Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Federal court rules SWAT raid of barber shop excessive, unreasonable

A panel of judges chastised Florida sheriffs for a routine inspection of a barbershop that included masked officers, handcuffs, and illegal search as being a violation of the Constitution. The three-judge panel held that deputes of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office violated the civil rights of those inside an Orlando barber shop during a warrantless raid of the business conducted in 2010. The court maintained that the deputies violated the barber’s Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures as they served as the “muscle” for a routine inspection of the business by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR). Although the action had been ostensibly to check the licenses of the barbers as allowed by law, court documents tell of an armored and masked group of deputies who stormed the business with guns drawn, barking orders. “We first held nineteen years ago that conducting a run-of-the-mill administrative inspection as though it is a criminal raid, when no indication exists that safety will be threatened by the inspection, violates clearly established Fourth Amendment rights,” wrote Judge Robin S. Rosenbaum of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in the panel’s ruling on Berry v Leslie last week. “We reaffirmed that principle in 2007 when we held that other deputies of the very same Orange County Sheriff’s Office who participated in a similar warrantless criminal raid under the guise of executing an administrative inspection were not entitled to qualified immunity…Today, we repeat that same message once again. We hope that the third time will be the charm,” Rosenbaum said...more

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