" There ' s No Fear of Being Caught "

The front page of Monday ’sNew York Timesfeatured a story about a dirty little police practice colloquially known as “testilying.” Testilying is the name police officers coined to describe lying in official statements, such as sworn affidavits, about particular facts to make a criminal case appear stronger. It happens most often in officer assertions of probable cause to conduct a search of a person or their p roperty without a warrant. For example, an officer could say that contraband was “in plain sight” after he pulled a driver over, giving him the probable cause to suspect a criminal act and thus bypass the warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment.The most generous rationalization for this behavior is something like, “The suspect was guilty of a crime, I knew he was guilty but I couldn’t legally prove it, so I found a way around the rules and discovered the criminal evidence I needed to make an arrest.” Put simply, the ends (an arrest for criminal behavior) justifies the means (an unconstitutional search). But, very often, what the officers “know” is wrong and they violate the rights of perfectly innocent people. Even when they are right, illegal searches and the lies to cover them up corrupt the law in order to enforce it. That’s not how policing is supposed to work. Police are supposed to pro tect our rights, not violate them to make an arrest.And as theTimes story explains, the lie is not only used against people who are breaking the law:There ...

Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 20, 2018 Category: American Health Authors: Jonathan Blanks Source Type: blogs