Creative Juices

I've been dying to write on here, but just haven't felt like doing a lot of research and I hate to post without knowing what I am talking about...so I bring you this instead.

Feeling a bit creative? Via two friends, Peter and Erin, I found out about a little exercise in imagination where you make the CD cover for a made up band. The instructions/rules are as follows:

1. First, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random. The first article on the page will be your band name.
2. Then go to http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3. The last four words of the last quote on the page will be the name of your album.
3. Finally, go to http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/?, where the third picture will be your album cover.

My first batch of pictures to choose from were...less than inspiring. So I'll admit to refreshing the page. The band name and album title were 100% by the book.

Introducing Broomball with their debut album, A Very Serious Thing.



Have fun...and leave a link in the comments to your album.

PS: if you don't have a program that can edit pictures, take a look at Gimp and their tutorials page.

***
I just found out that Dylan, a friend from BYU, has made a page that will automatically generate your album art. So for those who want to play along but don't know how to use Photoshop, here's some help: http://www.thurstonco.com/BandName.html

Sobriety Checkpoints and the Fourth Amendment

For those not familiar with the Bill of Rights, the fourth amendment states:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

This is the amendment that keeps you the police out of your house and from stopping you at every turn for any whim they happen to have. Anytime you are engaged by a police officer and are not free to leave whenever you please, you are being detained. In the language of the above amendment, your "person" has been "seized."

The easiest example to use with this is being arrested for, let's say not showing up for court. In that case, the judge issues a bench warrant for your arrest. Thus, a warrant describing the person to be seized (you) is issued on probable cause (an officer of the court observing that you failed to show up as legally obligated). The police can then, under the authority of the warrant, seize your person (arrest you). Again, this is all contingent on "probable cause," a lower standard than what is necessary to convict someone in court, which is generally defined as a "a reasonable belief that a crime has been committed" or "reason to believe that an injury had criminal cause."

The courts have decided that police officers should have the authority to temporarily detain or seize someone to determine if probable cause exists. Thankfully, the courts didn't give carte blanche to officers to do this. The Supreme Court case Terry v. Ohio from 1968 established that officers need to have grounds to detain someone, although less than "probable cause." Instead, "reasonable suspicion" was established as the standard for such temporary detainments, commonly called a "Terry stop." The evidence, observations, and inferences must in totality be sufficient such that a reasonable person would believe that the person has been or is about to be engaged in criminal activity. It is in this case that the authority for traffic stops are based in. When an officer writes you a ticket, the officer is attesting to what he observed and gives you the option of simply paying the fine if you agree to the infraction or crime you committed or to appear in court to be judged. The detainments must be based on more than "a hunch" and must be brief in duration.

In other words, if the police do not have reasonable suspicion, then they do not have the authority to detain you. They simply can't pull you over while you're driving for no other reason than to see if you are following the law. Or can they...

In the 1990 Supreme Court case of Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz, the court overturned the Michigan State Supreme Court ruling that the use of sobriety checkpoints was unconstitutional. While the majority held that the state interested in preventing drunk driving outweighed the intrusion. The dissenting minority disagreed and noted several things I find I highly agree with in this matter. Per Justice Brennan:

Some level of individualized suspicion is a core component of the protection the Fourth Amendment provides against arbitrary government action.

By holding that no level of suspicion is necessary before the police may stop a car for the purpose of preventing drunken driving, the Court potentially subjects the general public to arbitrary or harassing conduct by the police.

That stopping every car might make it easier to prevent drunken driving. . . is an insufficient justification for abandoning the requirement of individualized suspicion.

Justice Stevens also wrote a dissent and referred to a Maryland checkpoint system that made use of 125 checkpoints and only resulted in a 0.3% arrest rate. Comparing this to Michigan's proposal, he notes:

Yet, even if the 143 checkpoint arrests were assumed to involve a net increase in the number of drunken driving arrests per year, the figure would still be insignificant by comparison to the 71,000 such arrests made by Michigan State Police without checkpoints in 1984 alone.

