Standing Up to the Police State
The state of Taxachusetts has a law on their books called the "Massachusetts Protective Custody Law" which allows the police to detain a drunken person for 12 hrs until they sober up. This law is well and good when the drunk is on public property, but the police detained a drunken man that was on private property violating his 14th Amendment Rights!!
This man is correct; his Constitutional Rights had been violated!! When the Gov’t allows, through enacted laws, law enforcement agencies to violate our Constitutional Rights, then we have moved away from Liberty and Freedom towards a Totalitarian Police State. The police are not to carry all the blame; the blame lays on the Taxachusetts Gov’t and the Liberal Court System. When you have a Judicial System and the Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution any way they want and not following what was actually written, then you can expect gross violations such as this. This country is being assaulted by Islamofascists Terrorists from outside our borders and from Liberals and Activists Judges from within our borders, and if we don’t combat both, then our nation is doomed. I am glad this man is suing the Waltham, Mass. Police Dept., because someone needs to wake up people of Taxachusetts that they are having their Constitutional Rights overruled by their state Gov’t.
Mr Minority
A man arrested at a New Year's Eve party claims the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to be drunk in a private home, and is now suing the police who arrested him.
Eric Laverriere, 25, of Portland, Maine, filed his suit against police in Waltham, Mass., after they broke up the celebration and took him into protective custody.
Laverriere was incarcerated for nine hours until he sobered up after a night of beer drinking.
''One thing people should be able to do is drink in their own house," Laverriere told the Boston Globe. ''That's the beauty of the land of the free."
The computer-systems specialist claims the Massachusetts Protective Custody Law is designed to deal with public drunkenness and officers wrongly applied it when they took him from a private residence.
The law, which took effect in 1971, replaced a previous rule dating back to Colonial times that made public drunkenness a crime worthy of arrest, conviction and a criminal record. While it does not specifically mention public or private places, it allows police to take inebriated people to their homes, a treatment facility or a police station, where they can be held for up to 12 hours.
The current law notes people have to be drunk and deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, but they are not charged with any criminal offense.
Laverriere says in his federal lawsuit he had ''a constitutional right to be drunk in private, a privacy and liberty right founded in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
The clause states: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
''Heaven forbid if we've reached the point where police can take you out of your home because you're drunk and not hurting anybody," Harvey Schwartz, a Boston civil-rights lawyer who filed the suit on behalf of Laverriere told the Globe.
This man is correct; his Constitutional Rights had been violated!! When the Gov’t allows, through enacted laws, law enforcement agencies to violate our Constitutional Rights, then we have moved away from Liberty and Freedom towards a Totalitarian Police State. The police are not to carry all the blame; the blame lays on the Taxachusetts Gov’t and the Liberal Court System. When you have a Judicial System and the Supreme Court interpreting the Constitution any way they want and not following what was actually written, then you can expect gross violations such as this. This country is being assaulted by Islamofascists Terrorists from outside our borders and from Liberals and Activists Judges from within our borders, and if we don’t combat both, then our nation is doomed. I am glad this man is suing the Waltham, Mass. Police Dept., because someone needs to wake up people of Taxachusetts that they are having their Constitutional Rights overruled by their state Gov’t.
Mr Minority
