the door. It tells anyone inside that they will not be shooting you if you just get on the ground and show your hands. Lets remember that sometimes there are innocents in the house and that sometimes the cops get the wrong adress.
Click to expand...

They knock?

Well it's odd that they call it "No-knock" then. Kind of an innapropriate title.
 
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