Sunday, September 20, 2009

Goodbye, Number Five

Next time you get pulled over by a cop -- or stopped at random in a "sobriety checkpoint" -- you might want to remember the following laugh line: It's called the Fifth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, which reads, in part, that "No person... shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." Ho ho ho! It's a laugh line, because, like, so many of the other amendments to the Bill of Rights, pleading the Fifth -- that is, declining to assist the authorities in your own prosecution -- is a sick joke. Or like them, is about to become one. Because cops may soon have the legal authority to forcibly extract blood from you in order to use that blood as evidence against you in DWI cases -- which are criminal proceedings. It's all part of a new federal program -- yes, another one -- the stated purpose of which will be to determine how effective a "tool" such tactics would be in the ongoing (and endless) crusade against drunk driving. If it is deemed "effective" (do you doubt it will be?), then it will become as commonly practiced across this formerly free land as all the other outrages against civility and basic legal due process we have already assented to. Neither sees -- or would give a damn about it, if they did -- the point. Which is that empowering cops to physically hold you down and draw blood from your body against your will -- to be used as evidence against you in a criminal proceeding -- is to rape the Fifth Amendment and thus, another basic and ancient tenet of the late great tradition we used to call the rule of law...AmericanSpectator

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