Indiana man charged with theft for removing police tracking device from car
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
All the police had to do was knock on his door and ask for it back. If he refused, that's grounds for theft. If he denied knowledge of it (like if it had just fallen off somewhere) that doesn't sound like sufficient grounds for a search warrant, and if the search warrant did turn up evidence of some unrelated crime, that evidence shouldn't be admissible.
I'm no lawyer, but that's what sounds right to me.
(I don't agree that Finders Keepers is a legal basis for ownership, or that leaving your door open means it's ok to steal, or that a bank error in your favor means you get to keep it.)
One of the worst mistakes in modern government is pretending that the people 'serving' have more rights and privileges then everybody else.
They should have less.
If a regular citizen can't plant a bug, neither can police. If police can conduct a stakeout, so can regular citizens. They just have to follow the same process. That might include going in front of a judge and getting a warrant.
If a regular citizen could break up a bar fight, the police should be able to take the same actions. If police can set up a sting operation, so should citizens be allowed.
Obviously, we don't want everybody running around conducting sting operations or traffic stops. So we set some bar for regular citizens that makes it less likely. But police should have to face the exact same bar. The difference is that we pay for their time, training, equipment, etc. If a certain level of training is required before anybody can make a traffic stop, that training should be open for anybody. We just pay the admission and the salary for police to take the training. Regular citizens foot their own bill.
Edit: poor proofreading
and if magnetic shit falls off my car, that's the breaks, suckers.
Equivalencies of Powers/Rights is a good thought experiment that would keep the powers of the enforcers from multiplying without limits.
We were also taught it's almost never worth doing this; basically, if someone's shooting people and you're doing an armed job, yes, use your gun to try and stop them or detain them, but if it's just property damage or theft, call the cops and let them do their thing. The risk to you isn't worth it, nor is the risk of a false arrest lawsuit.
Then the question is, is such a good idea?
There was a curious case a few years back of a non-citizen who had been a military police officer and became a civilian cop because nobody checked his documentation. His military activities were perfectly legal but all arrests made as a civilian were invalid.
I was told the difference between a policeman and a citizen (via citizen's arrest) is that a policeman can arrest someone for a misdemeanor.
I think the real difference is that the cops have qualified immunity, meaning they aren't at fault even if the arrest turned out to be unjustified, and regular citizens do not.
I don't mean to sound pedantic, just having a conversation.
The correct term to use here is "powers". The people have "rights". The people delegate, through the constitution, certain "powers" to the government. The government, in turn, delegates some of those powers to the police. The police do not have "rights". The government does not have "rights". The government and police have "powers", and are supposed to exercise those powers within specified limits.
What is under discussion here is the limits of those powers.
Intent is a reasonable yardstick to assess who goes to jail and who doesn't. It is a terrible way to deal with systems and processes. There isn't time and it isn't productive to defend a system with bad incentives and outcomes because it wasn't intended to be that way.
Did the people vote to delegate those rights? Were the people ever asked?
So, at best the "people" of 3 centuries ago where asked. And not all the people, just the white, male, landowners (and rich -- poorer white male people only got to vote 1.5 centuries later or more in the US, even in general elections).
And why is this binding for people, including poor, non landowning, women, blacks, latinos, asians, etc, 3 centuries later?
Or at least I’d hope they can.
On the way to an emergency? Of course they should. And people should pull over.
And only sometimes while on the job. For example, if they catch someone for speeding and happen to go through a red light, I don't find that to be a grave thing. Speeding is easily a public hazard. Going off to investigate a theft where the thief has left the property, though? No need to run the light as the delay won't make a difference. Going to a car accident, especially with hurt folks or that is blocking traffic? Yes. Car accident in an open section of parking lot? Rarely necessary.
I live in a small northeast city off of an avenue where there are two trauma centers, a firehouse that does about 5,000 calls/year and a police HQ. I see and hear plenty of these vehicles. When you see it enough, you can spot the different patterns in how police, ambulances and fire trucks respond.
