Remember that whole business in the Third Amendment about not having quarter soldiers in private homes without the owner’s consent or that stuff in the Fifth Amendment about takings of property or that other stuff in the Fourth Amendment on unreasonable searches and seizures. It does not appear to apply to police in Henderson Nevada. The City of Henderson is being sued with its police chief Police Chief Jutta Chambers (left) as well as the City of North Las Vegas and its Police Chief Joseph Chronister (right) for a bizarre takeover of a home for a stakeout. Anthony Mitchell says that he was told that police needed to occupy his home to get a “tactical advantage” on the occupant of a neighboring house. When Mitchell refused, the police ultimately, according to his complaint, busted through his door, hit him with pepper balls, and put him into custody. The lawsuit also names Officers Garret Poiner, Ronald Feola, Ramona Walls, Angela Walker, and Christopher Worley.
Mitchell says that the ordeal began with a call from Officer Worley demanding access to his home. He refused to allow the police to do so and the call ended.
The complaint states that Officer David Cawthorn laid out the following plan in a report: “It was determined to move to 367 Evening Side and attempt to contact Mitchell. If Mitchell answered the door he would be asked to leave. If he refused to leave he would be arrested for Obstructing a Police Officer. If Mitchell refused to answer the door, force entry would be made and Mitchell would be arrested.’” Ultimately, when Mitchell did not open the door, the police bashed it in, shot him with “pepperball” rounds, searched the house, and set up a lookout point in the house. He says that they then went to his father’s house, a few doors away, and made a similar “request.” They took the father to the Henderson police station, and when he tried to leave, they arrested him. When his wife Linda opened the door, they used the house as planned. Both Mitchell and his father were booked them for obstructing an officer.
If these allegations are true, it is unclear why the police chiefs or the responsible prosecutors are still employed. Chief Chambers retired with a large buyout from the city.
All of the charges were later dismissed, a pattern we have seen in police abuse cases where victims are hit with charges and later offered pleas bargains or settlements. In this case, the charges were dropped but what prosecutor prepared the charges to begin with?
What I find most troubling about this case is that it seems to be following a trend. After the Boston bombing, I wrote a column expressing concern over how the Boston police effectively searched every home in a huge area — forcing families into the street under some general claim of exigency. It turned out that the suspect was not in the area. Police seem to be using exigency or “tactical” claims to circumvent constitutional protections.
I am eager to hear the response of these departments because, if true, these allegations constitute a chilling case of police abuse. If police can simply proclaim a “tactical” need as the basis for entering any home, the fourth amendment would become a purely discretionary rule. In my view, Mitchell had every right to refuse the use of his home. This was not some hot pursuit of a suspect or a need to protect officers from an imminent threat or harm. It was the forced occupation of a home — a poignant case to read on the Fourth of July weekend. We previously broke away from a guy named George who liked to do stuff like this.
Source: Courthouse News
Kudos: Andre Campos
Sonofthunder,
By all means, let’s hear all sides in a fair and impartial forum (or as close to one as a courtroom can get); fair enough. Your skepticism, when fleshed out, is healthy and laudable.
Your sarcasm is duly noted (LOL)
Yes I am talking about US Law Enforcement Officers from DoJ to FBI to ATF to DEA to Local and State Police. With all of their recent law enforcement legal training, why would ANY LEO deliberately put him or herself into a litigious situation and think their going to get away with it?
OK yes a rouge LEO doing his own thing for whatever reasons – OK I’ll agree you’ve seen that happen in the past. However, a unified effort to violate Anthony Mitchell’s constitution rights by SEVERAL LEO’s including the Police Chief? That seems a bit nonsensical.
I agree that some LEO’s are in league with higher federal agencies in the news lately (i.e. NYPD and some California LEO’s). But they are just acting in our national security interests, in my opinion. However, I do not agree with EVERYTHING that “higher federal agency” does these days (i.e. predator drones in CONUS et al, etc.)
Hmmm… I don’t agree with you. I know Raff and I’m just getting familiar with Juliet. I’m thinking that they do “get it” just fine.
By your syntax I suspect that you are either Canadian or British? Are you a Barrister? Juliet is right no one has invoked “Shakespeare’s” “Dick the Butcher” line on you yet (Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71-78) – LOL
When you said “Drink the Kool Aid” I kinda’ understand your mindset now. Whenever anyone says that they show their total lack of comprehension as to what REALLY happen in Guyana in 1978. Only people who lean a bit too far to the Right ever say that.
As George Santayana used to say ‘don’t forget the past’ you do remember what POTUS really messed up the legal system recently? You know the guy who put award limits on torts and other fun stuff that really puts a monkey wrench in our legal system? I mean you were watching all that stuff he pulled with his AG and other cronies on the CIA torture stuff right?