Any relationship between sobriety checkpoints and an actual reduction in highway fatalities is even less substantial than the minimal impact on arrest rates. As the Michigan Court of Appeals pointed out: "Maryland had conducted a study comparing traffic statistics between a county using checkpoints and a control county. The results of the study showed that alcohol-related accidents in the checkpoint county decreased by ten percent, whereas the control county saw an eleven percent decrease; and while fatal accidents in the control county fell from sixteen to three, fatal accidents in the checkpoint county actually doubled from the prior year."

Perhaps my favorite point from the dissents was by Justice Brennan when, quoting himself from another Supreme Court case, he wrote:

Moved by whatever momentary evil has aroused their fears, officials - perhaps even supported by a majority of citizens - may be tempted to conduct searches that sacrifice the liberty of each citizen to assuage the perceived evil. But the Fourth Amendment rests on the principle that a true balance between the individual and society depends on the recognition of `the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.' Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 478 (1928) (Brandeis, J., dissenting).

So, with the matter being decided in 1990, why am I bringing all this up and boring you with lots of legal stuff? Well, because it wasn't completely decided.

10 states, Idaho, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming (I found conflicting information on Alaska), don't allow checkpoints by prohibiting them in state law or, in Washington's case, because the state constitution provides higher protection against search and seizure than does the federal law.

In the 1988 case of City of Seattle v. Mesiani, Washington's Supreme Court upheld that sobriety checkpoints violate Article 1 Section 7 of the state constitution which says, "No person shall be disturbed in his private affairs, or his home invaded, without authority of law." The court went on to say that "sobriety checkpoints are highly intrusive subjectively because the officer personally searches the driver for evidence of intoxication, including smelling breath, looking for open containers, and attempting to elicit evidence of lack of dexterity by asking for a license." The court finally said that sobriety checks were illegal searches thus would require a warrant. So, 20 years later, the governor of the state of Washington, Christine Gregoire, has proposed legislation that would legalize sobriety checkpoints in the state by allowing judges to issue a warrant. How would a warrant cover the search of dozens if not hundreds of drivers? Well, that's simple. Issue it for a place and time, and have it cover everyone who happens to be there!

An article regarding the proposed legislation in The Oregonian explains Gregoire's proposal. The police will have to get a warrant from a judge to set up the roadblock at a specific place and for a specific time. All vehicles would then be stopped with failure to stop being a gross misdemeanor. In other words, the warrant would not be specific as to who would be stopped nor would it have to show any probable cause regarding the person being stopped other than the fact that there are a lot of alcohol and drug related accidents that take place at that location.

Governor Gregoire said, "We will go where the impaired drivers go, with the goal of getting them off the road."

You see, the problem is that the government already has the authority to "go where the impaired drivers go." Cops can sit on the roads that bars are on, can blitz the area and have increased manpower patrolling just outside a bar at closing time, and heck they can even sit across the street and watch for anyone staggering over to a car and falling inside the drivers side door.

So, I'm left wondering why Governor Gregoire feels the need to suspend our civil liberty and our rights to privacy and protection against seizures of our person with out individualized reasonable suspicion? Why does she feel the need to go against the state Supreme Court?

The checkpoints are intrusive. The checkpoints are illegal. And unless the residents of Washington step up and do something, the checkpoints are coming your way.

How do you step up?
Take a minute and either call or write your state congressmen or women and ask them to oppose HB 2771. The link will let you search for them and will give you their office phone numbers and email addresses. You don't have to write much. A simple: "I am writing to express my opposition to HB 2771 which would allow police to conduct sobriety checkpoints. I am opposed to it because I feel it is (pick one or more: unconstitutional under the state constitution, illegal as per the 1988 Washington Supreme Court ruling, invasive, [some other reason]). I would appreciate you standing with the concerned citizens of Washington and supporting our civil rights by opposing this bill. I look forward to hearing your response and how you anticipate voting." Simple enough.

Then write or call the members of the state house judiciary committee (where the bill currently is in the legislative process). You can probably skip the committee chair and vice-chair, as they are sponsors of the bill and have probably already made up their mind on how to vote.

