Arianna Huffington and Harry Shearer

You'll find this hard to believe, but I'm old enough to remember thinking, when Richard Nixon promoted the idea of "no-knock" warrants as a bulwark of the War on Crime, that this was not a good thing. In recent days, we have Jon Carroll's column in the SF Chronicle and yesterday's story in the NY Times detailing the close-to-numberless cases where cops, acting on information provided by criminals acting as informants to get (a) cash or (b) lighter sentences, barge into innocent people's houses on the pretext of looking for drug dealers. Forget about knocking: now the police routinely use battering rams. I don't hear conservatives, who prostrate themselves at the altar of the Second Amendment, shedding any tears as the Fourth is routinely shredded. People die as a result of these "mistaken" raids, the most notorious being a Ventura County landowner, suspected of harboring (gasp) marijuana plants, shot to death by L.A. sheriffs. Ventura sheriffs didn't like the informant's info, but L.A. sheriffs, beguiled by the opportunity to seize a valuable piece of property and use its proceeds to shore up their budgetary deficit, barged (and shot) right in. Yes, and while we're at it, those forfeiture laws make a mockery of the Fifth. Increasingly the pattern is to punish, with the destruction and/or seizure of property, long before a conviction is obtained, if one ever is. The inevitable result is that more and more jurisdictions, like LA and NY, are being hit with multi-million dollar damage judgments as the victims, if they survive, file suit. No wonder we don't like trial lawyers.

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