Free Republic

NOVI (AP) - A Christmastime turf battle is being waged in suburban Detroit. A Novi family has been ordered to remove a seven-piece nativity scene from the front yard of their home, or face possible fines of $25 to $100 per week. The order given to Joe and Betty Samona didn't come from the government. It came from their subdivision association, which said they should have sought permission from the board of directors to place the figures outside their home. Michigan courts have said homeowners who join neighborhood or condominium associations must follow the rules set by the group. Dean...

On December 19th, a sheriff’s deputy was shot and killed during an attempt to serve a “no knock” warrant near Sommerville, Texas. Just before 6:00 A.M. an 8 member SWAT team broke through the door of Henry Goedrich Magee to serve a warrant which would permit the team to search the mobile home in which Magee and his pregnant girlfriend were living. Reacting to the pre-dawn, forced entry Magee grabbed a rifle propped against a bedroom door frame and fired at the unidentified intruders, killing 31 year old sheriff’s deputy Adam Sowders. No one else was injured and Magee was...

“Almost Orwellian” -- that’s the description a federal judge gave earlier this week to the massive spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on virtually all 380 million cellphones in the United States. In the first meaningful and jurisdictionally grounded judicial review of the NSA cellphone spying program, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee sitting in Washington, D.C., ruled that the scheme of asking a secret judge on a secret court for a general warrant to spy on all American cellphone users without providing evidence of probable cause of criminal behavior against any of them...

Received a note on our door from the county tax assessors office "informing us that they required access to our home. Never heard of this before. Is that legal? Not sure if I want a government tax agent snooping around my home. Not in the current climate here in WI. Any serious advice?

Newspaper accuses feds of unlawful search and seizure The Washington Times and one of its former journalists have sued the Department of Homeland Security, accusing federal agents of illegally seizing the newspaper’s reporting materials during the execution of a search warrant in an unrelated case. In a motion filed in federal court in Greenbelt, Md., The Times and reporter Audrey Hudson asked a judge to force the federal agency to return all reporting files and documents it seized from Ms. Hudson’s home office during a raid in early August. • Click here to view a PDF file of the motion...

Selectman Barry Greenfield would like to give police the authority to inspect gun safety at people's homes. The problem, he said, is that police do not have the authority, granted by a local ordinance, to enforce the law and inspect the safeguarding of guns at the homes of the 600 registered gun owners in town.

Rogue police officers and sheriff’s deputies in a Southern New Mexico county are guilty of the sort of malevolent abuse of authority which has come to typify the lust for power exhibited by far too many police officials and departments across the nation. Officers Bobby Orosco, Robert Chavez and Officer Hernandez subjected law abiding resident David Eckert to 14 hours of accusation and physical abuse as the “suspect” was forced to undergo X-Rays, 2 anal cavity searches, 3 enemas and a colonoscopy, all performed at the Gila Regional Medical Center without Eckert’s consent. The officers claim of probable cause for...

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Retired Marine colonel and Iran-Contra figure Oliver North said in Huntsville Friday that that he is "deeply concerned" about the data being collected on American citizens by American intelligence agencies. "I think the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution has been trod on," North told a press conference before addressing a crowd of 350 at a young Republicans' dinner at the Davidson Center for Space Technology. North added that "the Republicans in Congress are complicit by not insisting on a select committee to investigate not just NSA, but Benghazi, the IRS, the spying on Americans, enemies' lists being...

Maryland state police and federal agents used a search warrant in an unrelated criminal investigation to seize the private reporting files of an award-winning former investigative journalist for The Washington Times who had exposed problems in the Homeland Security Department’s Federal Air Marshal Service. Reporter Audrey Hudson said the investigators, who included an agent for Homeland’s Coast Guard service, took her private notes and government documents that she had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act during a predawn raid of her family home on Aug. 6. The documents, some which chronicled her sources and her work at the Times...

A veteran Washington D.C. investigative journalist says the Department of Homeland Security confiscated a stack of her confidential files during a raid of her home in August — leading her to fear that a number of her sources inside the federal government have now been exposed. In an interview with The Daily Caller, journalist Audrey Hudson revealed that the Department of Homeland Security and Maryland State Police were involved in a predawn raid of her Shady Side, Md. home on Aug. 6. Hudson is a former Washington Times reporter and current freelance reporter. A search warrant obtained by TheDC indicates...

