[flagged]
>In court filings, attorneys representing the state and Bradley have argued Holland's lawsuit should be dismissed as the trooper has "sovereign immunity" as a member of law enforcement, and that it was a "lawful" traffic stop.
The concept is right but sovereign immunity is about states and between states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...
That bit of justification seems absolutely bananas to me.
Taxi drivers won't steal your wallet, but they may kill you if you're a tswana and get into (say) a zulu taxi, although more usually they're killing other taxi drivers rather than passengers, and setting fire to trains to cut out the competition.
That is horrible anti-american behavior. It's the definition of corruption; and goes against the fundamental principles of the founding of the US.
And, to put it quite bluntly: Cops walking around demanding tips from affluent Americans will quickly get shut down because no one will stand for it.
It is the way of things. You're not really paying a bribe but more in the line of baksheesh, a small fee to expedite processing or make things run more smoothly. It usually amounts to the equivalent of a few dollars so no big deal.
Ive had police in Mexico just walk up and steal $100+ from my wallet. It was refreshing as in the US they instead police have just dragged me to jail on fabricated allegations. When Mexican police can get all they want by just stealing my money and not my time, it feels like living in a more free country, liberating comparatively.
------- re: below (throttled) ----------
They got a warrant afterwards which they somehow applied retroactively. I found out police had systematically been doing this to people and in fact already sued for this. The hospital had also already been put on notice after ACLU sued in a different state.
I contacted several lawyers and the ACLU (since they already had posted notice for this same thing). ACLU was radio silence for the entire couple years of the statue of limitations, so no help there. The best shot I had was contacting a couple lawyers who specifically sued against the same people who had done it before. They lost the last time due to the courts considering the hospital as effectively deputized as federal officers while it happened. The courts/state got around the lawsuit by claiming it is medical care whenever the warrant issue come up, then claim it is a LEO search whenever the medical aspects of the search were challenged, creating a catch 22.
All lawyers involved told me they'd given up such cases (impossible to win). The prior, almost identical but even worse case (woman finger-raped by doctors without a warrant) was lost due to the catch-22 of it being a "search" whenever the medical aspects were challenged and being "medical care" whenever the search aspects were challenged. This meant it was effectively impossible to challenge it from any available angle.
As for the bill, I never paid it. Still chased by debt collectors for it though.
Basically if federal officers involved you are fucked. Lon Horiuchi straight up sniped an innocent woman holding a baby in her arms, over a husband's failure to appear in court, and even he couldn't be held accountable.
Should this ever happen again, I would suggest the Institute for Justice (www.ij.org). They take on cases that do not make economical sense if it helps set precedent to help other people in the future (example: spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight a one thousand dollar civil asset forfeiture case). They have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court several times, and they rely on donations.
They (the cops) can't force a hospital to do anything without a warrant. Sue the hospital & police; if you can't afford a lawyer, take whoever billed you to small claims to get your money back.
The story is that a cop dragged a suspect into the hospital and demanded that a nurse give the patient a blood test, which is extremely illegal. The cop arrested her, but she was 100% in the right and the judge released her the next day.
I also complained to the board the nurse cursed at me and called me a criminal (because I refused the 'care' that they provided anyway), but I suppose that's covered by 1A and you can verbally abuse an innocent patient all you like without any risk to your license. I don't disagree with that part of their conclusion, being an asshole isn't illegal, but it's worth noting that nursing license apparently doesn't cover verbal forms of misconduct.
So realistically although there are a few brave nurses, I would expect instead at least in my state (AZ) the nursing board will run cover for them while they perform the illegal search and then they won't have to worry about the police arresting them for non-compliance either. When I checked that same nurses license, she also had been in trouble for stealing and child neglect, that also apparently is no problem in Arizona...
If it's taken to collections, just take the hospital to small claims. You'll win. (And the hospital needs to collect from the police department that demanded the procedure.)
But none of that speaks to this other situation where a different nurse joined in the sadism of the cops (or at the very least was cowed into submission worrying about personal consequences), and then after a person was harmed, all of the responsible institutions have thrown up their hands and said "yup, looks good!". There's no guarantee that the laws as written support justice, and quite often it turns out that they do not. But you seem to be clinging to that idea.
As I mentioned, the same hospital system had been sued before for this same thing though and the hospital/officers won, even without a warrant. As long as you're innocent you can't do much about it since the civil suites lose and you won't be in criminal court where you can probably squash the evidence.