SOT: ” In this litigious society no LEO agent is going to use such excessive force on someone not legally deserving of it.”
You do live in the US right? You are talking about US police, right?
I think you are talking about “probable cause”. Your police department has every legal right to kick in your door if they have a bonafide PC case and you refuse to open the door. The same applies to the Fire Dept if they suspect there is a fire in your apt and you refuse to open door.
So LPD made a mistake? Did they apologize? No? I wonder why? Do you have a lot of priors? I checked Fairfield County Municipal Court database and you do. I’m not posting the link as it has your postal address in it.
Your just like Anthony Mitchell (the subject of this article were talking about) You’re not being totally transparent. It appears that LPD has a DIFFERENT view of what happened 20-Jun-2011 than than you do…
RTC – I read that part. I also read it in Anthony Mitchell’s pleading to the District Court of Nevada. However, if you read it thoroughly you get the feeling that the LEO never actually typed that. As how could Anthony get a HPD Action Plan? And wouldn’t it be counter-intuitive for LEO to share such a plan with a citizen? Wouldn’t that action plan be filed with the Henderson City Attorney’s office as a “classified document”? You do know that Henderson is named as the Defendant in this case? All such documentation would be available to Tony’s lawyer AFTER the case gets under way.
At this point I don’t think there is any REAL pleading filed in this case. I would check PACER if my subscription was up to date. I let it lapse. I think this entire case is BOGUS and the pleading is a clever forgery. Reading the other postings I see now that there was LEO SWAT action that day for the neighbor who was holed up with his baby and a gun.
I think they may have wanted Tony’s house as some sort of command post but I really don’t think it went down the way Tony is presenting it on the Internet. I think he is lying through his teeth. I want to hear Henderson’s side of the story before I pass judgment on Henderson Nevada Law Enforcement.
raff,
I’m inclined to agree with you . . . mostly. And I’ll say “Regents” and that should be a sufficient explanation. When a law school, accredited or not, puts theological dogma over legal principle, I think it’s fair to categorize it and its graduates as “sub-standard”. The Separation of Church and State isn’t just a good idea. It’s the law. And when you train your students to actively try to insert Religion X Dogma into the law? You are doing the Constitution and the Founder’s vision of a religiously pluralistic society a great disservice.
Juliet,
It’s a use it or lose it syndrome. They give ’em all these toys and if they want the funding to continue, they have to show a need for it.
Hey J.Brian Harris…
“For anyone who reads any of my writings and regards me as being some sort of “out-of-it” loner, I find it may be useful to mention that I actually have a lot of company.”
———-
Usually when someone feels the need to declare that they are not some sort of “out-of-it” loner, it means they’re some sort of “out-of-it” loner. Especially when they follow it by posting a thesis which has little bearing on the subject at hand. You might want to dial it back a little bit, and try having a conversation with folks. I’m just saying.
Don’t think Juliet or Raff do, “get” it.
Every jurisdiction that I know of has a layman or two on boards overseeing certain misconduct, rule changes, etc., not just Illinois.
I agree that attorneys overseeing attorneys is a bad idea, but I can’t think of any good alternatives. Halving the number of law schools, better teaching and discussion of ethics & morality, and less emphasis on material gain might be a good start. The glut of attorneys and desire for “NYC like” starting salaries has taken almost as much out of a once honourable profession as have the substandard law schools.
If you want to know the effect of a law school for everyone (as long as Mom and Dad can pay; or you are willing to carry the debt), Google Judge Marc Gold in Broward County, Florida and mistrial. Yet, to agree with one of your points, nothing will happen to him.
Its sad these have been two of the major factors behind lawyers not understanding how important being an attorney has often been in U.S., and U.K., history. It is a very different profession than when my father, his uncle, and so on practiced law. We need an alert, capable and intellectually-ready judiciary to oversee and balance the Executive branch of government. I have been both surprised and disappointed at the extent to which the Senate has “drank the Kool-Aid” on the Snowden matter. While I usually disagreed with her politics, I have been particularly disappointed by Sen. Feinstein. Despite certain hypocrisies, I always respected her. Not anymore.
Skip:
1. We do understand how important and honorable being a lawyer is. That’s why there are no mean jokes about them.
2. “Substandard” lawyers are not the proximate cause of overly aggressive police action. You took Torts, right?
skip,
once again, in my opinion, it is arrogance to claim that attorneys who graduated from what you call substandard law schools are something less of an attorney than someone who graduated from the top tier schools. I have had transactions and court cases with attorneys from those top tier schools and they had nothing on me. What you do and learn and how hard you work is the key to being a success in law school and in practice. If you can pass the Bar exam in Illinois you are an equal footing with any law school graduate who passed the Bar. What you do with that opportunity is the answer.
