The Nazgûl Supreme Court recently ruled that illegally obtained evidence can still be presented by prosecutors. Accountability was thrown out of the window with this ruling since there is no consequences for illegally collecting evidence. This ruling was controversial enough that three of the judges disagreed with one of them disagreeing quite loudly:
In her dissent to the ruling in Utah v. Strieff, which revolved on the matter of reasonable suspicion, Sotomayor cited James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folks and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me to describe what’s it’s like to live in constant fear of “suspicionless stops” as a person of color.
“Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading a stop can be when the officer is looking for more,” wrote Sotomayor. “This Court has allowed an officer to stop you for whatever reason he wants — so long as he can point to a pretextual justification after the fact.”
Sotomayor said the court’s ruling had essentially classified all Americans as inmates in the prison-industrial complex.
“By legitimizing the conduct that produces this double consciousness, this case tells everyone, white and black, guilty and innocent, that an officer can verify your legal status at any time,” Sotomayor wrote. “It says that your body is subject to invasion while courts excuse the violation of your rights. It implies that you are not a citizen of a democracy but the subject of a carceral state, just waiting to be cataloged.”
I’ve heard many people, conservatives and liberals alike, make the distinction between citizens and non-citizens when it comes to rights. They claim that one of the advantages of citizenship is that you enjoy the protection of the Bill of Rights. However, this ruling by the Supreme Court nullifies that claim because pesky things like warrants no longer need to be acquired before a search is performed. All a police officer needs to do is have a legal excuse for initiating an interaction with you and from there they can collect whatever evidence they want, legally or illegally, and it can be used against you in a trial.
This trend is nothing new though. Our so-called rights, which are really a set of temporary privileges, have been dwindling since ink was being applied to the paper that became the Constitution (the Constitution itself was nothing more than a power grab by the federal government). Every new law has been a further restriction to our freedoms. And while we’ve enjoyed a few scraps of freedom here and there they have paled in comparison to the freedoms we’ve lost. The United States has become a police state. Anybody who denies that is a fool.