I had a similar experience with Bekins a few years ago. A sales rep came to my house to look at my stuff; he promised a crew of six. On moving day, two broken-down subcontractors arrived with a rented truck.
This 21-centimeter transition was chosen by the designers of the Pioneer plaques (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque) to explain to any alien readers how big we are. At top left is a cartoon of two hydrogen nuclei in opposite spin orientations, and a ruler in between them marked "1". Over on the far right you can see another ruler that measures the height of the female figure, marked with binary numeral "8" ("|---") to indicate that she is approximately 8×21 = 168 cm tall.
If only we could somehow share a physical entity of known dimensions to reference together with the drawing so that we did not need to use a physics riddle to indicate scale...
Unsure what the tone of this message is, so I don't know if you're aware, but that's included too:
> Behind the figures of the human beings, the silhouette of the Pioneer spacecraft is shown in the same scale so that the size of the human beings can be deduced by measuring the spacecraft.
It's good to have redundancy, not just so someone interpreting the plaque can confirm their hypothesis, but also in case one of the messages fail. In this case, the spacecraft could break, but we can assume quantum transitions will always be observable.
I sarcastically referenced the plaque itself, which is a convenient disc of a known size to anyone observing the drawing, unlike the space craft or physics riddles.
Using quantum transitions is quite ridiculous in my opinion due to requiring not only the observer to have a perfectly compatible understanding of physics (even a more advanced understanding might not be compatible - maybe they don't categorize elements by electrons, or even treat elemental particles as a quantifiable entity), combined with the sheer number of deductions required to understand what was meant with two circles and a few lines.
I doubt we would ever have decoded this had we been the recipient rather than author, and that's with a perfectly compatible understanding of physics.
If we picked up that plaque from space with an illustration of some aliens and an alien solar system and someone Tweeted it, the correct hypothesis for the numbering would develop plurality consensus within one hour.
I don't know if aliens would decode it but it's not right that humans wouldn't decode it.
I submit that if the concept of quantum transitions is alien to whatever recipient of that probe (if ever), then any attempts to communicate are hopeless anyway. That is, if the recipient's physical reality is so different from our own that they can't at least get back to "oh, this distance means that transition, now the rest of the plaque makes sense", then no asynchronous communication will bridge that gap.
There is no relation between the ability to communicate and a shared understanding of our concept of quantum transitions - case in point, our invention of the technology we use to communicate with deep space far predates us learning these concepts ourselves.
I'd also hold that the only thing this plaque could ever give is clear sign of artificial creation, and by virtue the (possibly past) existence of some entity capable of creating it. Maybe they'll get a vague idea of what we look like, but if "their" culture does not commonly depict themselves in 2D as we do, or "they" have vastly different morphologies, even that would be unclear. The context needed to understand our attempt at showing our ___location might also be lost if the thing went far enough.
> our invention of the technology we use to communicate with deep space far predates us learning these concepts ourselves.
Maxwell published in 1873. The double slit experiment was 1803, subatomic theory developed throughout the 1800s, and Planck proposed quanta in 1900. The first radio transmission across the Atlantic came approximately 2 years after Planck's theory.
I doubt it is plausible to develop anything resembling industrial technology without stumbling across certain fundamental truths in the process because doing so requires a sufficiently accurate model of physics.
The period you're describing is that of old quantum theory, which was hugely inconsistent and predates our theories of modern quantum mechanics which is post 1925 or so.
The inventor of the arc converter was 18 at the time radio waves were discovered, 34 at the time he invented the arc converter, but 56 and with only 17 years left till his death when the era of modern quantum mechanics started with the invention of wave mechanics. It's a lifetime apart.
Some discoveries were made during that period that are of course still relevant.
(Not to mention that the hydrogen line was only discovered in 1951, as a result of years of hearing it using radio equipment invented half a century prior. Even things as basic as the proton took until 1932 to discover.)
So a period of 25 years to go all the way from "weird fringe theory that fixes some issues we've been grappling with for a long time now" to "got it all figured out". The start of that period aligns very closely with the initial invention of radio. And a variable effect due to the hydrogen line can potentially be observed by anyone operating a radio in the relevant band.
The only way this doesn't work is if the aliens who retrieve the plaque from deep space somehow stabilize in the long term at a point where they've developed rocketry and general space travel but not radio or an understanding of quantum mechanics.
However the above would seem to imply that they don't do radio astronomy, don't have a very good understanding of light (since it's all photons), and don't have high frequency electronic circuits (since designing those requires accounting for RF interference). I guess their understanding of optics is also lacking and their understanding of chemistry is rudimentary and stagnant over the long term.
In other words, aliens permanently stuck at a late 1800s technology level that have nonetheless developed the ability to travel across interstellar distances. And spotted voyager (a very small cold object in deep space). And retrieved it intact.
