I would like to thank The Captain for calling my attention, via his blog today, about what kind of jurist this lady is.
Apparently the Sacramento Bee has an editorial today about her and the part that made my head spin was this one:
In 1999 a Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy stopped Conrad Richard McKay for riding his bicycle in the wrong direction on a residential street, a minor traffic infraction.
The deputy asked McKay for a driver’s license. McKay had none. Instead, he provided his name, address and date of birth. The officer arrested him for failing to have a driver’s license. Then he searched him, finding a baggie of what turned out to be methamphetamine in his left sock.
McKay was charged with illegal drug possession, convicted and sentenced to 32 months in prison. He appealed, arguing that the arrest and the search were unreasonable, a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights to be protected from unreasonable searches.
The officer searched him, he said, because he didn’t have a driver’s license, a document he was not required to carry to ride a bicycle. Six members of the California Supreme Court rejected that argument, ruling that McKay’s arrest was within the officer’s discretion and therefore constitutional.
Brown was the lone dissenter. What she wrote should give pause to all my friends who dismiss her as an arch conservative bent on rolling back constitutional rights. In the circumstances surrounding McKay’s arrest, the only black judge on the state’s high court saw an obvious and grave injustice that her fellow jurists did not.
“Mr. McKay was sentenced to a prison term for the trivial public offense of riding a bicycle the wrong way on a residential street,” Brown wrote. “Anecdotal evidence and empirical studies confirm that what most people suspect and what many people of color know from experience is a reality: There is an undeniable correlation between law enforcement stop-and-search practices and the racial characteristics of the driver. … The practice is so prevalent, it has a name: ‘Driving while Black.'”
Ok, it appears that she is the type that believes we police officers are racists and do nothing but harass those who are black, brown or whatever.
If the citizens want us as police officers to do nothing but respond to crime’s after they occur and write the report for them, be a traveling secretary basically, then so be it.
I for one enjoy looking for criminals before they commit the crime.
A perfect example is this bike incident.
Riding a bike the wrong way is a citeable offense. A bike must follow the same laws as vehicles and that means riding in the same direction as the cars on the road. If you do not have any identification then to issue him a cite the police will need to bring him into the station to be fingerprinted. You see, a citation is a arrest for a infraction. You are signing a ticket with your promise to appear in court instead of being hauled off to jail. Another example would be If someone refuses to sign the ticket then they will be taken to jail to face the judge within 48 hours.
So a police officer stops this guy for a infraction. This is now a traffic stop and a detention is perfectly legal no matter how “insignificant” the infraction is. He has no identification so he will be searched incident to arrest since he needs to be booked at the station for fingerprints. Once his identity comes back in a few hours he will get a cite and be on his way. They searched him incident to arrest and found the meth. All of that is perfectly legal. Some of the most “insignificant” stops are the one’s that turn up the biggest lawbreakers. I can’t tell you how many times I have stopped guys on bikes for little infractions and found guns on their person, 99% of the time the guy is a confirmed gangmember. So if it wasn’t for us enforcing the “insignificant” laws this gangster would be on the street with his gun still. This gets guns, drugs, and the like off the street. But this judge believes its because we are racists apparently.
Now granted the vehicle law I am citing is from the California Vehicle Code, not other states so I can’t speak for them.
Should we not be looking for criminals before they commit their crimes?
I’m glad he brought my attention to this case, and now hope that she is voted down. We do not need judges of this type on the federal bench.
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