Juliet,
Here in Illinois, there are non attorneys on the Illinois Supreme Court’s attorney review panels when a complaint is made against a licensed attorney.
There seems to be a trend in law enforcement toward using as much force as they can get by with, instead of using as little as possible. Flashbang grenades for a domestic abuse situation? That just seems insane to me.
I believe the S. Ct. declared a few years ago that when LEO’s engage in misconduct beyond department regulations, they are subject to personal liability and that the municipality doesn’t have to cover legal fees or judgements
Sonofthunder-
Unless you scimmed the the original post, you should have read that the officer actually typed up his action plan, complete with a forcible entry contingency- which I believe will now be entered into evidence. So believe it, don’t believe it: the truth can be stranger than fiction sometimes.
A little more context
http://www.ktnv.com/news/local/125308298.html
What Darren said.
There should be arrests within the department for this kind of outrageous abuse and civil suits that makes their eyes cross filed against the city, the PD and each individual officer involved. Jail time should be pushed for and pleas rejected.
Rotten Gestapo b@stards.
Not subpar law schools- lets go with substandard. I agree with lawyers setting their own standards being a problem, though it shouldn’t be as big a problem as it has become. Somewhere along the way, the 1968-1975 time period, there seems to have been a school of thought that arose centered around, “there should be a law school for everyone”. Thus, we now have 203 (incl. the Military’s school) accredited law schools, and about 4 or 5 provisionally accredited. I believe the law school in Tenn. with a goal of serving Appalachia, and was denied accreditation, dropped it lawsuit and is re-applying.
Of the 202 accredited, U.S. News could only rank 144. the remainder are just unranked (“Rank Not Published). If those folks were willing to rank some school #144, you can imagine how bad the unranked schools must be. And, by the way, U.S. News gave into pressure & dropped its traditional Second Tier, Third Tier, etc. labels. Too pejorative for the useless, though expensive, schools.
How many law schools should there be? I’ve seen economic-based arguments for anywhere between 64 and 102. We have 125 accredited Medical Schools, and my experience has been their entering classes are significantly smaller than at Law Schools. Say, a difference between around 250 for law, about 160 for medicine, at Northwestern.
For anyone truly interested in the decline of the legal profession, the role of the second and third tier law schools, etc., the “blog of record” is Thirdtierreality.blogspot.com. All of the ugly truths are covered, the lousy (but greedy) schools, near fraud about the job situation, glut of JD’s, and impending trouble (or worse) for many law schools. I don’t always agree with the Blog’s author(s), but they are not afraid to go after First Tier law schools as well as the joke schools, and they always have the numbers backing up their position. They are definitely not cowed by rankings.
Sometimes, the “law school for all” idea was benign, as in the case of accrediting a law school with a night program. Since most of the “top” law schools phased out night law school (if they even had it), this was a good idea. By the way, I have no idea why the idea a top law school should not have a night program came to be. I suspect schools could not fill a night program with students carrying the same credentials as the day programs. This brought down a schools stats, etc. Unfortunate, but given the pressure on schools to perform in rankings, it was inevitable.
There are about 21 ABA accredited law schools in California. That’s a lot, but California does have a large population. However, the Bear Flag’s Bar has also seen fit to accredit about 18 (the state only accredited # sort of floats. I’ve seen it as high as 44!) or so law schools whose grads can take the California Bar, only. I guess you can’t take advantage of any reciprocity, and I don’t even know if you can practice in federal court. But other than that you can (in theory) do everything a grad of Stanford, USC or Boalt can do.
If you estimate very conservatively, lets say the 18 schools graduate 120 students each. That’s 2160 people. If even half pass the Bar that means every single year there are about 1000 newly minted lawyers in Cal from substandard schools. And there at least another 1000 from “accredited” schools that are still substandard. Thus, 2000 attorneys who should scare the H–l out of you are manufactured each year in California.
While Cal is pretty unique in its state bar only system, you can essentially do this same exercise for many states- just using the ABA approved schools. The numbers are not as extreme, but that’s only because there may be 5 law schools, 2 of which are substandard. Or 4 law schools, 1 substandard. For example, Alabama, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Rhode Island (a special case, perhaps, for historical reasons), and Texas stand out.