That's undoubtedly a very cool premise for a scifi story but as far as real life goes I think your time would be better spent worrying that voyager might be eaten by a species of space fairing wale.
Our timeline is not an ordered series of preconditions followed by inevitabilities. It does not hold that if some other civilization says "B", it must first have said "A" and follow by "C".
RF equipment is not built or designed by people working with or having understanding of quantum mechanics. Understanding waves could come from observing liquids, or if audio exists to them, that. Designing around noise can be done empirically as we do. Quantum mechanics in this area only matter due to our current chip manufacturing process, but who says they use semiconductors?
On the other hand they could also have a better understanding of light and photons and never build RF into their core technology stack, thereby not having people observe and analyze the hydrogen line.
The only strict order is that we know now that our previous theories were complete garbage, and we are still waiting to discover why our current theory is complete garbage.
Physics is a model of reality. Reality is objective, but the model we have chosen is very much "subjective" (maybe arbitrary is a better term).
It's easy to imagine that another species might have never conceptualized electrons as little balls orbiting around a nucleus. They are neither balls nor are they flying in circles, those are simply abstractions we like because they appeal to the way we perceive reality. The way we conceptualize electrons leads to issues like the wave-particle duality, so it's likely just a local optimum we got stuck in. Another species might not even think of Electrons as being distinct entities, maybe they think of the electron field as one large ocean with some waves in it, or they subscribe to the single electron theory, or something we have never thought of and might never imagine from our perspective.
"Arbitrary" ("existing or coming about seemingly at random or by chance or as a capricious and unreasonable act of will", "based on or determined by individual preference or convenience rather than by necessity or the intrinsic nature of something" [1]) is a very poor term. Not only is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe, it is also capable of demonstrating (when it is actually the case) equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation. It is not perfect, but can you present anything that does better?
> is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe
It is also very highly constrained by how _we_ observe the universe. Beings with different sensory/cognitive capacities could develop very different models.
> equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation
If there was some mathematical equivalence between their models and ours, which is already a leap to assume, there is still a question about whether the specific measure used would be translated to something equivalent to our object length measure in their model, which gets much stronger than just some equivalence assumption. And it’s even stronger to assume that this equivalence could just be inferred without any other information apart from the disk.
It seems disproportionate to fuss about "a leap to assume..." when we are talking about a small plaque affixed to a probe on the highly speculative basis that something intelligent might one day retrieve it, as opposed to something that is mission-critical. Would we be better off for not making these "leaps"?
It would be a leap to assume another culture has something similar to (or, in some cases, anything resembling) one's ethics, sense of humor or taste in music. In comparison to these things, science has something they do not: apparently universal and impersonal 'laws', which, where we can check, appear to hold across the visible universe (putting aside some unresolved issues on the leading edge of our present knowledge.)
For some extra-solar civilization to examine the probe and its plaque intact, it will have to rendezvous with it in space. It seems to me to be the greater leap of faith to suppose this can be done without having knowledge that is isomorphic or equivalent to our formulation of orbital mechanics. Do you have any concrete ideas about how this might be so?
As a theoretical physicist, yes physics could definitely be subjective between different species. Physics is the way HUMANS describe nature to themselves. I don't doubt that it describes some greater nature outside of us that is invariant, but it is only a description - not the thing itself. Like mathematics it is an anthropocentric conceptualization that has many arbitrary and historically contingent choices in its choice of representation and its chosen objects of study.
How could we ever be certain than another intelligence (whatever that means) would be capable of understanding the intended message? Unless of course we are already starting off with the major assumption that the only things that can be intelligent are things like us. I'm not even sure that intelligent has any meaning aside from denoting behavior "similar to us".
Our understanding evolves, course corrects, spins off etc., we can use some static value as purported from the dark ages or by newtonian or later einstenian points of view. They all are measurably correct for the problems that they are trying to solve for the people who lived during those times. A million years from now would these values still be relevant or be considered as having the same value of importance or will they be replaced by even more finer and precise and contextually different values that could be more precise and more accurate etc.,
Indeed. Say, maybe a civilization didn't start out with trying to build the world of particles of progressively finer size, but started directly with a model of fields, waves and charges and therefore never had a concept of a discrete elemental particle, and in turn a system built around that to categorize elements.
Or to them, an atom is as large an arbitrary macro structure as proteins are to us, and so they would never consider two empty circles with a single line to represent something so big and chaotic. Or maybe they had the crazy idea of building everything of vibrating strings!
Who knows what the abstractions and approximations would be when the foundation of it all isn't "getting hit on the head by an apple".
