ACLU Couldn’t Find Any Plaintiffs Over Wakarusa Searches
I found this one pretty humerous. Via AP
Civil libertarians wanted to make a case over police searching vehicles as they left Interstate 70 near a weekend music festival but couldn’t find anyone upset enough to complain.
“We couldn’t find a plaintiff,” said Phil Minkin, Douglas County president of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Without one, we don’t going looking for a plaintiff.”
The Wakarusa Music Festival drew thousands to the Lawrence area starting Thursday, with the huge crowds creating traffic gridlock that had fans taking as long as four hours to enter Clinton Lake Park.
Police stopped cars heading for the event, searching some, and the ACLU wanted to get an injunction against the practice, which it said may have been unconstitutional. Some local attorneys had contacted the ACLU, saying clients believed the searches were based on the way people looked rather than evidence of illegal substances or wrongdoing, said Brett Shirk, director of the ACLU of Kansas and Western Missouri.
“I had concerns they have been stopping people based on what they looked like,” said Shirk. “There very well may have been Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure issues.”
Lt. John Eickhorn of the Kansas Highway Patrol said troopers stopped every car using the toll lane exiting Interstate 70 at Kansas 10 both Thursday and Friday, regardless of how the vehicle or the driver looked.
“We didn’t discriminate about how people looked,” he said.
Some cars, he said, received more thorough checks than others but only when there was evidence of wrongdoing, such as the smell of marijuana, the driver looking more nervous than expected on a typical traffic stop or the car looking trashed, as if someone had lived in it for days at a time.
“Typically drug dealers don’t stop,” he said. “That’s a good indication that criminal activity is afoot.”
Shirk said he called the ACLU’s legal panel about possible action, including a state or federal court injunction that would have temporarily stopped the searches, he said. But the legal board said it needed a formal complaint to proceed, and neither Shirk nor officials at the Douglas County ACLU office had received one.
Shirk said legal action against the patrol or other law enforcement units remained a possibility if local attorneys or their clients come forward with complaints.
“If there was police misconduct, if that would happen, the ACLU may very well investigate,” Shirk said. “But the ball is in the court of local attorneys at this point.”
Heh! You can’t have much of a 4th amendment case when you can’t find anyone that thinks their 4th amendment rights were violated.
The story goes on to tell a humerous story about how one hippy got busted for marijuana possession. One of his buddies sold LSD to an undercover agent which lead to the search. It really will give you a chuckle, make sure to read it all.
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Posted by Jay on June 14, 2006 3:40 pm
» Filed Under ACLU, Humor, News
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3 Responses to “ACLU Couldn’t Find Any Plaintiffs Over Wakarusa Searches”
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Syndicate Me
“Heh! You can’t have much of a 4th amendment case when you can’t find anyone that thinks their 4th amendment rights were violated.”
Specially if you’re not looking.
Exactly, surely those cops did something that violated the Constitution. After all, every cop is a criminal, right?
“We couldn’t find a plaintiff. We don’t go looking for one”
Aren’t those two statements inconsistent?