To explain why probable cause often isn’t, I could just say “Cops Lie,” and be done with it, but then you wouldn’t read it, would you?

Oh, fuck. I just lost most of you. Come back! I’ll give you reasons for saying this! Real probable cause to believe me!

For those still with me, the other day, Radley Balko wrote a post over at the Washington Post titled, “Federal judge: Drinking tea, shopping at a gardening store is probable cause for a SWAT raid on your home.” Alleged constitutional scholar Orin Kerr, also writing at the Washington Post, took issue with it in his “No, a federal judge did not rule that drinking tea and shopping at a gardening store amounts to probable cause.” And, finally (for purposes of this post), Scott Greenfield (there! again!) clarified the real problem by pointing out that while Kerr was technically right in a pedantic sort of way,

That the judge who signed off on the warrant accepted the results of the test as being sufficient to show probable cause, that the test produced sufficient positive results, even if totally false, to support the issuance of the warrant, made Lungstrum’s ruling perfectly legally reasonable. The Fourth Amendment says get a warrant, and they did. It requires probable cause, and they had it based on the field tests. The police enjoy qualified immunity unless they knew their application to contain material omissions about the test, and they shrug and say, “science.”

This is the state of our legal system – as I noted yesterday, I will never again refer to it as a justice system, with, or without, scare quotes, and no sane person who cares about words should ever refer to it thusly – where probable cause is what a cop says probable cause is, and no prosecutor in a black robe is ever going to second-guess him.

As another law group has noted,

“Probable cause” is a legal phrase. It refers to a “reasonable” belief that criminal activity is taking (or has taken) place. So before a judge issues a search warrant, he/she must have a reasonable belief that the person /property specifically described in the warrant application (otherwise known as an “affidavit”) will be found in the searched location.

How does a prosecutor in a black robe come to this “reasonable belief”? A cop tells him it’s reasonable.

But imagine a cop requesting a warrant to search for evidence of an assault (voodoo dolls with pins in them) based on his training (having watched a horror flick about voodoo), and experience (he had seen people stick pins in effigies of him before, and felt pain), going to the judge and saying,

I have seen 14 of the aforementioned horror flicks, read about voodoo deaths in Africa and Haiti, and I have seen voodoo used many times without it once failing to result in another person being subjected to physical pain, including writhing, screaming, and even bleeding. Fortunately, I have never seen anyone die from it yet. [1]Of course, he would have to live with admitting the fact that he was not a Christian: “Can voodoo harm Christians? Should we fear it? No, we are protected by the blood of Christ and no voodoo curse, voodoo doll, can harm the children of God.”

Would a prosecutor in a black robe approve a warrant?

Probably not, because that was just too obvious an example. You may laugh. And a cop may be hurt by my comparison of his sciencey-type activities, and sciencey-type understanding, to that example, but it’s still something of a straw man. A doll of sorts.

And, yet, it’s not really that far off. Probable cause these days is what a cop says it is. In my area of the world, I get a lot of what defense attorneys call “medical marijuana cases,” and prosecutors – enrobed, or not – call drug-manufacturing, or drug-dealing, cases. Because the voters of the State of California voted to decriminalize marijuana use for people who obtained recommendations from medical doctors for the use of marijuana, and because doctors give out (really bad) legal advice along with the recommendations, and because the cops don’t want to try to go after doctors who recommend marijuana to anyone with $150 bucks (or whatever the current going rate is), because they have the money to fight back, we have a lot of folks growing marijuana in the highly-conservative right-wing center of California (the San Joaquin Valley) where it is most definitely not wanted by those in power. And so a cop will talk to a judge about a house he’s heard about with a bunch of marijuana plants, and say, “Based on my training, and experience, no one grows this many plants unless they are actually marijuana dealers hiding behind the medical marijuana laws stupidly passed by the electorate.”

Boom! There’s your probable cause. The law be damned. [2]People with recommendations plant “too much” marijuana for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to sell it, but tell that to a marijuana-hater. In addition, it’s actually not against the law in all circumstances in California to sell marijuana. But that’s another blog post.

And what about the cop who pulls someone over, and wants to search the car without a warrant. Well, the laws relating to warrantless searches are a little more complicated, but essentially boil down to, “The cop thought it was necessary, and could state something that sounded like it was reasonable.” This includes, for example, “As I approached the car, I smelled marijuana emanating from inside the vehicle.” Or, something which is not at all uncommon, “I smelled alcohol on his breath.” Without video proving (Update 9/26/2016: link broken) the lie, it’s not just probable cause, it usually results in a conviction.

Cops know this, and, as incident after incident shows, they get away with it. Too often, the same cop gets away with lying more than once. [3]In one notable case, a jury acquitted an officer of perjuring herself in a DUI case, stating, “in the passage of time between the arrest and trial in the DUI case, Hoffman could have confused details with other cases.” Yet, if this is true, it raises another, even more troubling problem about arrests and convictions based on officer testimony.

