Constitutional Law

More on the raid on the mayor in MD

From the Baltimore Sun.

"When the shooting stopped, two dogs lay dead. A mayor sat in his boxers, hands bound behind his back. His handcuffed mother-in-law was sprawled on the kitchen floor, lying beside the body of one of the family pets that police had killed before her eyes.

After the raid, Prince George's County police officials who burst into the home of Berwyn Heights' mayor last week seized the same unopened package of marijuana that an undercover officer had delivered an hour earlier.

What police left behind was a house stained with blood and a trail of questions about their conduct. No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo's home in this small bedroom community near College Park."

Puts me in mind of the line in The Wild Bunch. They ride thru a town in Mexico, buildings burning, bodies in the street, weeping women. One asks a resident, "Villa did this to you?" He replies, "no, senor. It was our own Federales. If it had been Villa, it would have been much worse."

UPDATE: comments put me in mind of the Kenyon Ballew case. Right after GCA 68, ATF raided his house in a Maryland suburb. He was innocent, the warrant turned out to be full of lies and deception (a teenage burglar had got caught, and to get mercy made up a bunch of stuff about Ballew having illegal guns and bombs. They screwed up the raid big time. Tried to enter at a back door that Ballew and his wife never used and had an aquarium in front of it. When she didn't open the door quickly, smashed it down. Then the first two officers in weren't in uniform, they were local uncover drug unit guys, meaning they looked like junkies. They pushed the uniformed guys aside and went in.

Ballew is in the bathtub, responds to wife's screams, picks up a cap and ball replica (his only gun, I think). The first two officers open fire, hit him in the head. Massive brain damage. Then they arrest his wife (on no grounds), decide to investigate the shooting themselves, and do things like cut out the walls where bullets hit.

He sued and lost. He didn't have a skilled attorney, as I recall. The government said he had a practice grenade (non explosive), had black powder, and if you fill a practice grenade with black powder, put a stopper in the hole, and tie it in with lots of filament tape, you can make it blow up. Ergo, he had all the components of a bomb.

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on August 08, 2008 (boomark / email).