The 21 cm line was chosen specifically because it’s the brightest line in the radio regime in our galaxy. Any civilization in the Milky Way capable of developing electromagnetic sensors would see that emission. There is a game theoretic component to this, as these other civilizations would also know that we could also see that line, and thus understand its importance
The prevalence of the 21 cm wavelength is something they would likely discover should they be in a part of the universe similar to ours. What I find laughable is the means of trying to communicate this wavelength and using it as a means to indicate our size.
Now if you go the other way, referenced 21 cm as a well known quantity (say, by making the plaque 21cm wide and referencing its diameter) and used that to describe the hydrogen spin flip in order to teach or communicate our level of physics understanding rather than depend on a shared understanding, then I'd say it makes more sense.
What if you end up with a picture of the record & everything else gets lost - that riddle will still work. Say the civilisation that found it collapses & leaves behind some garbled data, including a picture of the record.
Or even future human data archeologists digging through a mix of 20 & 21 century data heavily polluted by AI slop. ;-)
I really wonder how future archaelogists are ever going to decode our timeline. Imagine a meteor strikes, civilization falls apart, and in 20,000 years they dig up a data centre. Even if they get the computers to work and the hard drives are still readable, everything will be encrypted.
Or maybe you just have what was stored in various nuclear shelters at that time ? That could be even more confusing!
In one unused shelter here in Brno the numbered stones of a medieval chapel are stored since it was demolished long ago. In another shelter in Prague you can find the complete archive records of the Prague 4 city administration.
Any aliens discovering this would inevitably reach the conclusion that humans had a lot of respect to both honoring their past & for comprehensive bureaucracy. So much indeed, that when the end came, they decided to forego the temporary safety of their shelters and let this legacy of their culture survive instead!
Making the data fault tolerant to the discovery by another civilization, its collapse and later rediscovery by another civilization seems a bit of a stretch goal. :)
What if extraterrestrial "intelligence" didn't have a reason to "evolve" functional equivalents of a visual cortex. Even on earth where having vision gives a distinct evolutionary advantage over non-vision based living forms, species without vision far outnumber those with vision.
(I was sarcastically pointing to the plaque itself, a physical entity of a well known size to anyone capable of observing the drawing on it, unlike the space craft or physics riddles.)
Yeah. It would be pretty funny if an alien reader of the plaque concluded that 1 refers to the actual length of the line between the two circle thingies and concluded, therefore, that we're only a few cm tall.
Some technical issues that seem to be fuckups by the author and a vague complaint about a grant from Horizon that also funds some not so privacy friendly things. Guilty by association or something. I see no reason at all in this post to avoid Proton.
The judge's opinion explains this in detail. It depends on the so-called "good-faith exception" to the exclusionary doctrine.
The idea is that if the police tell the truth in their warrant application of what they are looking for and why, the judge issues a search warrant, and the police lawfully execute the warrant, then there's no point in suppressing the evidence just because, years later, it's determined that the warrant should not have issued.
There's no point in protecting one individual against an unconstitutional search that proves him guilty. The constitutional issue is the ability to have conducted the search in the first place. The only reason we suppress accurate, but unconstitutionally obtained evidence is to disincentivize the action in the future. This "good-faith exception" strikes that balance pretty ideally.
The defendants rights were violated, but there is no doubt about the legitimacy of the data, and what it implies. Police now know they cannot use this method in the future, so suppressing the evidence in this particular case does not disincentivize anything, as long as its made clear that it cannot be done in the future.
> Police now know they cannot use this method in the future, so suppressing the evidence in this particular case does not disincentivize anything, as long as its made clear that it cannot be done in the future.
It disincentivizes constitutional crapshoots where they throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It incentivizes using already known-good techniques where possible.
“This method” is also frequently scoped very narrowly. Next time they can get the data from a slightly different place, and it’s suddenly a new case. Or they filter the time or device info slightly differently. There are a bajillion permutations one could argue about in good faith.
What you're saying would be true if the law were black and white, but in reality there are countless grey areas.
In those cases, suppressing the evidence would go a long way to disincentivize actions the police know are likely unconstitutional but there's enough uncertainty for plausible deniability.
It's the breadth. Searches have to be narrowly tailored to provide evidence of the specific crime being investigated. There's discussion of this on pages 12–13 of the judge's opinion.
It is not reasonable to hold someone accountable for doing something illegal in 2020 that was only determined to be illegal in 2025.
The police officers applied to a judge for a warrant. The judge gave them the warrant. Now another judge says that the warrant should not have been issued in the first place. How is that the police's fault? How would you hold them accountable?
You're conflating "holding accountable" and "letting benefit".
The question isn't whether the police officers who initiated the tower dump should go to jail or be fired, but whether the evidence they obtained would be admissible. It shouldn't be.
