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It's hard to find joy in this, but these cases are very important to protecting our freedoms, more important than someone who was falsely accused and is easy to relate to. Forcing the government to let someone go even though they know that person wishes to do harm to the country is the ultimate test of the checks and balances that keep our country in line.

These agencies need to know there is someone watching over them. They need to know there are limits. And, god forbid, the worst happens and he commits a crime after he is released, these agencies need to know that the blood is on their hands, because they royally fucked up.

If you want to convict someone and have it stick, it has to be done by the books. In this case, the FBI is the real threat to the American people.

I agree on the importance of the rule of law in criminal investigations. I just wanted to point out, from a bird's eye perspective, the silliness of this situation. Because of the rigid insistence on legal standing, the only way to curtail the FAA on this issue is to release a person who has displayed a tendency for mass violence.

It would seem that there should be a better way to organize our legal system so society isn't faced with dilemmas of this sort.

> Because of the rigid insistence on legal standing, the only way to curtail the FAA on this issue is to release a person who has displayed a tendency for mass violence.

You're seeing an interaction between two rather unintuitive rules.

Standing is required because legislature is supposed to make the law, not the courts. The courts only "make law" when they're forced to because there is already a "case or controversy" and it has to be decided under the law in effect when the events occurred, not whatever Congress might decide to pass tomorrow. Only then do the courts decide what the ambiguous, vague, contradictory text Congress passed actually means. Then that decision stands as precedent and effectively becomes the law until the legislature disagrees in the form of passing contrary legislation (or a constitutional amendment).

But the thing you're really objecting to is the exclusionary rule. Letting bad people go free is the mechanism by which the exclusionary rule operates, because it's something the police don't want, which means it can be used as punishment for the police when they break the rules.

The exclusionary rule is weird. When you see it in operation your instinct is to think that something is malfunctioning, but that's how it's supposed to work. You think it isn't working because you want the same thing as the police and its method of operation is to do something the police don't want.

The problem is the exclusionary rule does what it's designed to do surprisingly well in practice, and the alternatives don't.

Right, and if it were possible for a "good person" to prove that they have been the target of illegal surveillance, they would have standing and they could challenge the law without creating any unfortunate situations.

The problem is that by the nature of surveillance and what the government does with the results (uses the tastiest bits as evidence and hides the rest), only "bad people" will ever be able to prove that they were the target of illegal surveillance. Thus the unfortunate situation.

Side note: If the exclusionary rule was a punishment, it's a rather bad one as it allows police to toe right up to the line and if they cross it the worst they get is they lose the piece of evidence they wanted. It's merely a bright line that encourages a muscular police force to toe right up to the boundary. If police were punished (e.g. fined, fired, jailed, lose the entire case, etc) for violating someone's constitutional rights, they would go nowhere near the line.

The problem with jailing the police is that the prosecutors who'd have to file charges against them are on the same side as them and have an interest in encouraging them to push the rules. We can barely get charges filed against police officers who kill someone in cold blood a lot of the time, what chance do we stand of doing the same over minor things like constitutional violations?

So we need a different set of prosecutors for going after abusive police.

As usual, perhaps I have not made myself clear. And before I go further, I should clarify that I've only taken one law school class, and I am not a lawyer.

The issue I'm referring to is that no one is in a position to challenge this component of the FAA without demonstrating that they personally have sustained harm, meaning their rights as an individual have been violated. In other words, the issue is that there must be a "case or controversy" to test a legal hypothesis.

If there were a means of challenging the constitutional validity of a law, or an interpretation of the law, without the burden of proving that one has personally sustained harm, then the public would be able to challenge this component of the FAA in situations other than one where a possibly dangerous person stands a chance of being released. I think few would be prepared to argue his case were it not for its legal significance.

Correct me if I'm mistaken; you seem to be more educated on the subject.

You're not actually arguing against the standing rule. If the government is violating your constitutional rights then you have standing.

The problem is you may not be able to prove it.

The government could have trivially helped everyone out simply by admitting that they're spying on all these people, and then the issue could have been decided before it was important to a real criminal case, under circumstances where nobody bad is let out of prison if the government loses.

But then the person whose rights are violated in the deciding case ends up being a highly sympathetic journalist or civil rights leader instead of some highly unsympathetic terrorist wannabe. The government doesn't want that (because they don't want to lose), so instead they purposely try to force the situation in which bad people go free if the courts rule against the government.

The appeal isn't about entrapment, it's about wholesale warrantless surveillance of American citizens.

> Mohamud is the very first criminal defendant to challenge the FAA before a court of appeals, which opens the door for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. The appeal has widespread implications: The controversial law provides the legal framework for the mass surveillance programs that Edward Snowden revealed in 2013.

> “It’s not an exaggeration,” Patrick Toomey, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, told BuzzFeed News, “to say that the privacy rights of millions of Americans potentially hang in the balance of his case.”

I didn't claim it was about entrapment. I was anticipating a potential objection, that Mohamud was 'radicalized' by the agents involved in this situation, which another comment implied.

I understand the legal implications. If only our legal system were not organized such that one must invest so much effort into proving 'standing,' perhaps we could respond to the situation rationally instead of choosing between two potentially negative outcomes.

I think it is a good balance. Cops do not want to let bad guys off the hook, so knowing that if they improperly collect evidence it will do so aligns the incentives well.

Cops are as susceptible to rationalization as anyone else. If they improperly collect evidence but are not punished directly for it, they will not view it as their error: they will view it as "the system" has failed to follow through on their hard work. This might then lead to more cops taking matters in their own hands rather than handing the suspect over to the prosecution.

> The appeal isn't about entrapment, it's about wholesale warrantless surveillance of American citizens.

Why should they have it any better than the unAmerican citizens of the world?

The Constitution of the United States only protects US persons (not citizens) from unreasonable surveillance. Spying on "unAmerican citizens of the world" is the direct duty of many of the US spy agencies, of which there are 17.

I don't believe he or she claimed they should, only that this was the basis of the appeal.

> But there is something absurd about the possibility that a person with a demonstrated propensity for mass violence might be returned to society at large without any legal restrictions, psychological treatment, or period of supervision.

There is nothing illegal in wanting to kill people. There is nothing illegal in having radical religious (or other) beliefs. Free societies don't punish thought crime.

The only thing the law enforcement/legal system can legally and morally do, is to mark him as a potential threat (and increase surveillance) like they would with any other suspected terrorist.

> There is nothing illegal in wanting to kill people

True, but actively planning and taking concrete steps to prepare to actually kill people and trying to trigger a bomb to do so absolutely is illegal, and it appears that this is what he did.

But that is irrelevant due to the entrapment part. Now it only matters what he will do in the future.

It's irrelevant to his legal rights and whether or not he should be released, but perfectly pertinent to the point the post you were responding to was trying to make.