2. I don't know where they are dispactched or anything. I could tell the difference between sirens though.
3. I know not all dispatches are emergencies that need lights, sounds, or running lights. If someone has broken into your business, for example, and the person is no longer there, there is no need for speed, lights, and so on. I'm in a larger city in another country now... and there are less sirens and stuff here. It is really weird. I know they respond and the crime rate is probably lower, but... priorities are different as well. I generally didn't see the same patterns with fire trucks and ambulances in the states, and honestly never had a complaint about them. Just the police.
Edited to add an afterthought.
Cops are supposed to be professionals, with keeping the civil order of their state and/or county and/or municipality as their full-time job, but the authority to arrest criminals historically extends from the sheriff of the county, to every person whom he or she may designate, either orally or in writing. If the sheriff asked for assistance from an ordinary person, and they effected an arrest, that was legally an official act of the sheriff. Similar extension-of-authority constructs exist for a municipal mayor/council, state governor, and federal president.
Without a preexisting order to assist, as one might have as a municipal cop or full-time county deputy, there is no official cover for an arrest, and the person making one would have personal liability, if they made a mistake. That privilege of immunity for mistakes made during establishment or maintenance of civil order is supposed to keep professional cops from being too fearful of civil liability lawsuit to do their jobs effectively. I would argue that they are now not fearful enough to conduct themselves in a manner consistent with their positions in the community, as part of it, simply being persons who have been given a standing order to assist the office of the president/governor/sheriff/mayor in their duty to keep civil order. They have now set themselves apart from the communities in which they live, behind the cordon of their thin blue lines, as adversaries to those whom they see as enemies of civil order.
As such, they have become blind to those occasions on which their actions are actually upsetting to the civil order. In other words, they get into some crazy bullshit legal arguments, and sometimes get away with it.
The privilege they enjoy is actually in having their personal actions taken as extensions of a higher lawful authority, rather than as their own.
It is established that the state has the authority to require that motor vehicle owners permanently affix a license plate to their vehicles, which remains the property of the state, and not remove it, and to return it to a designated authority on demand. But this is all written into public law. You can't just arbitrarily extend that power to some cop shop's magnetic GPS tracker. If you want it to be a crime to remove it, you have to write that into its own law. Otherwise, you have to follow the same law for theft (or unlawful conversion) as everyone else. And that opens up a reciprocal liability for putting your property on someone else's property without their authorization.
I suppose the opsec moral of the story is to drop found trackers onto the public road, or report it as lost property, instead of leaving it inside a locker. Putting a classified ad for lost property in the public notices section of the local paper for three consecutive weeks might have been a fun experiment in "fruit of the poisoned tree" lawyering.
you don't even have to find it, if something is in your car then the cops will insist that it's yours, although that doesn't necessarily make it a legal basis for ownership
Theft of electricity is a crime. Indeed, before explicit computer intrusion laws, hackers used to be prosecuted for the theft of a few cents of electricity involved in the computation of their “crime”.
Because I'd say me putting something on your private property is vandalism. And you removing said vandalism is in no way a crime. They didn't have a warrant, and their device wasn't identified as belonging to the authorities. Just because the police vandalized your property (without informing you about what they were doing) shouldn't* make it any more of a crime to remove than if a private citizen did it. This is the same bullshit that empowers police to harass minorities "because we're cops".
That level is destruction is open to interpretation, but it still requires some form of destruction or damage to be classified as vandalism.
CLEARLY he's not going to counter-sue, but it's ridiculous to claim it's THEFT when you violated my privacy/trespassed on/against my property while affixing the thing to my property (without a warrant) in the first place.
No, it's not. For all the police knew, as you say, it could have fallen off on its own. Definitely not PC.
> trackers placed by the government under a warrant are distinct from those placed by private citizens. Removing a device from a car where it has a legal basis to be “deprives the police of its use,” he claimed, and constitutes a crime.
You have no way to tell a police tracker from a stawker’s one. How can removing it possibly constitute a crime?
Then again, even if he disposed the device, the police should have been able to track it down.
Shipped to Mexico would have been a good one as well.
However, since he was not made aware of the device, he has no obligation to be compliant.
If the police were tapping someone's phone and they threw away the phone, for whatever reason, would they be in a similar situation?
If they avoided a human surveillance detail, would they be in a similar situation?
Likely no and no.
