Why the ‘wet tea leaves’ drug raid was outrageous

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/01/11/why-the-wet-tea-leaves-drug-raid-was-outrageous/

by eric_h • 11 years ago

65 40 11 years ago

eric_h• 11 years ago

this is a good follow up to previous discussions of this case

krisdol• 11 years ago

"Robert Harte, along with hundreds of other people, became a suspect when Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Jim Wingo saw Harte, his son and his daughter emerge in August 2011 from a hydroponic gardening store and wrote down the Hartes’ license plate number"

How is this legal? I cannot believe that this is a satisfactory level of probably cause needed for the police to start digging through people's trash and raiding their homes. It's incredible. On that note, I don't believe for a second that there even was marijuana in the trash before they searched for it.

abrodersen2• 11 years ago

This did not satisfy the probable cause. Police dug through the trash and conducted a field test, and the field test incorrectly tested positive for THC. The author criticized these field tests in the original piece as being wildly inaccurate and too easy to coerce into positive results.

jandrese2• 11 years ago

Those test kits are sometimes called probable cause kits, since they produce false positives so frequently. The conspiracy theory is that they're working exactly as desired and that more accurate kits would be counterproductive to their actual purpose.

zhemao• 11 years ago

There wasn't any marijuana. What they thought was marijuana were actually tea leaves.

vec• 11 years ago

It's completely legal for the police to make note of who enters a public storefront. It's also legal for the police to dig through your trash. Once it's placed on the curb to be picked up it's not your trash anymore, it's the city or county's trash, and they can do with it as they like.

Evidence of illegal contraband in trash is almost by definition probable cause for a search warrant, and judges tend to be okay with handing out a few false positive warrants. Assuming that the police are professional and the citizens are cooperative, the damage is usually relatively minor.

This seems to be less a case of rules failing and more a case of common sense breaking down. Wasting an officer's time someone's trash because you once saw them leave a gardening store isn't illegal, it's just a dumb waste of resources. And serving the resulting search warrant with a SWAT team is the kind of risk-averse cover-your-ass common sense violation that legal remedies tend to make worse instead of better.

guard-of-terra4• 11 years ago

I think you've got to be a reptiloid to defend "federal judges" and the police. Of all the people in the world they're the least vulnerable from huma perspective. We should probably check whether Orin Kerr has scales for skin.

Or exists.

kelvin02• 11 years ago

What exactly do you mean by 'reptiloid'?

guard-of-terra4• 11 years ago

A person that we can't even begin to understand.

Philip Dick had an empathy test to detect androids - they did not show compassion towards cute animals in trouble. We have a similar problem here, if a person chooses to side with federal judges and the police versus public, we have an alarming creature on our hands.

livingparadox• 11 years ago

Probably this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians

Disclaimer: I do not believe in these, but I think this is what was being referenced.

Gibbon1• 11 years ago

Probably that there is something seriously sociopathic going on with police, prosecutors, and Judges that handle drug cases.

kelvin02• 11 years ago

Nice, but going to a gun show and running guns across the border to Mexico does not seem to gather the same attention from law enforcement.

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-j...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24...

sp332• 11 years ago

I think Kerr's article was pretty good, but he does undersell the scope of the complaint. I thought the Hartes' were just trying to sue the officers personally for the bad policy. But their complaint was a lot bigger. From the judgement:

Plaintiffs filed this action against various defendants alleging violations of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for unlawful search, unreasonable execution of the search and excessive force in violation 2 of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. Plaintiffs also assert a claim for municipal liability under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978). Finally, plaintiffs assert numerous state law claims against defendants, including trespass, assault, false arrest, abuse of process, intentional infliction of emotional distress and false light/invasion of privacy. This matter is presently before the court on defendants’ motions for summary judgment on all of plaintiffs’ claims. As explained in more detail below, defendants’ motions are granted in their entirety.

codyb• 11 years ago

The article stated they spent 25,000 on legal fees I believe. Their lawyers probably did the smart thing and tackled the issue on every front possible to see what would stick.

As my dance instructor might have said... they seem to have taken a holistic approach (to their lawsuit | to dance) in an effort to achieve better results.

jdmichal• 11 years ago

That $25ooo actually went only to a court order so that they could receive a copy of the documentation about the case leading up to the search. The cost of the case to the Harte family was not mentioned, and I'm hoping it was done on contingency.

After spending $25,000 to get a judge to order the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department to turn over documents related to the search and investigation leading up to it...

hoodoof• 11 years ago

All drug raids are outrageous. The stupid war on drugs is tearing society apart, criminalising citizens, filling jails, ripping apart families, wasting police and court resources, throwing away tax on enforcement, missing out on tax revenue and funnelling billions to organised crime. All because people want to get high, which is (for most drugs) a personal choice health issue.

stoffie• 11 years ago

Exactly! Even if there was actually marijuana, how can you justify a no-knock raid for a victimless crime like smoking weed? I bet those police guys would shit themselves and call it a day if they were to raid an actual criminal organization, with automatic weapons and grenades

Vexs• 11 years ago

I think there's a difference between crimanal drug usage and illegal drug usage. I mean, if it's a warehouse with massive ammounts of drugs in-out, then yes, a raid makes sense. There are criminals doing illegal things in there. However, a drug raid with the same tools preformed on an apartment is insane, it's going to be a group of people doing illegal things.

