Our justice system [is] anything but.” “You are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.”
These would be fiery words coming from a political organizer; they are scary coming from a Supreme Court justice. But that is who they do come from. And perhaps many of us need to be scared — because many of us already are. In the last section of her June 20 dissent in a search-and-seizure case, Utah v. Strieff, Justice Sonia Sotomayor declares she is “writing only for myself, and drawing on my professional experiences.” Then she reviews how vast the court has allowed the powers of a police officer to grow — and why that’s a problem.
She runs through Supreme Court decisions that have granted police the power to rely on pretexts to defend stopping people, and even to openly use people’s ethnicity, clothing and residence in defending decisions to stop them. “The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal,” Justice Sotomayor points out; stops may include frisking. She reminds us what that actually entails: standing helpless in public while an officer gropes your entire body, even your most private areas.
And if the officer decides to arrest you, as Justice Sotomayor says he has the power to do even if your offense is only speeding or jaywalking? “At the jail, he can fingerprint you, swab DNA from the inside of your mouth, and force you to ‘shower with a delousing agent’ while you ‘lift [your] tongue, hold out [your] arms, turn around, and lift [your] genitals.’ ... Even if you are innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest record and experience the ‘civil death’ of discrimination by employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check.”
What Justice Sotomayor is doing here is calling our attention to what it is like to live through a search or seizure of your body, and to the effects it can have on the rest of an individual’s life — or on a community...
http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion...-justice-on-police-power/stories/201607310004
These would be fiery words coming from a political organizer; they are scary coming from a Supreme Court justice. But that is who they do come from. And perhaps many of us need to be scared — because many of us already are. In the last section of her June 20 dissent in a search-and-seizure case, Utah v. Strieff, Justice Sonia Sotomayor declares she is “writing only for myself, and drawing on my professional experiences.” Then she reviews how vast the court has allowed the powers of a police officer to grow — and why that’s a problem.
She runs through Supreme Court decisions that have granted police the power to rely on pretexts to defend stopping people, and even to openly use people’s ethnicity, clothing and residence in defending decisions to stop them. “The indignity of the stop is not limited to an officer telling you that you look like a criminal,” Justice Sotomayor points out; stops may include frisking. She reminds us what that actually entails: standing helpless in public while an officer gropes your entire body, even your most private areas.
And if the officer decides to arrest you, as Justice Sotomayor says he has the power to do even if your offense is only speeding or jaywalking? “At the jail, he can fingerprint you, swab DNA from the inside of your mouth, and force you to ‘shower with a delousing agent’ while you ‘lift [your] tongue, hold out [your] arms, turn around, and lift [your] genitals.’ ... Even if you are innocent, you will now join the 65 million Americans with an arrest record and experience the ‘civil death’ of discrimination by employers, landlords, and whoever else conducts a background check.”
What Justice Sotomayor is doing here is calling our attention to what it is like to live through a search or seizure of your body, and to the effects it can have on the rest of an individual’s life — or on a community...
http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion...-justice-on-police-power/stories/201607310004