So while the police did things correctly, getting warrants, etc, the suspect was still entirely unaware of any need to comply.
The guy should walk.
Edit: addendum
If the device had been labeled "Property of {X} Police, do not remove", then they'd have a better case.
Same way the police are supposed to (but don't) announce themselves before kicking down your door.
You're not more important than the citizenry you serve.
Not a reasonable assumption.
A given model say a M1911 Pistol may still be in use by the military but it has been a civilian item for over a century at this point. Barring say labeling like serial numbers and look ups or red handed catching of thieves there is no reasonable way to say if a given specimen in a pawn shop is stolen. A predator drone however is clearly military only for now and a pawn shop dealing with it is obviously selling stolen goods illegally. (After all civilians manufactured them in the first place.)
This doesn't feel like a strong argument. A police uniform doesn't become useless just because bad guys could wear the same.
If a judge finds that it's not the polics'd fault that the warrant was invalid, they can use it. If it was there fault, it's probably inadmissible.
The only flaw I see is how to get the state to prosecute officers of this crime...
Added a "good faith" exception to the 4th amendment.
Meaning that, if the police were acting on a warrant they believe they obtained correctly, the evidence they collected usually is admissible.
In this case, both they and the judge thought disabling an unknown tracking device was probable cause to search for the device. During that search, the police found drugs and drug paraphernalia.
I think what's worse is that this opens up a 4th Amendment "exploit". Want to search someone's house but don't have a enough evidence to get a warrant?
1. Put a $20 bill where the suspect will find it.
2. Wait for the suspect to pick it up.
3. Accuse them of stealing the $20, get a warrant to search their home.
If you want to go the route of civil disobedience and take it off on moral grounds, you can do that too, but you'll probably go to jail. This isn't the first time I've heard of this, the FBI has charged people for tampering with the trackers they've put on people's cars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2011/05/09/heres-...
From article: "'What if it’s not the police’s tracker device?' asked Justice Geoffrey Slaughter. 'What if instead it belongs to the jilted girlfriend or the nosy neighbor? Is it also theft if he removes that device from his vehicle?'"
The thing to do is to call the police.
Yes, but ...
> It's an occasion to call the police.
If you are a drug dealer it is an occasion to hide your supply extra hard. And use a second car/taxi for your drug dealing while using the compromised car for perfectly legal things like an upstanding citizen.
If you are a drug dealer and find a police tracker on your car, it's time to stop being a drug dealer.
Deliberately "cry wolf" with legitimate but shady looking shipments while other members carry out business. Of course that would make them and the organization lose their illegitimate income and the police likely outnumber them in particular even if there may be more smugglers total.
Of course long term thinking and crime for profit don't usually go together - quick gains and jackpots are the temptations in the first place.
I suspect he did. Most likely the police planted the glass pipe that was found when searching for the tracking device so that they could obtain permission from the judge for the second search.
There is low conditional probability that a drug dealer smart enough to locate and remove a GPS tracker would put it in the same physical locker compartment as a crack pipe after taking it off.
Were I the judge, I would be especially wary of "automatic probable cause" objects that were coincidentally found with the search warrant target, namely "drug paraphernalia", "the distinctive odor of marijuana", and "the K-9 unit alerted".
Ask to see the glass pipe they found. Ask to see the photograph of it in situ next to the tracking device. Compare it very closely to evidence taken from previous drug cases. When the cops are unable to back up their bullshit story, throw their whole case out and cite someone for perjury.
Your jaded perception of police is mistaken. You just hate the police and your argument doesn't make any sense.
> Ask to see the glass pipe they found. Ask to see the photograph of it in situ next to the tracking device. Compare it very closely to evidence taken from previous drug cases. When the cops are unable to back up their bullshit story, throw their whole case out and cite someone for perjury.
You want the judge to rule on a comparison of previous drug cases of how people store their drug pipes? The police need to back up their "bullshit" story because of this drug dealer didn't follow the drug pipe storage protocol others follow?
It probably would have been easier to just watch the bodycam and dashcam videos.
Even if it was not evidence from another case, I don't think that new glass drug pipes are hard to obtain. After all, cocaine addicts that have smoked up everything else in their life can still get them. Cops have closer physical proximity to that lifestyle, and could pick up an abandoned pipe from one place, and later drop it where it would be more useful.