I will confess an error in my thinking, in that it's really hard to legally define what I describe, if not impossible. But, as the bible says (paraphrased, and this is probably the first time I've ever quoted it..) "I would not destroy the city if there is a single innocent inside of it." If you can't make the law work, than maybe it shouldn't be there.

deciplex• 11 years ago

I mean, if it's a warehouse with massive ammounts of drugs in-out, then yes, a raid makes sense. There are criminals doing illegal things in there.

Let's rephrase this a bit:

I mean, if it's a warehouse with criminals doing illegal things in there, then yes, a raid makes sense.

Currently much of the drug trade is managed by criminals, and once you're breaking drug laws you might as well go ahead and break other laws e.g. human trafficking, extortion, etc. But that need not be the case, and it's not hard to imagine a warehouse with "massive ammounts [sic] of drugs in-out", where a raid would be totally unjustified and illegal.

flatline• 11 years ago

Drugs are capable of ripping apart families without any help from the drug war, thank you very much. Alcohol is certainly high on this list and there are a slew of prescription drugs up there with it, but we shouldn't pretend that there is not a public health crisis from rampant amphetamine, opioid, and alcohol misuse, whether obtained by illegal means or not. Of course, the issue is continuing to receive increased awareness as a public health crisis and not a criminal one as both usage and law enforcement encroach more heavily into middle and upper class, predominately white society. Law enforcement's role in the drug trade is never going to go away completely, nor is organized crime's. I do think, however, that we as a society are finally starting to see some movement in the direction of reducing their influences. The question in my mind - and I think in many people's minds who are for decriminalization - is, will we put anything in their place to help people and families in need?

api• 11 years ago

Addiction is a symptom of other underlying psychological or neurological problems, not a cause. Healthy people do not become addicts any more than healthy people run high fevers or vomit uncontrollably.

The underlying causes of addiction are medical, psychological, and social, and fixing those is the solution.

Criminal drug prohibition harms everyone. It harms non-addict drug users in an obvious way: by punishing them for a completely voluntary non-crime. It harms addicts by punishing them for having a psychological health problem that should be treated, and the follow-on effects of criminal prosecution further damage their lives (e.g. having a felony) which in turn causes them to be more likely to suffer from further addiction. Finally, it harms society by creating a massive off-the-books profit center for criminals that in turn increases crime and promotes corruption. (I call it the "federal subsidy for organized crime.") It also wastes police resources that could otherwise be available for pursuing more pressing problems.

If drugs are legal, why would organized crime continue to be involved?

jobu• 11 years ago

It is ridiculous, as is a heavily armed tactical squad being called on a quiet suburban family of four. Unfortunately it's the sort of bullshit that the public seems to allow when it's framed as a "War".

One possible way to flip the debate might be to re-frame it as police "War on the Constitution". I'm not sure if it will work, or if there's better wording, but the author tries to do it in the article:

"The Fourth Amendment was a response to the invasive, sometimes violent searches of colonists’ homes by British soldiers armed with general warrants to look for untaxed goods."

bradleyjg• 11 years ago

An excellent reply and elaboration to the original article. Although I had my own qualms about Kerr's article (I commented here on HN when it was posted) having read his blog posts for ten years now I have a lot of respect for his erudition and even handedness. I look forward to his surreply which he promises to start working on in the comments section to the linked article.

rqebmm• 11 years ago

Man, I do love those few brief moments when the internet holds an actual debate. Too bad these poor people had to go through all the trouble for it.

jimrandomh• 11 years ago

This case centered around a field test, using a test kit which was highly prone to false positives and conducted by someone who wasn't trained how to use it. This was used to get a search warrant, which was executed by a SWAT team. A judge ruled that the police were not liable for relying on the faulty test.

However, I think it's important to consider this in context. There have been multiple recent scandals in which US law enforcement was found to rely on supposedly-scientific evidence which was, in fact, nothing more or less than fraud upon the courts. (For example https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo... and http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crimelab-massachusetts...). These scandals would have been easily prevented by the ordinary scientific practice of using control samples, so the fact that they weren't prevented indicates systematic bad practices.

And there are widely-known deceptive practices still in use. For example, police bring "drug-sniffing" dogs with them, which bark whenever an officer cues them to, and courts accept this as though it were probable cause for a search.

anon4• 11 years ago

They want to make 4/20 an annual drug raid event.

So just make it like Halloween. Have the kids dress in police uniforms and go door to door with the actual officers searching every single house in the county. Have the adults give out marijuana-shaped candy. Say "pot or arrest" as you knock on the house. Have a competition at the end and declare the kid with the weightiest bag of "pot" the winner and give him/her a medal. Go all the way. It's good publicity you're after, not actual police work, after all.

hamiltonkibbe• 11 years ago

"As the law sees it, an officer can’t be recklessly indifferent to truth if he was never trained about, told about, or took the time to learn the truth in the first place."

It's unfortunate that police are the only ones allowed to use the "ignorantia juris" defense.

Why the ‘wet tea leaves’ drug raid was outrageous

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