The bad news: the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday threw out evidence that helped convict a gang member and a drug dealer. The good news: the Court ruled that police must get a search warrant to riffle through your cell phone.…
Posts tagged as “Fourth Amendment”
Senate Bill 46 would make animal cruelty a felony in South Dakota. We are the only state that has not done so. Decent South Dakotans recognize there's no reason to protect sadistic animal abusers from stiffer legal punishment. The ag…
Some South Dakota conservatives think we should test welfare recipients for drug use. A U.S. District Court judge ruled this week that Florida's welfare drug tests are unconstitutional: Enforcement of the law was temporarily halted in October 2011 after the…
Pat Powers publishes without comment or critique Rep. Kristi Noem's mealy-mouthed excuse for voting against the Amash-Conyers Amendment to curtail the National Security Agency's blanket surveillance of American citizens' communications. My friend Leo Kallis posts this much more concise summary…
Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan proposed an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would have defunded the National Security Agency program that collects our telephone call data. The Amash-Conyers amendment would have limited the NSA's phone-data collection under Section…
Mr. Kallis quotes Justice Scalia's excellent dissent from the privacy-trashing majority in Maryland v. King: Today's judgment will, to be sure, have the beneficial effect of solving more crimes; then again, so would the taking of DNA samples from anyone…
Now that we've all paid our taxes, we can get back to challenging the government on its violations of the Fourth Amendment. According to internal documents obtained by our friends at the American Civil Liberties Union, the Internal Revenue Service…