Legal Commentary

The Wrong Guy to Raid

By Michael Froomkin

News of  Clark Freshman, a former UM Law colleague now teaching at UC Hastings, that appeared in the SF Weekly: Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue.

If the news story is accurate, the police got a clearly invalid warrant, either through carelessness or worse (it described the house completely inaccurately).  And indeed, the raid was a bust — for the police.

The SFPD and DEA found no piles of marijuana money at 243 Diamond St., one of six addresses raided simultaneously in San Francisco that morning. Instead, they found Clark Freshman, who rents the penthouse at the two-unit building. Freshman, a UC Hastings law professor and the main consultant to the television show Lie to Me, was put into handcuffs while in his bathrobe as agents searched, despite Freshman’s insistence that they had the wrong place and were breaking the law.

He’s sort of angry:

“I told them to call the judge and get their warrant updated,” he says. “They just laughed at me ? I guess that’s why they’re called pigs.”

No, he’s really angry:

[Freshman] pledged to sue until “I see [the agents'] houses sold at auction and their kids’ college tuitions taken away from them. There will not be a better litigated case this century.”

I’d be spitting mad too.  Not sure I’d say that about college tuitions, though.  They’re sacred.

(Thanks to Michael Marshall for the story.)

Full post as published by Discourse.net on February 15, 2011 (boomark / email).