White Wing Sheriff in Georgia Has Entire High School of Kids Physically Searched

Not sure HTF you do this without a Warrant – much less see any rational Judge granting the right for the sheriffs to do a pat-down on an entire school!

This breaks so many laws…Its ridiculous.

Local folks need to remove this dumb sucker jackass of a Sheriff.

A Georgia sheriff ordered pat-down searches for every student at a public high school. Now they’re suing.

Students at Worth County High School in Sylvester, Ga., have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against their country sheriff after he ordered what the complaint describes as a schoolwide drug sweep involving pat-down searches of hundreds of teenagers.

On April 14, Sheriff Jeff Hobby and dozens of deputies came to Worth County High School searching for students in possession of illicit substances. According to the students’ legal complaint, they proceeded to go to every classroom and physically search nearly every student present for drugs. The deputies, the lawsuit alleges, used “pat down” searches, with some deputies touching female students’ breasts and male students’ genitalia.

Tommy Coleman, a lawyer for the district, corroborated the students’ account of the search. “I thought the [students’] complaint in the suit very accurately described what happened,” he said. “We’d like for it to be resolved in the best interests of these kids.”

The district hasn’t joined the lawsuit on behalf of the students because it lacks the standing to do so, Coleman said. The lawsuit contends that the students, not the school district, were harmed by the searches.

In the aftermath of the search, the sheriff told local media that the pat-down searches of students were legal because school administrators were present. He also said he believed drugs were present at the school, and that a separate drug search performed several weeks earlier by police from the city of Sylvester had not been thorough enough.

Neither search turned up any illicit drugs, according to Coleman.

In the days after the search, the sheriff’s office acknowledged in a news release that at least one deputy had touched students in an inappropriate manner.

“After the pat down was conducted it was discovered that one of the deputies had exceeded the instructions given by the Sheriff and conducted a pat down of some students that was more intrusive than instructed by the Sheriff,” the statement said. “Upon discovery of the deputy’s actions, the Sheriff has taken corrective action to insure that this behavior will not occur again.”

The sheriff’s office did not provide more detail on the “corrective action” in the release, and it did not respond to a follow-up request about what that action entailed. Hobby’s office also refused multiple requests for an interview and declined to answer repeated requests from The Washington Post for more details about the school search.

The case is an extreme example of how the school system can become a battleground in the nation’s war on drugs. Law enforcement officials and school administrators have occasionally brought zero-tolerance, tough-on-crime policies into the nation’s classrooms, often with counterproductive results.

Meanwhile, teen drug and alcohol use is approaching historic lows. Experts cite a variety of reasons this may be the case. Lower rates of teen tobacco use may mean that fewer students go on to try harder substances. And the rise of social media means more teens are spending time with their peers online, rather than in the real world, where it may be easier to obtain drugs.

Worth County High School students are upset over their treatment by Hobby and his deputies.

J.E., one of the plaintiffs who is being identified only by his initials because he is a minor, said in an interview with The Washington Post that when deputies arrived at his 10th-grade agriculture class, they marched the students out to the hall, lining them up, girls on one side of the hallway and boys on the other.

The deputies, J.E. says, made everyone put their palms on the wall, spread their legs and take their shoes off.

J.E. says that during his search, the deputy put his hands in J.E.’s back pockets and then under his shirt. He then, J.E. says, rubbed down both of the student’s legs from his thighs to his ankles, and back up between them.

“He came up under my privates and then he grabbed my testicles twice,” J.E. said in an interview. “I wanted to turn around and tell him to stop touching me. I wanted it to be over and I just wanted to call my dad because I knew something wasn’t right.”

J.E.’s allegations of improper contact are part of a legal complaint filed jointly by nine students after outraged parents contacted Horsley Begnaud LLC, a civil rights law firm based in Atlanta.

According to the students’ complaint, some of the deputies — Hobby’s office brought more than two dozen, the complaint says — stuck their hands in students’ bras and underwear. The complaint includes allegations that some deputies cupped the genitals of the boys and exposed the breasts of some of the girls to their classmates.

Sometimes the deputies wore gloves. Other times they didn’t, according to the complaint.

Another student involved with the lawsuit was in a different class than J.E. at the time of the search but described a similar search procedure: Deputies ordered students out of his ninth-grade literature class and into the hallway, segregated them by gender, and then systematically physically searched each one.

“Some people were crying,” the ninth-grader said in an interview. “Kids weren’t allowed to go home; they weren’t allowed to tell their parents” during the search.

The suit has been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia. In their complaint, the students contend the “unlawful and intrusive” searches violated their rights under the Fourth and Fourteenth amendments.

The sheriff had no warrant to perform the search, according to the complaint. Coleman, the lawyer for the school district, says the sheriff’s office told school officials they suspected 13 students of possessing drugs in setting up the search. It’s unclear what information formed the basis for this suspicion — lawyers for the students said in an interview they haven’t seen it yet, and the sheriff’s office declined to provide details to The Post.

“I’m not aware of anything like this ever happening in Georgia,” Mark Begnaud, one of the students’ lawyers, said in an interview. “It’s obviously unconstitutional, a textbook definition of police overreach.”…Read More Here…

 

 

The American Gestapo

Most law enforcement organizations, at last in first world countries cling tightly to their non-political, non-partisan, and neural image. As well as that of being even-haded and fair. The reason being quite simply – trust.. As we have seen in some of the cases of Murder-by-Cop of black men – It doesn’t always work out that way No system is perfect.

The FBI massively violated that rule in supporting Trump during the election.

The release of information relative to Hillary Clinton’s emails was not only false

The FBI Is About To Get The Power To Hack Millions Of Computers

Congress had six months to debate granting President-elect Donald Trump’s FBI new legal powers to hack millions of computers, and Republican leaders objected to doing so on Wednesday.

