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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 01:10:31PM -0400, Phillip Rhodes wrote:
> Steven Champeon wrote:
> 
> 
> >I'm confused. So, freedom depends on your right to be an *anonymous*,
> >drunken, child abusing danger to yourself and others, in public? 
> >
> >   "Based on a report from a witness, Hiibel was suspected of hitting
> >    his daughter, who was inside the truck. Hiibel also was suspected of
> >    driving under the influence of alcohol, based on his eyes,
> >    mannerisms, speech and the smell of alcohol."
> >
> >Mmmm...oKay.
> 
> Nice spin attempt Steve.  In truth, it was Mr. Hiibels daughter that hit
> him, and he wasn't driving drunk, nor posing a danger to himself
> or anybody else.

Oh, sorry - I was suckered into believing that HE hit HER by the press,
that tool of our oppressors. Wasn't trying to spin, just taking the news
story itself (quoted above) at face value, so don't blame me for
spinning anything, OK?

OK, so maybe he wasn't drunk, didn't hit her, and didn't think it was
the police's business. Fair enough. You could have pointed out the sites
where all of this is shown, and perhaps corrected the Reuters story in
your post as well:

 http://papersplease.org/hiibel/facts.html
 http://www.epic.org/privacy/hiibel/default.html

Having watched the video, I can understand why the officer thought
Hiibel was drunk. He was certainly unintelligible and belligerent. And
someone had reported the fight to the cops. Officer Dove may be a bit of
a moron, but he seems to have been well within reasonable bounds in what
he did do. If anything, Hiibel seemed to have wanted to be arrested, as
he said again and again in the video. I'd have arrested him, too. At
least for public drunkenness. And who the hell was driving the truck, if
his daughter was in the passenger side seat? Come on.

> >Now, we probably /should/ have that right, but it's not clear that we
> >do, or that we ever did. 
> 
> The Constitution doesn't grant rights, and it never did.  We would have
> exactly the same rights, even if there were no Constitution or Bill of
> Rights.  All the Constitution does is explicitly guarantee certain 
> rights that were deemed especially important.

Erm, thanks for the natural law lesson. As I don't believe in a deity,
and don't consider rights something that just "are", I'm happy to have a
Constitution around that guarantees me some rights, as well as a legal
process that can determine whether others are worthy of same. <shrug>
Small comfort it is to think you have rights without something else
there to help ensure they're protected.
 
> As I understand it, a large part of controversy over adding the Bill
> of Rights was the idea that if such a thing were added, it might be
> interpreted as a list of the ONLY rights of the people...  hence the
> inclusion of the 10th Amendment...

Yes.
 
> Sadly, as we can see from your response, many people ARE under the
> mistaken impression that the Constitution grants rights, and that if
> it's not listed in the BoR, we don't have it.

No, don't twist my words. I was referring /strictly/ to the case at
hand, where Mr. H. tried to justify his privacy rights on the 4th
amemdment's search and seizure provisions.

Steve

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