Also, a cell tower dump is not an act in good faith - neither in 2020 nor in 2025, regardless of whether the court lets it slide or not.
This is the basic idea of the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule. The exclusionary rule was supposed to deter police misconduct (e.g., searching a house without a warrant, thereby violating the Fourth Amendment) by preventing them from using evidence they never should have had. But the deterrence rationale doesn't hold up that well when the police reasonably (and that's key) believed that they were acting lawfully.
'Your constitutional rights were violated but tough luck, nothing can be done about it because the court is extending special 'good faith' courtesy to the police that you don't get (some animals are more equal than others in court decisions/considerations when minor laws (the fourth amendment) are broken)'.
And people wonder why American's are apathetic to it all. A judge can just wave away constitutional violations all day/every day because 'good faith'.
Got it, Constitutional rights were violated, but our Constitution, the highest law in the land, has it written in that precedent is put above the Constitution.
> It is not reasonable to hold someone accountable for doing something illegal in 2020 that was only determined to be illegal in 2025.
Tell that to a financial regulator and see where it gets you. That's how it works for everyone else. Just because a law hasn't been clarified yet doesn't stop it from being applied to your past actions after courts have clarified it.
Sure, if the thing in question were someone being tried with a crime.
Rather, it's the opposite. It's not "punishing" police to say "hey, you can't use this evidence". That's not a punishment for them, they shouldn't personally be offended by that. And we certainly shouldn't be comparing that outcome to as if the police are being put behind bars.
We shouldn't be putting people behind bars with bad evidence just because we didn't know it was bad when we got it. No, we should retroactively say "hey, we can't use that evidence". If that hurts the police's fee fees I don't think that should come into play. I don't think that's a metric we should be optimizing for.
The purpose of the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine is to disincentivize illegal collection of evidence. But there has always been a good-faith exception to it: if the police genuinely believed that what they were doing was legal, as they did in this case, relying on established legal precedent, then throwing out the evidence doesn't disincentivize anything.
But the declaration that cell tower dumps are illegal now disincentivizes future police from relying on dumps, since they now know (or should know) that such evidence will be thrown out. And more to the point, magistrate judges will stop issuing warrants for cell tower dumps.
"fruit of the poisonous tree" is one of those "magic words" that a lot of people think will preclude prosecution. Judges frequently make exceptions and judgement calls on whether a given search was legal, and people are frequently convicted on "poisoned" evidence, and evidence compromised in all sorts of other ways.
if the police genuinely believed that what they were doing was legal, as they did in this case, relying on established legal precedent, then throwing out the evidence doesn't disincentivize anything
This is obviously false. It would disincentivize the police from collecting evidence without first ensuring that the method of collection was legal.
That does not make it legal and it does not eliminate the responsibility of asking for the warrant and using it.
Not saying there was a conspiracy here, but bad judges exist and arranging for a warrant is possible even for honest judges. If you are a policeman and you want to kill someone, get a judge to sign a "no knock" warrant, get in their house and shoot them, it happened many times; there were cases when the warrant was not even for the address of the poor guy that was killed and last year the warrant was for someone that borrowed a lawn mower from the judge who signed it and did not return it. So the warrant excuse is not so good.
but can you hold them to that in any manner or does each officer need to be told officially and continue to plead ignorance of the law until they are in some documented way informed of it? can you plead ignorance of the law if you know it's not legal to dump all traffic from a cell phone tower but no one said that it's not legal to dump all the traffic from a web server (assuming for the sake of argument the obv interpretation that this ruling applies to all data stores that contain data from multiple people)? Every time you need to violate the constitution can you just have the new guy do it? Does declaring this illegal actually do anything to protect the rights of people who did nothing wrong and had their data seized and pored over by police anyway?
>> Does declaring this illegal actually do anything to protect the rights of people
Yes, next time they do it the data cannot be used in court as it was already declared anti-constitutional by that Circuit and good faith argument cannot be used. Good faith and not knowing the law are different; good faith can be used when the law is not clear enough and there was no rule to clarify.
It happens very often with 2A restrictions that are overturned by courts, but they are in effect for years and when they are repelled by courts then similar laws are passed just to be repelled years later, but during all the years there is an anti-constitutional law in place with prohibitions. So police cannot do cell searches, but local governments can enact anti-constitutional laws with intention and wipe rights successfully, for example laws that mandates telecom companies to provide the data to the police.
The rule that illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible exists to disincentivize the police from obtaining evidence illegally.
But if the police believed, in good faith, that a particular search was legal and reasonable, based on the fact that a judge authorized them to perform it, then excluding the resulting evidence doesn't serve that purpose.
Update: This is not a new thing. The good-faith exception has been in U.S. law for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception . You may not like it, but it's not something the judge just made up out of thin air.