This type of misbehavior has been documented on bodycams, when the cop thought the recording device was on standby. Drop contraband, turn on bodycam, "find" contraband, arrest suspect for possession of contraband. Cops that cut corners to take down drug dealers--or other people whom they just know are guilty--think they are doing the right thing.
Your mental model of a typical American judges values is, unfortunately, unrepresentative in the extreme.
Judges tend to rule in favor of lawyers that do most of their work for them. It's a lot easier to get an order if the lawyer submits a draft order, and the judge can just sign it.
I get it. I also like to slack off and get paid. To be perfectly honest, I'd probably only double-check the evidence if a random number generator said to do it, based on the pre-established sampling rate setting in my judge-automation program.
If the disappearance of public property attached to a vehicle can be used to justify a search warrant, this seems like it would be ripe for abuse. The police could apply for a tracking warrant, wait a week, claim their tracker was lost, and then perform whatever searches they want on the private property.
My understanding is that it's the Police's property. If you find it, you can probably legally remove it from the car, but you can't keep it or prevent the Police from recovering it.
This might be interesting to you:
Often, knowledge of surveillance almost completely diminishes its effectiveness. If you know your car has a tracker on it, the police won't get anything useful out of it, because you won't drive to any place you don't want the cops to know about.
Leaving it in place also has the advantage that you don't alert the police that you know about the surveillance.
After all, you're not spying on him.
Sure.
If you're car gets booted, you can't keep that either.
A subsequent search, granted by a judge based on the paraphernalia, uncovered bags of methamphetamine, pills, digital scales and a gun. Heuring was charged with drug dealing and with theft."
Smart enough to take the tracker off the car. Dumb enough to keep it on-location with conviction-worthy drug paraphernalia.
Attach it to a hire car. Keep it moving, but as far away from your illegalities as possible, my goodness.
Who is to say that the tracker actually was found in a locker, or the drugs and guns? Presumably they already knew where he lived.
Want to fix problem at source?
Why do we even bother with warrants if the police can get around them by tricking you into "stealing" something?
Yeah, that hasn't really been working out for us.
(The entire matter is highly absurd.)
> “But something is left on your car — even if you know it’s the police that are tracking you, you have an obligation to leave it there and let them track you?”
If you can compel someone to leave surveillance on private property, where does this precedent make a distinction. Could they leave surveillance cameras in your home and compel you to leave them there?
My thought: Isn't there something about bearing witness against yourself? In America you're not required to do so. Isn't removing a tracking device something like pleading the 5th?
Others suggest you should return it to the police, but it seems to me there are way better approaches to that than handing it over.
Its a tracking device, right? They're going to find it, wherever you put it (except in a locked metal cabinet of course).
So leave it by the side of the road - they'll see it quit moving, find it, assume it fell off. Maybe try again, put it back on your car.
Next time, maybe leave it outside town in a muddy drainage ditch? Imagine the sap who has to go in there to get it.
All sorts of fun could be had. Leave it in a bank lobby. In Victoria's Secret under the discount table. In a trash can at the zoo. Behind the Police station where they keep the idle tracking devices. In an abandoned building. Under a parked police car.
So many better ways to deal with this problem, it could hardly be called a problem at all. Its a challenge!
If removing the tracking device is pleading the 5th, then putting the tracking device on at all would be a violation of the 5th Amendment. You can philosophize a testimonial aspect into almost anything, but the courts take a more narrow view of what gets protected by the 5th.
Anyway I see its not speech, so not testimony.
I know I sound dramatic but it is honestly impossible to overstate how damaging to privacy rights and how much horrific police militarization can be directly and indirectly laid at the feet of the war on drugs.
looking back over the years, from the outside, I think that's been the american attitude all along.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/1/16686014/p...
It's a good example of what I mean. There are others, I'm just not going to post them all. The police seem to optimize for stats and profit. And the cities/counties/state are on board. That's why we see red light cameras too. There are also documented cases of tweaking yellow light times in order to increase the number of tickets sent for running red lights.
The police don't seem to be here to protect and serve anymore. Like most things in America it's all about appearances and money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21603136
Protect and serve died decades ago.
