Unreasonable search and seizure now legal.
NEW YORK (AP) — A federal appeals court has upheld the constitutionality of random bag searches by police in America’s busiest subway system to prevent terrorism.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday rejected a challenge to the searches by the New York Civil Liberties Union, saying that a lower court judge properly concluded that the program put in place in July 2005 was “reasonably effective.”
The searches began after deadly terrorist bombings in London’s subway system. The NYCLU filed a lawsuit to stop them, saying they were an unprecedented intrusion on privacy and ineffective because they can be easily evaded.
The appeals court said it was proper for Judge Richard M. Berman to conclude that preventing a terrorist attack on the subway was important enough to subject subway riders to random searches.
Berman had concluded that the searches were a reasonably effective deterrent and that the intrusion on the privacy rights of riders was minimal.
And what did he use to draw that conclusion?
Nothing, of course. It’s just a feeling.
And while the decision notes some recent arrests of those who targeted the system, and he also notes that it is indeed a target, he doesn’t actually draw a correlation between the illegal searches by the NYPD and those cases (most likely because there isn’t one and none of them were uncovered through these illegal searches).
Constitution be damned. Unreasonable search and seizure is a reasonable deterrent.
Judge Berman says so.
Judge Berman is a moron.
[tags]berman, judge, nypd, searches, subway, mta, illegal, privacy, civil rights[/tags]