Friday, November 15, 2013

California Courts Exhibit Disdain for SCOTUS When Liberty is Being Protected

It is most ominous and disgusting that the Courts, especially of this State, exhibit utter disdain for United States Supreme Court holdings that give some glimmer of hope and liberty to people accused of crimes.  Courts and prosecutors, ostensibly swearing to uphold the Constitution, sometimes seem to do everything possible to detour the route charted by that Constitution if its terminus is one of individual’s liberty.

I recall clearly when the same United States Supreme Court that gave us the current “how can we get around it” anti-power McNeely opinion previously handed down the patently anti-liberty decisions of United States v. Leon (1984) 468 U.S. 897 and Illinois v. Gates (1983) 462 U.S. 213, Courts were falling all over themselves in a veritable and lamentable stampede to see who could be first to apply them to strip people of liberty.  But when McNeely came down, reminding us that the government needs to back off and to apply the same presumptive warrant rule to drunk drivers as to other folk, many of our Courts are assertively shunning it like the plague, concocting “consent,” “retroactivity,” “only forced blood,” “exclusionary rule doesn’t apply,” etc., devices to avoid elevating liberty over power.  Pretty sad and ominous and Statistic.

We are living in troubled times, when people can no longer believe that the Courts, especially of this State, are the place to come to obtain surcease from tyranny - the Courts are enabling, rather than resisting, tyranny more and more.  You cannot walk into any of the Courts I practice in, where you have to be subjected to the indignities of personal searches to get into the building, and then you have to cool your heels outside the door of the Courtroom until they deign to open the door and grudgingly let you in, and feel protected or respected.  The cops are already comfortably inside, chatting it up with the bailiffs, DAs, public defenders, and sometimes even the judge.  And you are supposed to believe that you will be treated with neutrality and dignity, and that your plight against those same cops being patronized will be resolved in your favor?  Really!/?

But now we have one case that ostensibly levels the battlefield, and the lower Courts of this State do everything in their rationalizing power to deprive you of the prize, a prize whose foundations go back to 1776 [and even to Magna Charta], but which got stolen somewhere along the line.  Far from Runnymede, I am running mad!