Supreme Court Rules Against Fourth Amendment
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
January 15, 2009
As the Democrats in Congress methodically plot against the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court works in unison against the Fourth Amendment. On January 14, the Court ruled that evidence obtained through illegal searches may be used to prosecute criminal defendants.
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| The Supremes rule against the Fourth Amendment. |
According to Mark Sherman of the Associated Press, the justices split 5-4 along “ideological lines.” In other words, the ideology of the majority of the Supreme Court is apparently arrayed against the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas rule against the exclusionary rule, which requires evidence to be suppressed if it results from a violation of a suspect’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches or seizure.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens dissented. Bader Ginsburg said the ruling leaves the suspect in the case, Bennie Dean Herring of Alabama who was illegally convicted on drug and weapon charges, “and others like him, with no remedy for violations of their constitutional rights.”
“The most serious impact of the court’s holding will be on innocent persons wrongfully arrested based on erroneous information carelessly maintained in a computer database,” wrote Ginsberg.
The “ideological” majority focused on the “societal costs of excluding drugs and other evidence seized,” according to USA Today. In other words, the social bias of Supreme Court “conservatives” against drugs trumps protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.
By ruling against the exclusionary rule, the Supremes have rolled American law back to a time before 1789 when English law did not provide as strong an exclusionary rule as the one that later developed under the Fourth Amendment, in part a reaction against English law including the general warrant and the writs of assistance.
In a related development, the so-called federal intelligence court, in a “rare public opinion,” according to Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times, “is expected to issue a major ruling validating the power of the president and Congress to wiretap international phone calls and intercept e-mail messages without a court order, even when Americans’ private communications may be involved” (emphasis added).
Put another way, the illegal secret court, established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, may soon have carte blanche and unsupervised power to monitor the communications of all Americans, an effort underway for some time now. “The appeals court is expected to uphold a secret ruling issued last year by the intelligence court that it oversees, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or FISA, court. In that initial opinion, the secret court found that Congress had acted within its authority in August of 2007 when it passed a hotly debated law known as the Protect America Act, which gave the executive branch broad power to eavesdrop on international communications, according to the person familiar with the ruling,” Lichtblau writes.
The so-called “Protect America Act” allows for massive, untargeted collection of communications without court order or meaningful oversight by either Congress or the courts.
“The misnamed Protect America Act allows the US government to monitor telephone calls and other electronic communications of American citizens without a warrant. This clearly violates the Fourth Amendment,” Ron Paul said on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on January 30, 2008.