Excluding the evidence would incentivize police to stop choosing the most convenient interpretation of the law. They should have to try to make the most accurate interpretation, which means punishment when they are wrong. Just like for everyone else
No. In 2020 the police went to a magistrate judge to ask for a warrant. The judge issued the warrant. Five years later, another judge has determined that the warrant should not have been issued in the first place.
That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.
> That is not the fault of the police, and there is no reason to punish them for it.
It's not punishing the police. It's not allowing them to use evidence that they shouldn't have been allowed to gather.
Fining them, firing them, and/or jailing them for breaking the law; those would be ways of punishing them. That's not what is being discussed here. Admittedly, we pretty much _never_ punish police no matter what they do, so it's kind of a moot point.
No, that is not the point. Common law does not exist to render justice to the people in and of itself, it exists to give the people a mechanism of getting that justice themselves.
I expect anyone that was convicted due to this dragnet would now be able to appeal.
Where is it written that, if a judge tells a police officer they can do something, they are legally allowed to do it, no matter how blatantly illegal it is? I'm open to being corrected, but I have a hard time believing that, if a judge told a officer they have permission to go out an summarily execute 40 random people in the mall, it would be legal for the officer to do so. And once _anything_ can be illegal even if a judge tells them two, you're now in a grey area figuring out what is/isn't illegal.
At the moment, I would believe they were both wrong, and that the officer broke the law. I _think_ the judge also broke the law, but I don't know exactly how that works.
Who commands the police officer to do things? Is it his/her superior, or the judge directly?
If there is a chain of command in any police department or Sheriff's Office, then the judge is not going to jump that chain and interpose herself in giving orders to a lowest-level officer who is on-the-ground and doing things.
The order's going to go to the office of their commander, who's going to evaluate it, and then it'll go through proper channels, so by the time your hypthetical "Police Officer in Summary Execution of 40 Innocent Consumers" then the order's been interdicted or validated as totally within the law as they interpret it?
I think there's a disconnect in the way we're looking at this. It seems like you feel the person who told the officers to "go do this" is at fault, and anyone who did <this> isn't. I feel strongly that both are at fault. If a mob boss orders a murder and a hitman carries it out, they're both at fault. Same deal here.
“You feel”? Who is “you”? Are you referring to me? I have no feelings or judgement on any particular case. I have no facts about them. I don’t care because I am not involved and I am not in authority.
Please do not ascribe judgements to me that I am not making. I was simply asking questions to clarify a typical process that may be hypothetically followed. Thank you.
Sorry, there's multiple people in the conversation. I was originally speaking to the person that said this
> They were allowed to gather the evidence - they had a warrant from a judge. The judge erred, not the police.
And that statement makes it very clear that, if the judge gives the ok to do something, then the judge is at fault; and _not_ the person that actually does the thing. I disagree with this. The person who does the thing is responsible for their own actions. The judge may _also_ be at fault, but that doesn't absolve the officer who took the action.
Your response (in the context of what I said)
>> if a judge tells a police officer they can do something
> Who commands the police officer to do things? Is it his/her superior, or the judge directly?
Seems to indicate you think I said the judge is the one who ordered the officer to do the thing. I didn't. I said the judge gave permission for it.
To be very clear, in a situation where
1. Tier 1 officer orders Tier 2 officer to have a thing done
2. Tier 2 officer orders Tier 3 officer to do the thing
3. Judge authorizes Tier 3 officer to do the thing
4. Tier 3 officer does the thing
If "the thing" is clearly illegal (to a reasonable person), then ALL of those individuals are at fault. And Tier 3 officer clearly broke the law when doing the thing.
Really we should be punishing the judge who approved it in the first place. A judge that violates the rights of the people shouldn't be allowed to be a judge.
There is obviously a line between what is and is not a permissible search somewhere and it's virtually inevitable that judicial rulings will from time to time err on both sides of that line (and they do). Punishing judges for ruling in ways which are later overturned would destroy rule of law at a fundamental level.
> Punishing judges for ruling in ways which are later overturned would destroy rule of law at a fundamental level.
Not where people's most fundamental rights are concerned. What it would do is cause judges to err on the side of caution before making a ruling that would violate the constitution which is exactly what we want judges to do.
That's obviously unworkable if you consider that even the Supreme Court's interpretation of fundamental rights can change over time. If a future Supreme Court overturns a prior Supreme Court decision in a way that expands a particular right, do we punish all the judges who followed the previous precedent? If we do, then we have a judicial system that encourages individual judges to ignore the Supreme Court, which doesn't seem like a good setup.
