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Friday, May 13, 2011

Indiana's Supreme Court Kills the Fourth Amendment

Getting back to normal after the great blogger crash of May 2011.  The crash ate almost all of the comments to my post from Tuesday.  I see the same thing being said at a lot of blogs, so we all understand.

I see from John at Improved Clinch that the Indiana state supreme court has ruled the 4th amendment to the US constitution is no longer in effect. 
Overturning a common law dating back to the English Magna Carta of 1215, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Hoosiers have no right to resist unlawful police entry into their homes.  
In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer's entry.
I knew the 4th amendment was on the ropes, beaten silly by the modern security state: the TSA invasive body searches of people not accused of any crime, including babies, the Homeland Security/Walmart  program to have you watch and report on your neighbors and more.  I just thought it had more life left in it. 

In a statement of stunning ignorance,
"Professor Ivan Bodensteiner, of Valparaiso University School of Law, said the court's decision is consistent with the idea of preventing violence." 
In reality, like gun control laws, this will increase violence against people who obey laws.  Think of it a bonus for any aspiring home invaders.  All they have to do is get something that passes for a police uniform and come to your door.  Do you really know exactly, to the detail of buttons, what your local police uniforms look like?  How about their SWAT teams?  Once inside, being a peaceful, law biding citizen, you'll assume the position, leaving them free to rape, torture, murder, whatever they want to do with minimal risk.  Folks trained in self-defense have long complained that the 3AM door-breaking raids police carry out are impossible to tell from determined home invasions.  You have milliseconds to decide if that person in a black ski mask pushing into your house is a home invader or a policeman at the wrong address.  Criminal gangs have used this attack pattern for years.  The dynamics of identifying them have just gotten worse.

William Grigg of Pro Libertate Blog writes here,
In the interests of brevity, these rulings should be consolidated under the name “Rapist Doctrine,” in recognition of the ... pseudo-scholarly versions of the advice once urged upon women enduring sexual assault: Don’t resist — it will only make things worse.
Watch this one.  Bad law decisions like this can sweep out of one state into the rest of the country.  There seems to be a few gun bloggers in Indiana; you guys need to try to get your legislature to overturn this.

6 comments:

  1. I assume this will be headed to the SCOTUS pretty quickly, which is bothersome (because it should never have been necessary): should SCOTUS side with Indiana's Supreme Court, it will move us one step closer to The Revolution.

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  2. I imagine it will take years to get there. Someone has to sue, it has to go to district court, be appealed, and so on. Look at the hoopla over Obamacare. It has been ruled unconstitutional by 4 of 5 (or 3 of 4) lower courts, but the administration keeps putting it in place. The Supremes have said they won't give it precedence, let it percolate up at normal pace. By that time, the whole thing will be in place and much harder to destroy.

    As someone said, the founders would have been shooting by now.

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  3. SG, I cannot form the words to tell you how much this angers me.
    That is completely unacceptable. Judges who make decisions such as this should be made to pay a severe penalty for their judicial activism. And, if society slips into a more barbaric mode due to economic failure or other reasons, perhaps scum like this shall. Santa Claus may not be the only one with a list.

    I understand the consequences of my decision, having been a police officer, but any forceable entry into my home will be met by lethal force. I will not risk my wife's life by assuming it is law enforcement. I realize I will not survive the encounter unless it really is a home invasion, but that is acceptable to me.

    Considering the penetration of certain calibers, if they are stacked up, more than one of them will be joining me in our next journey into the unknown (sorry, I'm a heathen.) If I have the time to deploy other preparations, I might even improve upon that.

    If you are reading this via Echelon or whatever, you peckerwoods, keep that in mind. Read a little Aleksandr Solshenitsyn, and understand that not all of you will be going home that night. I won't be one who "burned in the camps later, thinking . . ."

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  4. Along the line of that comment, Reg, I was reading (somewhere...) one of those "is it time, yet?" threads. The answer was, "Grab your rifle, your ruck full of ammo, water and jerky, and run out the door. If there are other people with rifles ready to go, it's time. If there aren't, go back inside and wait some more". Made me laugh a bit.

    In my mind a saw a perfect little community like in "The Truman Show" with guys running outside of every fifth house, seeing each other and forming up into groups.

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  5. Yeah, I'm hoping Montana might be a bit like that. Went to a Constitution rally here in Hamilton last October. Larry Pratt spoke there, as did Gary Marbut, of Montana Shooting Sports Association. He's a really pro-gun/pro-liberty guy and it's a pleasure to listen to him speak. The hall wasn't completely packed, but there was a fairly good showing for this lightly populated area.

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  6. Yeppers, this is a bad one. If ever there was a time for protests at the state capitol, this is it.

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