New York is already iffy, and it is proposing 3 more law schools! Oh yeah, that’s just what NY needs, because 15 law schools, 2 to 7 of which are are arguably substandard, are just not enough. Even in a state like Tennessee, that is already well-served by 4 law schools of varying quality & state affiliation, the temptation to lower the profession cannot be resisted. I truly think a law school that serves the Appalachian area is a great idea. But greed only gives it a 50/50 shot of working, IF the school can get accreditation. (Too bad for its chances it seeks to serve a White area. If it was to serve a Black region, Hispanic region, etc., rather than poor & White, the ABA stamp would have come years ago).
It’s all money driven, of course. There is no shortage of lawyers, just the opposite. And putting out thousands of poorly educated attorneys every year results in degradation of the profession for other reasons. We are not talking about future Maritime, Patent or Antitrust attorneys. And certainly not about people who are going into the law because of an interest in Constitutional law or Civil Rights. These folks gravitate towards hanging a shingle & trying to make a living. Heavy on torts, negligence, p.i. in general, residential closings, local government. Because we really need more attorneys perceived as ambulance chasers.
The classic argument is that you really learn how to practice law after law school. Absolutely true. However, in my 30 or so yrs of watching lawyers I have come to realise something Juliet is missing. That is, these “attorneys” missed 3 yrs in which, yes, you are supposed to learn to think like an attorney. But it is also the only 3 yrs most lawyers will have to be exposed to the academic side of law. These substandard schools have one clearly stated goal: to pass the Bar. Teaching kids how to argue any position, right or wrong, good or evil, is not such a bang-up idea if their educational background is bereft of anything not Bar-oriented. (Not that 3 years at Yale guarantees a moral compass. See, H.R.C.)
It’s something I never realised until long after I graduated my, I thought, overrated law school, but I don’t recall the issue of the Bar coming up in conversation until my third year. I don’t recall it ever coming up in class. Not ever. The school, and it is joined by another 100 or so, truly sought to teach towards a National perspective. They did seek, sometimes quite unsuccessfully, to plant a seed of interest in “Law” as an academic subject, a matter of philosophy and historical creation. It took a good long while for me to understand and appreciate this, but it happened.
Knowing something about the Common Law, the Constitution, how and why the representative democracy of the U.S. is supposed to work, does not make you money. But it is the difference between, to analogise, being an electrician regarding the law, or being an electrical engineer. True, some of the absolute best trial lawyers I have seen are p.i. lawyers from substandard schools. But their idea and philosophy of the law is of a tradesman or mechanic, not likely to understand or care about John Locke’s ideas. Or those of James Madison.
So, why is all this relevant? Because the number of these lawyers has reached very large numbers, and will continue to represent a significant percentage of law school grads. They become judges, state level, with great powers. They become state legislators (don’t know where the 15% came from, but I doubt it. Certainly not in any of the states I know), passing laws that effect our lives.
I don’t want my right of privacy, etc., being subject to a judge or legislator who almost certainly knows nothing about why such a right was found to exist. Or why it should exist (I understand the relative safety of a federal judge is often available). The surfeit of lawyers from substandard law schools has had a corrosive, coarsening effect on the legal profession. It is a danger to have a government willing to breach an individual’s privacy, with state judges who, upon a Habeus action, never even read the Constitution.
And if you don’t get it, consider this. Suppose the AMA loosened standards and the number of medical schools Tripled. Basically, anyone who could pay tuition could get an M.D. Degree. You think you might be looking on the wall for a diploma, or online for info? You think having “medical schools for everyone” would really help the medical profession?
Skip: Please don’t mistake my disagreement with your premise, along with most of your “supporting” arguments, for not understanding it. I get it, but I just think you’re (mostly) wrong. And by citing the AMA and the medical profession, in my opinion, you couldn’t have made a stronger appeal for one my arguments — professionals shouldn’t oversee themselves.
I wish I had more time to wade through the word wall you posted, but I’m busy, today.
Rental companies rent “scissor-lifts” real cheap that would have worked. With the billions of dollars from Department of Homeland Security grants every SWAT team or tactical unit in the United States could own one, easily transported with a utility trailer. Instead they bought tanks!
My door was kicked in the night of June 20th, 2011, in Lancaster, OH due to “exigent circumstances” because I refused to open the door. The police claim to have heard a woman screaming for help in my apt., but I was alone in bed, asleep. They said that she escaped out a window, but all the windows were covered with plastic still from the preceeding winter and to help with ac costs. We have no rights. They claimed I was holding a woman hostage in the report, but no investigation was ever done, and no charges were ever filed in regards to anyone being held hostage in my apartment.
” Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government”- Thomas Jefferson- Declaration of Independence
Holy shit. Can’t imagine that they couldn’t see the error in advance. The lower 80 just can’t be trusted to exercise judgment.