On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:30 PM, Charles Curley <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:41:11 -0600 > Steven Morrey <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I think adding personal liability at the executive level, makes it a >> bit more threatening. >> Decision makers tend to tread lightly, where the veil is thin. > > It would tend toward personal responsibility. A friend of my family was > a stock broker with a seat on the NYSE. He was personally liable for > carrying out his side of his trades, and either or both of his two > lovely homes were at stake. > > Another area where we could use some personal responsibility is among > cops and persecutors. You violate someone's civil rights, and the > government (read: taxpayers) does not compensate the victim, *you* do. > Your home, you pension are at stake when you screw up. > > There is precedent for this. At the time of the American War for > Independence, British Ministers were held personally liable for proper > respect of the rights of subjects.
I have thought this for years. I think they need to get rid of (at least seriously amend) the exclusionary rule of evidence (facts are *facts* after all--it's silly to disregard them simply because of the manner in which they were discovered). If you add personal accountability to the LEOs and actually prosecute *them* for any crimes committed while obtaining evidence I would hope that feedback loop would suffice to keep things better balanced. Then, so long as the evidence can be vetted, let it stand on it's own merits--not the merits of the means used to obtain it. Give each offending LEO a full jury trial for all offenses, and let the jury (understanding nullification) decide whether they want to allow each particular offense slide for the LEO or not on a case-by-case basis. (This process could surely be streamlined somehow if necessary.) Consider an LEO that obtains the smoking gun from a serial killer (with witnesses thus vetted evidence, yet illegally--say he sends in his team before getting a warrant), resulting in the capture and a conviction of a very dangerous person--the jury may very well let that one go. But, if they determine that some ordinary Joe wound up being harassed and was innocent, they will probably let the LEO take some punishment. I would hope this would make each LEO think really hard before choosing to cross the line. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