Today, people literally die at the hands of police for errors, questions, mistakes, and failure to demonstrate blind compliance. <---that is no joke.
They delayed court many times, while trying to make their poor case worse.
I took it to trial, won, and those officers were gone.
Things are way worse now. Be careful.
The attorney I had filled me in. The prosecution presented escalation of force to compliance at my trial.
Not doing what they say can escalate to death. The initial event can be ANYTHING.
There were, and still are, plenty of horrible people, probably worst ones in the whole of history, that were doing such things with good intentions.
Also American, or commonwealth justice system, from outside perspective looks like a farce - mostly due to jury system. Based on emotions, not facts - although i do have very high respect for some of your judges.
The combination of private prisons, lobbying, police getting slap on the wrist for the abuse of powers and corrupt government makes USA looks absolutely horrible abroad.
Three years ago, I was you. I thought I wasn’t blind to the problems in the US, but that we fundamentally had a solid system that did its best. Insofar as racial injustice permeated the system, that was a product of racist cops/prosecutors, but a problem that would solve itself as better, younger people, with fewer prejudices, slowly rotated in. I realized I was wrong after Trump became president.
Not the way you might think, though. It wasn’t the series of stories of the things Trump did (and does) that showed me how wrong I was. It was the stories about the things people conveniently started blaming on Trump. Now that we had a legit villain in the White House, the press started dredging up horror stories—but as often as not, from before the administration took power!
So I started reading. And I read about how qualified immunity means cops can do anything to you as long as a court hasn’t previously ruled is unconstitutional. I read about how courts will not decide on constitutionality if they don’t have to—meaning that finding qualified immunity means that the constitutionality wouldn’t be ruled on, leaving the act legal!
I found out that prosecutors will charge defendants with absurd numbers of crimes that they know they can’t prove in order to force a plea deal, because they know the vast majority of defendants can’t afford the legal representation to avoid conviction.
I found out that if you do have means of hiring competent counsel, it is not unheard of for the government to freeze your assets, alleging they proceeded from your crime, so you can’t pay for your defense.
In other words, I found out the US criminal justice system is a giant machinery that takes in people and spits out shattered lives, and that your best hope in life is that its Eye of Sauron won’t turn to look at you.
So how did it get that way? I’ll propose three theories and hopefully explain why the last one is the one I subscribe to.
First, the American people may just be evil. But I don’t buy that, because nations aren’t evil, and everyday people just want to get by. Also, they live under this system; it’s a particularly stupid sort of evil that harms itself.
Second, the American people are oblivious. This one is true, but insufficient. By a “hilarious” cultural “accident”, the vast majority of the system’s horrors fall on the powerless and the poor (by "coincidence", minorities, particularly African American); the rest of society tends to live in a reasonable world. However, that doesn’t explain why things are bad for the victims; cops and prosecutors should be no more likely to be evil than the rest of the population, and yet they are the ones turning the gears of the meat grinder.
Third: the system structurally encourages the behavior. That’s the one everyone is arguing for. Measuring conviction rates (how insane is that?), needing to be seen as tough on crime, those provide the push. Then, removing the guardrails of prosecutorial accountability (prosecutors are almost never sanctioned, even in egregious cases of misconduct) and police restraint leads to the rest.
We are putting good people in a position where the only rational thing to do is to destroy lives to make a number go up, and we remove or don’t enforce the rules that would give any semblance of fairness. Inevitably, the most successful ones will be the ones operating outside the expected rules. As for the ones who refuse, their motivations don’t matter; the system will grind them down as surely as it will grind down its other victims.
TL;DR: The trend started nearly 200 years ago, though for various reasons it accelerated in the mid 20th century.
Some reviews:
"The book is eminently readable and merits careful attention because it accurately describes the twin problems that pervade American criminal justice today―its overall severity and its disparate treatment of African-Americans. The book contains a wealth of overlooked or forgotten historical data, perceptive commentary on the changes in our administration of criminal justice over the years, and suggestions for improvement… Virtually everything that Professor Stuntz has written is thought-provoking and constructive... Well worth reading." -- Justice John Paul Stevens, New York Review of Books
"This volume is exceptionally rich, insightful, provocative, and well-written. It is bound to have great influence on academic thinking, and perhaps in time on the criminal justice system itself... Stuntz's book will repay much closer scrutiny than I can give it in a review… [An] important book." -- Richard A. Posner, New Republic
I thought Russia was pretty far on the scale of messed up for having that system, but apparently it's up there with the freedomland.
