Friday, May 17, 2013

How I Got Kicked Out of the Supreme Court

By James Bovard


The @HLMenckenbot had a great Mencken quote on Twitter this morning: “The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.”
It never occurred me that laughing in court could be a crime punishable by jail time.  But maybe that helps explain how I once got kicked out of the Supreme Court. Here’s the story from Public Policy Hooligan:
SUPREME FASHION OFFENDER (from the “Conspiring Against the Clinton Administration” chapter)
In March 1995, I visited the sacred burial ground of Americans’ rights and liberties – the Supreme Court. Working on an article for Playboy, I went to watch lawyers argue a case of great principle and tawdry details. Sharlene Wilson was a repeat offender and former government snitch who had been nailed for two sales of marijuana totaling $105. The state of Arkansas – which could not afford to pave many of its own roads – planned to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars incarcerating Wilson for the next 30 years.
The case reached the Supreme Court because Arkansas police carried out a no-knock raid on her home, during which they discovered marijuana and drug paraphernalia. John Wesley Hall, an Arkansas attorney and author of a treatise on the Fourth Amendment, believed the no-knock raid was unconstitutional and petitioned the court to overturn Wilson’s convictions for marijuana possession and paraphernalia. (He did not challenge Wilson’s drug dealing conviction.)
No-knock raids were routinely carried out by SWAT teams wearing masks and black Ninja outfits and toting submachine guns. The right to violently batter down a front door necessarily included the right to shoot any citizen who tried to stop the police from invading his home. And what did it take to justify government effectively declaring war on its own citizens?
Flush toilets. Law enforcement agencies were paranoid that the slightest delay in barging in could allow residents to flush away small amounts of drugs. The Clinton administration told the Supreme Court that “if the officers knew that . . . the premises contain no plumbing facilities . . . then invocation of the destruction-of-evidence justification for an unannounced entry would be unreasonable.”
Americans are raised to believe that judicial processes favor truth and fairness, but cravenness is the coin of the realm at the Supreme Court. I watched lawyers grovel before the Justices like slaves trying to avoid a whipping. Some Justices were martinets, interrupting and browbeating disputants to their hearts’ content. When Chief Justice William Rehnquist mocked one lawyer’s assertion, everyone in the house responded with a polite chuckle.
Hall, who was short, bearded and bespectacled, told the Justices that the “knock and announce” rule for police searches goes back to 1603 in English common law – before the Mayflower reached these shores.Hall included in his brief to the Court a Playboy piece I wrote -“Oops – You’re Dead” – chronicling cases of innocent people killed in no-knock raids.
One of the Justices asked Michael Dreeben, the zealous beanpole representing the Justice Department, if the Clinton administration thought that no-knock entries were always justified. Dreeben magnanimously granted two exceptions: “if, based on confidential informants, the police know that all the drugs in question are stored in relatively indestructible crates,” and second, if cops were searching for stolen televisions, there “would be no reason to believe that the occupants would have any means of being able to destroy the televisions.”
Hall retorted that, according to Dreeben’s logic, “the more drugs you’ve got, the more right you have to an announcement” prior to a police search.
I thought that was hilarious. Alas – my boisterous laugh proved to be a solo performance. All the Justices – and dang near everybody else in the courtroom – turned and stared in my direction.
Being a rube, I did not realize that there were different standards for laughter, depending on whether the jokester was wearing a bat suit.
Here is how the Washington Post’s Al Kamen described what happened next in his “In the Loop” column:

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