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No. We teach people that they have rights, and that these rights are secured by the principal documents that guarantee our civil liberties -- the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. An informed individual who invokes his constitutional protections is doing exactly what our nation's founders intended. They created these documents to...
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This is a tricky issue. The simple answer is that citizens who are minding their own business are not obligated to "show their papers" to police. In fact, there is no law requiring citizens to carry identification of any kind. Once you get passed the surface, however, things get much more complicated...
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Yes. Police can, will, and often do lie; especially if it helps them make arrests. The rules regarding entrapment usually tip in favor of law-enforcement, so police won't hesitate to trick you into incriminating yourself or others...
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Videotaping or photographing police in public places is usually legal, so long as you don't interfere with their activities. Nonetheless, doing so will often get you arrested...
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Simply put, the number of arrests an officer makes is a major factor used to determine his job performance. Police officers know that the easiest way to make arrests is to find people in possession of illegal drugs, so they want to search everyone they can find...
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The sad fact is that most people believe that they are under some kind of obligation to acquiesce when an officer contacts them and asks permission to search them or their belongings. The truth is exactly the opposite...
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As a general rule, searches conducted without a valid search warrant signed by a judge violate the Fourth Amendment, but like most rules of law, there are a number of explicit exceptions. In fact, most searches occur without warrants because police take advantage of these exceptions to the Fourth Amendment...
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Everyone should be trained to assert their constitutional rights under the 4th Amendment in order to avoid the hassle and humiliation of police misconduct and illegal searches. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report on citizen-police contacts...
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Traffic stops typically occur as a result of suspected moving violations committed by the driver of the vehicle. Passengers cannot be held responsible for the driver's conduct and are generally free to leave, unless police become suspicious of them during the course of the stop...
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No. If a police officer asks your permission to search, you are under no obligation to consent. The main reason why officers ask is because they don't have enough evidence to search without your consent. Don't expect an officer to tell you of your right not to consent. Any time you consent to a search request you are naively waiving your constitutional rights.
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Unfortunately, many people get fooled by some version of this commonly used police officer's line: "Everything will be easier if you just cooperate". That's true to some extent -- it will make things much easier for the police officer who's trying to arrest you! -- but when it comes to you consenting to searches and answering incriminating questions, it couldn't be further from the truth...
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No. The courts have made it clear that police officers do not have to tell people that they can refuse to consent to a warrantless search. Also, contrary to the belief perpetuated by popular police television shows, a person will not be read their rights subsequent to being taken into custody. A person only needs to be Mirandized when...
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Your rights do not disappear if the officer threatens to call in the dogs, so don't let this all-too-common tactic intimidate you into consenting to a search. You have several options...
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No. The Supreme Court has never ruled that police must present the warrant when performing a search. The purpose of the warrant is to...
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Be aware that private security personnel outnumber police officers in the United States by three to one. As a result, you may be more likely to be confronted by a security guard than by a police officer. You must also be aware of the following places where security personnel (governmental or otherwise) are permitted to search you without a warrant...
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Written by Chris Anders, ACLU
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Tuesday, 22 July 2008 19:29 |
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Lame-Duck Attorney General Wants New Declaration of War — and Takes Aim at the Constitution Maybe we should get Attorney General Michael Mukasey a couple of countdown calendars. If he had checked the calendar yesterday before heading out to give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, he would have realized that there were only 182 days left of the Bush Administration and roughly five weeks left in the congressional calendar (which translates to about 20 days on Capitol Hill). The problem for Mukasey is that no one is lining up behind someone who will be in forced retirement in a little more than six months. And certainly Congress isn’t going to drop everything and follow Mukasey’s crazily ambitious proposal for Congress to both declare a new war and gut habeas corpus protections. Mukasey offered a multi-part plan to violate the Constitution. He demanded that Congress declare a new “armed conflict” (which is Bush-speak for a new declaration of war) that would give a president worldwide power to declare anyone a terrorist and hold the person forever -- without ever charging anyone with a crime. Mukasey also asked Congress to enact the Bush Administration’s scheme for undermining the recent Supreme Court decision restoring constitutional habeas corpus protections to the detainees at Guantanamo. The main goal of the proposed new Bush rules restricting habeas rights is to try to block federal judges from ever learning the truth about the deliberate and widespread use of torture and abuse inflicted on detainees. Judges would not be allowed to see evidence of torture and abuse and would instead simply have to trust that a president is holding the right people as terrorists. That is far more power than any president should have. No president should be able to simply declare someone picked up anywhere in the world (including in the United States itself) to be a terrorist or associated with a terrorist, imprison the person forever without charge based on the determination of a president alone, and then hide from courts the evidence being used to hold the person - even if it was beaten out of a witness. The Supreme Court has already said no four times to past Bush Administration schemes to violate the law in holding detainees. Mukasey is looking for slap-down number five. The only good news in all of this is that not only is there almost no time left in this Congress to pass this sweeping violation of the Constitution, but the House and Senate Judiciary Committees are hostile committees for this scheme. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy politely, but firmly, told the Bush Administration yesterday that he is not pulling his committee into another Bush plan to violate the Constitution (and the Ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter, has spent years working with Chairman Leahy to try to restore the very habeas protections that Mukasey wants to gut). Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has been leading a year-long probe into whether high-level Bush Administration officials committed or authorized crimes of torture and abuse - and he has repeatedly demanded that Mukasey appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate any torture crimes ordered at the top levels of government. Conyers is certainly not going to have his committee be complicit in the latest Bush Administration plan to cover-up torture and abuse crimes. As the clock ticks down, there certainly is a lot of work for Congress to do. But the work is in repairing the damage done to the Constitution over the past seven years, not in causing more harm.
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