Then tell a friend. If you care to do that by sending this post to someone, you can do that by simply clicking on the little envelope icon at the bottom of this post.

Disappearing Car Door

Disappearing Car Door

I have to admit, this does look pretty cool. Especially where they point out how it eliminates struggling to get in your car when someone as parked eight inches away from your driver side door.

Discriminating Language

It is not at all uncommon for laws to prohibit places of public accommodation, such as restaurants, to prohibit against discrimination. The city of Philadelphia has just such a law entitled the Fair Practice Ordinance and it disallows discrimination based on the following protected classes: ancestry, color, disability, gender identity, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. Now, regardless of whether I personally agree that all of those should be protected classes, the law seems pretty straightforward. You can't refuse service based on any of those factors.

Back in early 2006, Joey Vento decided to put up a sign in his Philadelphia cheese steak shop, Geno's Steaks. The sign reads "This is America. When ordering, please speak English." His reason for the sign? "If you can't tell me what you want, I can't serve you," he said. "It's up to you. If you can't read, if you can't say the word cheese, how can I communicate with you -- and why should I have to bend?" (Quoted in a Boston.com article, which was quoting a Philadelphia Inquirer story that is no longer available online.)

Ask yourself, does the sign violate the law and discriminate based on one of those classes?

I'd say it does discriminate, but not on any of those classes. We can throw out the sex/gender classes as they don't really apply here. Religion, disability, and marital status can go too as they don't seem to even come close to having to do with language. Race, ancestry, color, and national origin are left. For me to determine whether the sign discriminates on any of those, I would ask myself, is English inextricably linked to any of those classes?

Color and Race: nope, lots of people of all colors and races both speak and don't speak English.

Ancestry: same thing, lots of different ancestries speak and don't speak ancestry. I can turn away a non-English speaker of Slavic ancestry and not turn away an English speaker of Slavic ancestry.

What about national origin? Not really. If you come here from Oman, I won't turn you away as long as you are ordering in English.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't break the law. Does it discriminate? Certainly, but it does so on the basis of language, something that isn't protected. It is akin to refusing service to those who aren't wearing a shirt or shoes or refusing service to people who make too much or too little money (which Philadelphia does protect in certain circumstances, but not for restaurants).

So do you agree? Did I reach the right conclusion?

Apparently, Philadelphia's Human Relations Commission (HRC) doesn't agree with me. They believe it discriminates against people of certain backgrounds. From an article on the Philadelphia Daily News:

Paul Hummer, the attorney prosecuting the complaint against Vento on behalf of the HRC, said the sign "discriminates on the basis of national origin because national origin and language are linked."

When it comes to national origin though, Joey Vento is no stranger. His grandparents immigrated from Sicily speaking no English and he indicates that it took his parents learning English in school before they, according to this ABC News article puts it, "realized the American Dream."

Vento is fond of promoting English as being essential to being American and often paraphrases this quote from a 1919 letter written by President Theodore Roosevelt ( (pdf copy of it can be obtained here, courtesy of snopes.com)), often mistaken for being from 1907, while he would have been in office:

"There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room but for one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality; we have room for but one soul loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people."

The above ABC article goes on to note that:

While some in the Philadelphia community worry Vento's sign might give the City of Brotherly love a bad reputation, Vento says his customers -- even the non-English speakers -- think it's funny. He is quick to point out he has never refused service to anyone who didn't speak the language.

"Here at Geno's no one, and I mean no one, in 40 years has ever been refused service for a language barrier."

So, if he doesn't discriminate based on it, who's being hurt? Who is being discriminated? Well, what if someone doesn't order because they read the sign and didn't bother to come to the counter because they don't speak English?

If someone can't speak enough english to ask for "one cheese steak," then chances are, they can't read the sign anyway and how are they going to be offended and discriminated against in the first place? And again, this goes back to the idea that discriminating on the basis of national origin and language is the same thing.

I'll tell you what I and a lot of others see the sign as discriminating: those who value the importance of free and political speech, even speech they may not agree with, and those who don't. That sign is Joey Vento's avenue of advocating for English to be the common language.

Free speech needs to be protected, not prosecuted.