{"id":5591,"date":"2011-05-23T10:20:31","date_gmt":"2011-05-23T10:20:31","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-23T10:20:31","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=5591","title":{"rendered":"NYT: Linda Greenhouse on Kentucky v. King: “Justice in Dreamland”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linda Greenhouse in the NYT on Kentucky v. King: Justice in Dreamland<\/a>, i.e., SCOTUS is out of touch with reality:<\/p>\n

Do the police stake out the apartment and go for a warrant? No, they do not. Instead, they bang on the door, shouting, \u201cPolice, police, police.\u201d No response \u2014 at least, no verbal response. From behind the door the officers hear the sound of \u201cpeople inside moving\u201d and objects \u201cbeing moved.\u201d Aha! Evidence may be about to be destroyed. Announcing that they are coming in, the officers kick in the door and find not the man they were looking for, but three other people, one of whom is smoking marijuana. More marijuana, along with cocaine, is in plain view.<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Fourth Amendment law is enormously complex (although not as complex as it once was, now that the state wins almost all the cases) and I make no pretense here of unpacking it wholesale. Nor do I argue that this case was the most important on the court\u2019s docket; even accepting Justice Ginsburg\u2019s conclusion that the police could easily have obtained a warrant and that the majority had gratuitously used the case \u201cto contract the Fourth Amendment\u2019s dominion,\u201d the criminal justice system has hardly been shaken to its core. <\/p>\n

But in fact, its very ordinariness is what makes this decision worth pondering. It\u2019s worth stopping to consider the assumptions about human nature that underlie not only this ruling but much of the court\u2019s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. It\u2019s worth wondering what planet the justices \u2014 most of them, anyway, and not just the incumbents, but many of their predecessors \u2014 have been living on when it comes to encounters between the police and the rest of us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}