But more fundamentally, the system you're proposing doesn't just incentivize judges to err on the side of caution, it incentivizes them to never rule in favor of the government and just punt the decision to the next level. If the cost of ever being overturned on appeal in favor of an individual's rights is losing their job, while there is no corresponding downside of ruling the other way, there's basically no reason to ever risk granting a warrant, for example.
Judges who violate the basic rights of other judges would also be subject to some level of accountability though. At a certain point, we have to trust government officials to at least attempt to do their jobs and we need to have ways to address the situation when they don't. It shouldn't matter if that judge is a democrat or a republican.
Right now there is currently zero accountability. At best, when a judge violates people's constitutional rights some small number of those people will be able to get an unjust ruling overturned at which point they might be released from prison or might get some monetary payout at the expense of taxpayers, but the judge is still free to do whatever they want without consequence knowing that at least a few people will be unable to assert their rights.
Considering that unaccountable judges are where we're starting from, I think having a means to make judges accountable can only improve things. Given the choice between judges being able to violate people's rights without any accountability or a system where judges have some level of accountability for the most egregious violations of our rights, even while that system requires us to make sure that it isn't being clearly abused, I think we're better off with the option to get some accountability where it's needed.
It doesn't need to be a perfect system to be a better one, and it feels like we could put some guardrails in place to keep the amount of obvious abuse down. It's difficult to believe that judges willfully violating people's rights without consequence is an unsolvable problem, let alone one that couldn't possibly be improved somehow.
The Rule of Law is already being broken by a judge saying the law doesn't matter when it is convenient to getting a conviction, meanwhile for normal citizens ignorance of the law is not a defense.
This is not responsive. The police did not commit a crime here.
Also note that there are good-faith defenses to all sorts of crimes, because (for example) there is a difference between knowingly defrauding a customer and just making a mistake.
The Fourth Amendment was violated by the magistrate judge who issued the illegal warrant, not by the police officers who, acting in in good faith, executed it.
No, the judge told them they were allowed to do it. The act of doing it is what violated the fourth amendment. If they hadn't acted on the warrant, the fourth amendment wouldn't have been violated. The judge was _wrong_, but the police are the ones that violated the amendment.
If my lawyer tells me selling a specific analog version of fentanyl is legal because it's different enough/whatever, and I good faith sell an analog version of fentanyl, do I get a good faith exemption?
I take it fentanyl is some illegal drug, but some people can legally sell drugs (licensed apothecaries). If they go for a license, get it approved, then sell a drug, and then it turns out the license is invalid due to no fault of their own and should not have been issued, I don't think anyone is surprised if the apothecary is not on the hook for that. But I'm not a lawyer, much less a judge, so who knows what they'd actually rule
In the example where "someone told me to do it", you're glossing over evidence (this was in writing, not hearsay). In the example of addictive substances, you can be reasonably expected to do your own research and not take a random person's written word for it. The analogy is so hyperbolic, I don't get the impression you're trying to reasonably think about this case
Fentanyl is an illegal drug. There is an Analog Acct that makes it so that close analogs to fentanyl are illegal. That was done because people were making analogs and getting away with it.
Drug dealers then went to their lawyers and asked if certain formulations fell under the Analog Act. Their lawyer said no and wrote out how they were legal and didn't fall under the analog act. They sold the drugs and went to prison even though they thought they were in the clear (so good faith should apply, right?).
This is a real case that I have experience with so not sure why I'm being called out as acting in bad faith or making up a ridiculous scenario. This is a real scenario with the people sitting in prison still (for another 5 years).
Right, I see. There's still the difference of having official permission according to the legal system, such as the search warrant being a mechanism codified in law, or the mechanism to get a license as an apothecary to operate a pharmacy
If there is no such license you can apply for, I'm not sure there exists a system by which you can be indemnified from criminal prosecution for doing such sales (or possession or whatever the case may be)
The question reminded me of a 2019 case where two parties went to the judge to get a ruling on something, without there being damages or claims. (Here, a potential buyer and seller could ask to decide whether a certain substance would be legal to sell before the sale happens, steering clear of prosecution until there is a ruling.) Reading that case back, the legal provision that made this possible only applies to situations where the parties are free to do whatever (such as with a contract dispute); it does not work for creating jurisprudence on criminal law. Asking ChatGPT as a quick last attempt, it proposes to ask a lawyer (you've shared how well that worked) or to sue the government over the law that makes the sale illegal which would be void if the judge goes "this substance doesn't fall under that law anyway" and then you've got jurisprudence to work with. The latter sounds a bit strange, not sure if that's actually possible, but it'd be worth exploring for such edge cases where it may or may not be criminal to do a certain thing
Of course, I totally see how this is a double standard: you've done your homework and to the best of everyone's knowledge it's legal, and then when it turns out you're wrong, whether you get sent to prison depends on whether it was the government who sanctioned it. Everyone can make an honest mistake, government or no
I don't know the intentions of the drugs dealers you have experience with. If there are legit purposes for the specific analog they were selling (that is, purposes falling outside of the spirit of the law that makes fentanyl (analogs) illegal) then it seems strange that a judge would send them to prison for years. Was a long prison sentence perhaps compulsory due to some minimum sentence requirement as part of this war on drugs thing? Wondering this since our government is implementing more and more minimum punishments despite research showing this does not deter the behavior and also increases recidivism due to the longer time you spend outside society, losing any position that you had in it. It's great
In the United States you can sell non-controlled supplements. For example you used to be able to buy MDMA (street name ecstasy/molly) over the counter at health food stores in the 1980s before the government classified it. In my area there are all kinds of strange stimulants sold in gas stations, and something called kratom people seem to get mildly hooked on.