How do they get away with lying? Why do juries acquit them? Simple: the cop who is accused of lying says that he didn’t lie. He just “forgot.” Maybe he was having personal issues, and used a template for accusing and arresting someone without changing the facts (which, incidentally, is why so many police reports contain nearly the exact same verbiage as other police reports). Yeah, that’s the ticket! I confused this case with another case! Sorry that dude almost went to prison for it, but it was an honest mistake, which I almost never make. Except this one time.

There used to be a rule – occasionally still honored – called corpus delecti, which was developed over 300 years ago to prevent convictions for crimes that never happened after someone who was mentally-ill, or coerced, had confessed to the (non-existent) crime. This rule, like so many others that make it hard to obtain convictions due to the lack of evidence, has fallen into some disrepute over the last few decades. But it really is the best way to prevent people going to prison just because someone said so. In this normal corpus delicti situation, of course, the person who said so is the person accused of the crime; the person making the confession.

But what would happen if, instead of just believing everything an officer said to him, or her, a judge required a little bit more? Or if prosecutors who were about to file charges against an accused person said, “I want something more than just the officer said such-and-such a thing happened”? Or when an officer testilied about something in court, the jurors thought, “Hmm…I could be that accused person sitting there. Is there anything other than the officer’s say-so that ‘proves’ the accused committed a crime?”

I don’t know, but I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot fewer innocent people would have their lives ruined. Fewer people would fill our jails. And saying there was probable cause to believe someone committed a crime might actually start to mean something again.

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 Of course, he would have to live with admitting the fact that he was not a Christian: “Can voodoo harm Christians? Should we fear it? No, we are protected by the blood of Christ and no voodoo curse, voodoo doll, can harm the children of God.”
2 People with recommendations plant “too much” marijuana for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to sell it, but tell that to a marijuana-hater. In addition, it’s actually not against the law in all circumstances in California to sell marijuana. But that’s another blog post.
3 In one notable case, a jury acquitted an officer of perjuring herself in a DUI case, stating, “in the passage of time between the arrest and trial in the DUI case, Hoffman could have confused details with other cases.” Yet, if this is true, it raises another, even more troubling problem about arrests and convictions based on officer testimony.

9 comments

  1. So much for spell check and my own eyes to see misspelled words. In my statement on the third line it says, eternal continence. What it is suppose to say is “Eternal Continuance”. I could not let this go unedited some way.

    Thank you.

  2. I could not help a grin when reading: “I smelled alcohol on his breath.” Without video proving the lie, ”
    I also create some video and watch even more, yet still fail to be able to figure out how a video would prove that the cop or anyone could ‘smell’ anything, alcohol or burning marijuana or crushed green marijuana.
    The rest of the article was supurb. Thanks!

  3. “doctors who recommend marijuana to anyone with $150 bucks (or whatever the current going rate is)”

    It’s down to $75 if you bring in the office’s ad in the free paper. 😉

    Great summary of the state of things when we take LEO’s word as gospel. I’m constantly flabbergasted by the public’s inability to comprehend that cops lie all the time. EVERYBODY lies, it’s a special kind of foolishness to assume that cops aren’t part of EVERYBODY.
    You’re 2/2 on good posts for 2016, keep up the good work!

    1. Thanks for the compliment, and the information. Folks take a look at me, and because I defend others accused of using medical marijuana frequently assume I use it. I don’t. Consequently, while I know medical marijuana laws, I’m not up on all the other things that go along with it, like how much it costs to get a recommendation right now. 😉

      Incidentally, I should probably write another blog post about the state of the law, but let me add here that those recommendations are virtually worthless in protecting anyone against arrest. If you want protection against arrest you 1) need to make sure you understand the laws relating to medical marijuana, 2) follow those laws, and 3) you need to get your Medical Marijuana Card (I’m not talking about your recommendation, but the actual MMC) from a county health department. I’m looking forward to the day someone comes to me for defense, and has one of those cards, as opposed to just having a recommendation.

  4. I am disgusted and in great fear of how police in my case have been “allowed” to continuously change/amend the police report over and over again fixing one lie into another lie. My case has been on an eternal continence going on 4 years now. They came to my home with a warrant for a tenant who was not home. In fact they know he wasn’t home as I live in a cul-de-sac and he rode on his scooter right by them. Police claim they have probable cause. That there was a control buy with marked money. But they can’t find the marked money. And the control buy? It took place some where else and did not involve me or my guests. I am being charged with drug sales. I have never sold drugs in my life. And the homeowner is charged with exporting and importing firearms as they knew coming in that there was two vaults containing the owners beautiful gun collection worth over $400,000 that belongs to his 88 year old father. The newest charge added is he was personally armed with a firearm which is so absurd. This is a 58 year old man who doesn’t even have a traffic ticket. I am a single mother that works her ass off just to make ends meet. Our lives have been destroyed over a bad snitch, bad police and a horrible justice system.

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