When someone comes to your door, you can let them in — or not. But keeping out a representative from the Michigan Tax Commission could be costly. At least that's what some residents in Davison Township are finding. When the local tax assessor showed up at homeowner John McLaughlin's house in the Genesee County community he said he wasn't going to let them in. So what happened after he declined the appointment: "My taxes went up," he said. The executive director of the Michigan Tax Commission said local tax assessors are supposed to be getting inside all homes to see...

San Diego Judge Gary Kreep, a conservative legal activist who led a failed fight to challenge President Obama’s citizenship, has been exiled to traffic court after several Superior Court rulings favoring defendants’ constitutional rights. Kreep, 63, was reassigned on Sept. 9 from the downtown San Diego courthouse to a Kearny Mesa facility that handles traffic offenses and small claims. The move came after prosecutors from the City Attorney’s Office began to boycott his courtroom over his legal approach. For instance, Kreep often declined to take away a defendant’s 4th Amendment rights against search and seizure — something prosecutors can legally...

The fine print of Obamacare says “The 4th Amendment be damned, we’re coming into your house when we feel like it.” There is no other way to interpret what the allowable government raids of otherwise law abiding American homes will be. Under the provisions of the healthcare law given to Barack Obama by the Democrats and Chief Justice John Roberts, government thugs will have the right to kick in doors and search homes in a number of circumstances. These are by no means situations that would cause the average low information voter to shrug and acknowledge that “Maybe that’s not...

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals has reversed the conviction of a man who was charged with possession of a handgun. According to the Legal Times, an officer approached Ernest Ramsey because he suspected that he was urinating in an alley. Somehow, the officer ended up running his name through the police database and searching him.The court ruled that since the officer didn't have cause to look Ramsey up, the search was unlawful and a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.Judge Phyllis Thompson wrote that without "reasonable articulable suspicion or probable cause," the police can't detain individuals to look...

This past week I was over on Officer.com trying to convince some hot-headed, patriot-hating young cops that the Constitution is actually the law of the land. I failed. One of them refers to open carriers as “attention whores.” I was denounced as a traitor to law enforcement for insisting that gun owners actually have rights that LEO’s are legally and morally bound to respect. It got me thinking about the great gulf that separates the law enforcement profession that I knew as compared to the one that exists today. I never thought I’d be one of those geezers that says,...

The Taiwanese animators strike again!! "Stop and Frisk" It's code for racial profiling to people of color, or a warm privileged safety blanket if you're caucasian. The policy has seen over 4 million New Yorkers stopped at random over the last 10 years, with the vast majority of those stops targeting black and latino New Yorkers, far beyond what their demographic numbers would justify.

The discussion that will take place next year in the Utah Legislature over law enforcement raid-style search warrants is a necessary topic to debate. Certainly, the use of a battering rams to combat minor offenses is something that should not occur. A libertarian group, the Libertas Institute, and others, including the American Civil Liberties Institute, will lobby for limits on police use of force during search warrants for minor crimes. When this discussion occurs, it must focus on the safety aspects — to police and suspects — that these raids provide. These raids, as conducted now, are too dangerous. One...

The Fourth Amendment protects us from random invasions of our homes by police, right? We know we're secure in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects" unless the cops demonstrate probable cause to a judge and get a warrant. Except... Except when they don't. The fact of the matter is that police have a lot of leeway to bust your door down and take a look around if they fear that waiting for a warrant could lead to loss of evidence or danger to people. Or lead to something, anyway. That end run around the Fourth Amendment is called "exigent circumstances,"...

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency’s dominant role as the nation’s spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say. -SNIP- “The other agencies feel they should be bigger players,” said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. “They view the N.S.A. — incorrectly, I think — as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of...

In a major victory for the Justice Department over privacy advocates, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that government agencies can collect records showing the location of an individual's cell phone without obtaining a warrant. The 2-1 ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld the Justice Department's argument that "historical" records showing the location of cell phones, gleaned from cell site location towers, are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. A key basis for the ruling: The use of cell phones is "entirely voluntarily" and therefore individuals who use them have forfeited the right to...