Judges here like the wording of ‘there's no reason to doubt the testimony of the officer’, but how can you not doubt it when the police has an interest in the outcome—by design, at that.
Chomsky has a good point about this, that often the most heinous crimes in history have been done with a genuine belief that they are done for good. So, intentions should play a limited role in your judgment of someone's moral outcome.
On the other hand, there have been clear cases where the powers that be in America have gone to violent extremes to protect their interests. Some major examples would be the southern slave holders going to war with the rest of the country to protect their 'right' to hold slaves. Or large industrialists getting help from the army or national guard to stop large scale protests and strikes. Or COINTELPRO, where the FBI used infiltration, blackmail and even assassination against the civil rights movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A...
Where USA destabilized 3rd world government for profit of fruit company.
USA was never a "good guy", they were, and still are, just a lesser evil - especially if compared to soviet union, or now - china.
The founding fathers are rolling over as they say if they heard where this country has gone.
Getting rightly accused of possession of light drugs and ending up in prison is a much worse outcome, and it happens to many, many times more people. And unlike the celebrities that usually fall on the wrong side of public opinion, most people who are absurdly put in prison for petty crimes will never bounce back, since they don't have the resources (money, social circle) to do so.
Granted it may be better for society (may because nothing stops the law from being messed up) so the question is worse for who?
However, hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from vastly over-exaggerated punishment for minor crimes. Even more, the current political climate suggests that some of what these people did should not have been illegal in the first place (e.g. Marijuana use and distribution). Worse still, there is discretionary, racist enforcement of many of these laws, disproportionately affecting some communities and not others.
Individually, suffering from being falsely accused of a crime is much worse than being punished excessively for a crime you did commit.
But overall, people losing jobs and status is a much smaller problem to society todyay than excessive enforcement of minor crimes.
The problem is when you're innocent and still get punished anyway.
And again, in the real world, there are maybe hundreds of people suffering public outrage even though they are innocent, and there are tens of thousands of people who are serving extremely harsh sentences for minor crimes. The first is regrettable, the second is a major societal issue.
The US justice system is built on this foundation of letting the guilty go if it means avoiding a single innocent from being wrongfully convicted. Now you might say that social outrage isn't a big deal but considering the permanent nature of the internet and pervasiveness of social media, it's the same branding as a ex-con, if not worse since govt records at least have some controls on who can see them.
I agree that criminal sentencing and prison reform is needed, but that's a different discussion compared to how we treat the innocent.
I mean, sure, it might not be likely, but the point is, these police were willing to do unscrupulous things to catch the guy, so how do we know?
To me, being innocent yet treated as guilty is far worse, and in fact the US justice system holds that as a core principle.
Can we just agree that both are a perversion of our justice system?
Blackstone's formula, "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" was very influential do the people who designed our initial legal system. The reason it is important is that if innocent people believe they will be prosecuted unjustly, they have no incentive to stay innocent. This of course will turn us into a lawless society.
https://twistingtruth.wordpress.com/better-10-guilty-men-go-...
Also, the prevalence of this problem you are raising is extremely small in reality. The opposite is still much more likely - people who are guilty of various crimes who escape unpunished both by the justice system but also from public scrutiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution
It seems small unless you are one of the 4%, that's just direct affect to the individual and their family. The indirect effect to you and me is lawlessness.
"It is of more importance to the community that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world, that all of them cannot be punished....when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, 'it is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security.' And if such a sentiment as this were to take hold in the mind of the subject that would be the end of all security whatsoever"
- John Adams, Defending British soldiers charged with murder for their role in the Boston Massacre
For the record, I think it's a travesty that people get thrown in jail for petty crimes, or that petty crimes in general have become felonies, sold by politicians who want to appear "tough on crime." I don't think it serves either purpose to try to rank them.