That means that starting Thursday, a Department of Justice official will be able to go to a single judge, assert that a computer crime may involve millions of networked devices, and get a warrant that lets the FBI hack all of those devices.

According to three senators who tried to put the brakes on that new authority Wednesday so Congress could at least discuss it, there are no concrete assurances from law enforcement officials that privacy won’t be violated or that devices won’t be damaged. Nor was there any explanation of how authorities will hack Americans’ wired equipment.

“At midnight tonight, this Senate will make one of the biggest mistakes in surveillance policy in years and years,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who tried with Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) to offer three measures to delay or rein in the new FBI powers. “Without a single congressional hearing, without a shred of meaningful public input, without any opportunity for senators to ask their questions in a public forum, one judge with one warrant would be able to authorize the hacking of thousands, possibly
millions of devices, cell phones and tablets.”

In fact, very few Americans have any idea that the scope of online search warrants is about to get much broader. The push for the expansion stems from a case in Texas in which investigators were denied a warrant because they could not show that the computer they wanted to hack was in the federal district where the warrant was sought.

That prompted a long review by court officials of what’s known as Rule 41, a part of federal criminal procedure that defines search and seizure rules. They ultimately sent a proposal to the Supreme Court to expand the scope of the surveillance powers. The high court approved the expansion, and by law, Congress had six months to review and approve the change. The six months expire Dec. 1.

When Wyden and the two other senators asked for unanimous consent to bring up various measures to modify the new rules or just delay them for six more months, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) objected.

He said the changes were common-sense steps designed to allow law enforcement officials the ability to pursue new threats in the rapidly changing online world.

“There is a challenge when cybercriminals use the internet and social media to prey on innocent children, to traffic in human beings, to buy and sell drugs,” Cornyn said. “There has to be a way for law enforcement, for the federal government, to get a search warrant approved by a judge based on a showing of probable cause to be able to get that evidence so that the law can be enforced and these cybercriminals can be prosecuted.”

Wyden and the others do not dispute that criminals exploit all sorts of online devices ― from cameras to computers and connected appliances ― to commit crimes in ever-evolving ways.

But Wyden argued that the new powers are far too vague, and there are inadequate protections for innocent Americans whose property could be hacked legally by the feds if officials assert it is “damaged” by malware of some sort that may have been used in a crime.

He raised the specter of a mass FBI hack going wrong, and perhaps further damaging victims of a criminal hack, or even knocking vital systems offline, such as hospital computer networks.

“Legislators and the public know next to nothing about how the government
conducts the searches,” Wyden said. “The government itself is planning to use software that has not been properly vetted by outside security experts.”

The Oregon senator and a couple of dozen others have written to the Department of Justice about those and other concerns, but did not find the answers persuasive. (Read the exchanges here.)

Wyden predicted that when something inevitably goes wrong, the anger will be aimed a lawmakers who couldn’t be bothered to add checks on the new powers.

“I think when Americans find out that the Congress allowed the Justice Department to just wave its arms in the air and grant itself new powers under the Fourth Amendment without the Senate even being part of a single hearing, I think law-abiding Americans are going to ask, ‘So what were you people in the Senate thinking?’” Wyden said. “What were you thinking about when the FBI starts hacking the victims of a hack, or when a mass hack goes awry and breaks their device, or an entire hospital system in effect has great damage done?”

 

Judge Strikes Down Welfare Drug Testing in Florida

A Florida Republican law requiring all Welfare recipients to pass drug testing has been put on hold by a Federal Court. The law is unconstitutional, due to the fact that it violates personal protections against the government invading a citizen’s privacy without reasonable evidence of wrongdoing. Statistically, Republican legislators in the state are more likely to use drugs than welfare recipients.

So… In view of the legislators ability to royally screw everything up for everyone…

Why don’t they pass a law that all elected officials in the state are regularly tested?

Federal judge temporarily bars Florida’s welfare drug-test law

A federal judge has temporarily blocked a controversial Florida law requiring all welfare applicants to be drug-tested.

U.S. District Court Judge Mary Scriven issued a temporary injunction Monday evening against enforcement of the law’s “suspicionless drug testing” of adults seeking federal welfare.

The law went into effect July 1, but a single father and the American Civil Liberties Union contend in a lawsuit that the new law is unconstitutional and violates Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

“Perhaps no greater public interest exists than protecting a citizen’s rights under the Constitution,” the judge wrote, quoting a 1997 Hawaii case.

Under the law, the Florida Department of Children and Family Services requires the drug tests of adults applying to the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. The aid recipients are responsible for the cost of the screening, which they recoup in their assistance if they qualify.

Those who fail the required drug testing may designate another individual to receive the benefits on behalf of their children, but they do not receive a refund for cost of the test.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott has championed the law, saying it provides “personal accountability.” He added it was “unfair for Florida taxpayers to subsidize drug addiction.”

Florida is not the first state to pass such legislation. Michigan passed a similar law that was found to be unconstitutional by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2003 for violating the Fourth Amendment…

The GOP-controlled legislature passed the bill, and Scott signed it into law in May 2011.

“The governor obviously disagrees with the decision and he will evaluate his options regarding when to appeal,” said his deputy press secretary Jackie Schutz.

Since campaigning for governor, Scott has said that the drug-testing of welfare recipients “will help to prevent misuse of Florida tax dollars” and make sure the money goes to the children.

“Research shows higher drug use among individuals receiving government assistance, and drug abuse also forces children into welfare assistance,” Scott said while signing the bill into law.

The ACLU said the state’s own study found that of the 2,000 people who took the state drug test, only a small percentage tested positive.

“It shows that a little bit more than 2% of the welfare applicants tested positive for drugs where it’s about 8½% in the general public,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the ACLU of Florida.