The drug dealers were ex-marines that received debilitating injuries fighting in Afghanistan, became addicted to pain pills when they came home, and because of their injuries were unable to work. So they were selling drugs. Then the analog act came around, which made a large amount of closely related drugs illegal. They were drug dealers, and should be in prison. Someone died from these weird compounds they were bringing in from China to try and skirt the Analog Act. But these guys in their head justified it because they were using the same compounds, and they felt they needed to subdue their pain. But these guys also didn't hide it. They had a lawyer that they ran things by. They bought cars from dealerships with their money, not trying to hide it in any way.
I don't think 'good faith' should apply to them. But also don't think 'good faith' should supersede the United States Constitution. If it applies to the prosecution side, it should apply to the defense. A judge shouldn't be able to waive away our Constitution just because it's inconvenient in a prosecution. In the US, even if something is determined unconstitutional and that determination means people should be released from prison, every single person impacted has to go to court and prove it applies to them. We should release people imprisoned unConstitutionally, but we don't, because again it's inconvenient to the legal system. There is even a time limit on those people to go to court, and if they don't in time (say because they don't know, because they aren't notified) then they are bared from bringing it up in a motion to the court.
Drugs are a hard one. I blew up my life over addiction. Many around me were to. Some were using drugs, some alcohol, some gambling, some risky sex. One interesting feature of American society is we used to give people a second chance. For old guys like me, many of the characters in westerns were criminals turned better as law men one town over. These guys would have been completely different if they were receiving adequate pain care and some sort of job opportunities when they came back from war. I think society needs that. But it also can't enable bad behavior. Interesting/complex times.
18 U.S. Code § 242, “Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States…”.
The judge erred in granting the warrant, the police violated the above statute. Them being unaware would be an affirmative defense, that does require admission of the above crime.
If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise and in some cases also be acquitted.
So this isn’t really a good argument even if we ignore the fact that it’s a non sequitur.
A better argument is that the good faith exception, while making sense in principle, can easily be abused by the police to make illegally obtained evidence look like it was done in good faith, and therefore the exception itself should be removed because of how difficult it is to actually gauge and enforce.
> If you believe in good faith that you have not broken the law, and can reasonably convince a jury of that, you almost certainly will receive a lighter sentence than you would have otherwise
Juries usually don't decide sentencing, and even if they did I don't think that would matter with crimes viewed as wrong in themselves (mala in se) though it might with crimes viewed as wrong because they are prohibited (mala prohibita).
Well there's also the case that a main component in having your sentence reduced is expressing genuine remorse.
I'm not sure how on earth someone could be remorseful for a mala prohibitum victimless offense while simultaneously maintaining they in good faith thought they were following the law. Any expression of those two views simultaneously would in practice be seen as not much more than "sorry I got caught -- doing something I thought was legal."
Doesn't seem contradictory to explain you thought it was okay and had no ill intent, but now realize your mistake and won't do it again. Requiring regret is problematic when you're claiming innocence (didn't do it), but when all parties agree you did it, your concern is convincing them you won't do it again.
Jeremy Kettler -- bought a silencer completely made and sold within his state (no interstate commerce) and believed based on the Kansas Second Amendment Act (I think that was the name) which legalized intrastate NFA items that it was 100% legal. His own state representatives had advertised to their constituents that the law exempted silencers that never crossed state boundaries. The buyer and seller did it openly and even had photos on facebook, seemingly totally oblivious this would actually still touch federal law / interstate commerce.
Cody Wilson -- Went to a sugar daddy website that verifies IDs to ensure all 'escorts' are 18 which is a pretty good faith way to do it IMO. Woman seemingly had fake ID at some point, and also lied and turned out to be like 16 or 17. At some point later she underwent counseling at school and admitted she was an escort, after which a criminal investigation happened and Mr. Wilson was arrested. As a strict liability crime, there was no defense that due diligence was done to ensure the escort was 18.