You just threw that straw man straight down a slippery slope.
>apparently we're ready to burn everything it stood for to prevent people from getting high
This falls under "punching Nazis". Do you want some guy going around punching people? No, of course not. But if he's punching Nazis, then hey, let him do his thing, man. Same logic here, except it's "tracking meth dealers".
>I know I sound dramatic
I was thinking "moral grandstanding"
I'm okay with the police catching a meth dealer and putting him away. Good job. Keep up the good work.
There can't be any exceptions when it comes to holding law enforcement accountable.
"Indiana man charged with theft for removing drugs planted by police"
Is it typical for DAs to have lacking judgement? I know we hear about the bad ones but whenever any kind of insane police stunt appears in the media the DA is always on the police's side. I thought the judicial branch was supposed to be separate and neutral from the executive branch.
Courts are in judicial.
Why aren't DAs part of the Judical branch? It seems like they are a key part of our justice system.
Judges are independent from that. They’re supposed to act as a check against the excesses of the DA office.
I find that much more troubling than any technicalities around 'did he know it belonged to the cops'. Just how much obedience can a simple warrant coerce out of supposedly free citizens?
On the other hand, it might be risky to combine voice command with dorito's launch since they both use the same orifice for I/O.
That argument doesn't make sense if the suspect doesn't know that it belongs to police. Presumably, the suspect wouldn't have known in this scenario, and chances are a meth dealer has non-law-enforcement entities after them in addition to the police. It could've just as easily been a disgruntled "customer" or competing dealer who placed the device.
If I see a tracking device on my car, it's getting removed. For me, that'd mean contacting the police and asking them to look into it, but I'm sure plenty of people would simply remove it themselves. Why would that be a crime?
2) Police puts a mic on a guy who comes to your house, you find it, and destroy it. Is it ok or not?
3) Police puts a nano-mic (nano-gps) on you, you find it, and destroy it. Is it ok or not?
My answer to all of the above is that anything put on your property without you knowledge is up for grabs and destruction without further notice. Hour, car, or body is irrelevant.
Spoliasie, however, means that you can't take away an existing right, an existing usage by someone, without somehow proving through the process of the law that that person is not entitled to that right.
A good example of this is an access gate used by multiple people. If you change the lock or remote, and someone else uses the gate—rightfully or not—then you are at risk of transgressing this feature of the law. Interestingly enough, there has been a case where the gate was electronic and a case where the gate was manual and in the two different cases the judges actually ruled differently in the two cases. One case of changing access credentials without giving access to other users was "spoliasie" and one wasn't—obviously also complicating subsequent interpretation of the law.
In fact, since you cannot take the law into your own hands, a thief could theoretically after having stolen your car and if you take back the car somehow, sue you for spoliasie. The key here is that the police is supposed to go and apprehend the suspect and bring back your car.
Of course, practically, such a case would never go to court. But before you think the "theory" of this is crazy, consider this: How do you know who has a right to usage of which items and personal properties? In fact, maybe you lent the "thief" your car (and maybe the "thief" is even your friend) and suddenly you decided you didn't like this friend anymore and called the police and told them this person stole your car. Maybe it's a silly example, but the point is that it's tricky to just impede existing usage without proper consideration.
The principle is that an existing right should be respected until shown to be an unlawful usage and hence not a valid right. By the way, IANAL.
That said, if you find a GPS tracker on your car, which you take off and keep in your house full of drugs, it might be a bit late for you. I'm not suggesting the police used the GPS tracker to locate him, but who would keep a device like that, even if you were fairly* sure it was off? Park next to a city/police/firefighter/EMS vehicle and stick it over there. Or just chuck the thing on the side of the road and be done with it.
This is a fairly rural area, but I suspect in a larger city the police wouldn't even need a GPS tracker to maintain a rough idea of your comings and goings. They'll just scan the license plates ~20+ times a day as various police vehicles drive by, and use that data to build a map of your travels.
Be sure to include an invoice with a hefty charge for shipping and handling.
How do you know where to mail it?
I guess when this happens I have to drop it off at a police station. TIL
I wonder if that provides any kind of precedent for this case?
Or if it's magnet mounted, clip it on the catalytic converter for a couple of trips.