[Mb-hair] Montana Supreme Court justice warns Orwell's 1984 has arrived.

[George R. Milman]

http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-5820618.html

 

 

Thirty three years ago, in our brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in CALIFORNIA
v. KRIVDA, 409 U.S. 33 (1972), my then partner Roger Hanson and I made an
argument, among several others, that since backyard incinerators had been
banned for air pollution reasons citizens of Los Angeles were, and still
are, required by law to put their garbage on the street for disposal.
Consequently, we argued, since there was no other practical way to keep
one's trash private the government should be barred from rooting around in
it without a warrant.  The California Supreme Court had earlier decided in
that same case as it was coming up the line that trash was thus protected.
In Roger's and my case, the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back out west
so the California Supreme Court could advise whether its decision had been
based on adequate and independent non-federal grounds, on federal grounds or
on both.  It later held that its ruling was based on both.  

 

Californians, then, used to have a reasonable expectation that their trash
would not be rummaged through and picked over by law enforcement officers
acting without a search warrant, and that it would go straight to the dump
where it would disappear in a hopelessly chaotic, and therefore private,
mass of decomposing waste.  Warrantless police trash-diving only became
permissible later on as a smoldering, sometimes hysterical dread over crime
was fanned by fear-mongering officials of both major parties.  Since then,
privacy rights across the nation have been heavily eroded or in some cases
eliminated (e.g., trash), a trend that will certainly continue as Congress
continues to pander, as both federal and state benches continue to be seeded
with ultra-conservative ideologues by the current administration and its
state counterparts, and as so many voters near-sightedly allow their alarm
over real and imagined terrorism and general crime to overshadow whatever
fragile understanding they may have, sadly, of the relationship between the
various state Constitutions and the U.S. Constitution on the one hand, and
their day-to-day lives on the other.

 

2005.  No incinerator, no reasonable expectation of privacy.  Wow. 

 

George

 

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