The SAFA case is complicated, granted, and rare; it reached the appellate circuit for a reason.
CSAM and child sexual assault are one of the few areas of criminal law where we confer (in my opinion, correctly) absolute liability.
Broadly speaking, I think more cops have been convicted of duty-related crimes than unsuspecting random convicted of and punished for a crime they didn’t know they committed.
These kind of convictions aren't rare in the firearms ___domain. People get arrested or convicted all the time for doing stuff they had no idea was illegal. More recently a Navy Sailor (Patrick Adamiak) in the pipeline to be a SEAL was convicted after selling an imported parts kit that had been destroyed per ATF guidelines from the early 2000s. But apparently when he resold it, (after buying it openly from gunbroker), the ATF decided the way the kit was cut up was wrong and put him away for 20 years. Oh yes they had a few other excuses -- he had a decomissioned RPG tube, so the ATF just put an entirely other gun inside the fucking tube and fired it to claim it still work.
In that case, even the Navy, which almost never does this to felons, terminated him with an honorable discharge and even let him run up all his liberty time before releiving him.
Absolute liability is unquestionably completely wrong. It is punishing someone despite his not having had any kind of guilty state of mind. It creates criminal liability for something that is completely beyond the defendant's control. Nothing could be a greater abuse.
What justification do you have for the view that it is right that in some US states you can be convicted of a crime despite never having done anything wrong, with no negligence, no recklessness, no intent, no knowledge, nothing? Because that goes against the most fundamental precept of criminal law: the requirement of both actus reus and mens rea. With no guilty mind there is no criminal liability.
Hide some drugs in someone's luggage when they're traveling at an airport and then get back to me. There's tons of cases of people being arrested for things they either had no idea they doing or had no idea was illegal. And then even more where the police tack on lots of charges for someone that's already been arrested; for things that they had no idea they were a problem in the first place.
Hell, there are tons of examples of people being arrested for things that aren't crimes at all, and even for acts that are constitutionally protected. Police don't care because they know they'll get away with it (and might even get a paid vacation) when the case against the person who was arrested and likely lost their job as a result gets thrown out. If the unlawfully arrested person is lucky and/or wealthy enough to afford a good lawyer they might get a decent amount of tax payer money out of it.
It's a perfectly reasonable defense to a charge of mail fraud, for example.
Or employing illegal aliens. "But they told me they had work visas, and they showed me what later turned out to be expertly-counterfeited visas!" Why shouldn't that get you off the hook, if true?
I have this vague impression that a certain amount of intent, but (a) I think it’s more about intending to do the bad thing than knowing that the bad thing is illegal, and (b) this is all very vague so I could be totally wrong.
It apparently doesn't in one of the areas of which I have a high level interest. The ATF is constantly changing their mind on what a machine gun is, and if it is one, it is a strict liability crime.
Not long ago a guy was put in jail for creating business-card sized metal sheets with the image of a 'lightning link' (machinegun conversion device) on it. Not the actual device, just a picture of it etched <0.001" into the metal. Clearly just art, and even when the ATF cut it out they could not get it function as a machine gun. They gave it to an actual machinist, and even after a day he could not get it to function as a machine gun. They could only get it to do anything by literally jamming it into the gun and making it do hammer follow, which every AR-15 can do with the parts already in it.
Up until the guy was convicted I don't think anyone had any idea a picture of a machine gun on a metal card was a machine gun. They even convicted the guy advertising it, who never as far as I know actually distributed one.
Are you talking about the AutoKeyCard case, Kristopher Ervin and Matthew Hoover? Ervin finally gets out of prison on 2025-05-03 and Hoover gets out on Christmas 2026.
Agreed. Part of the problem here is that there are few consequences (other than perhaps non-promotion) for judges who issue bad warrants, and we don't have good information on how many warrant applications are rejected or wrongly granted.
It is an established principle. But it also is an exception to how our legal system works: you are usually bound, retroactively, by new legal principles when courts “discover” them.
Reminds me of the de-facto good-faith exemptions for US police for not shooting civilians, or for the US government for arming death squads, or dictators, or genocidal military campaigns etc.
Horseshit. This isn't a criminal conviction, the standard of mens rea doesn't and shouldn't apply. To add a good faith loophole only incentivizes two things: purposeful ignorance and lying.
The problem here is that the police ALREADY have systems upon systems upon systems in place to ensure they never have to take accountability, ever. Police _literally_ get away with murder, but more importantly, they routinely get away with lesser offenses.
I mean, if we can't even charge someone like Chauvin without first burning down a few cities, could you just imagine how many clerical errors get swept under the rug? How much false evidence is floating around? How many innocent people are behind bars?
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