A government that would rape, torture a man to find a fistful of drugs is not worthy of our allegiance, obedience or respect

The government will continue to act like that until we say “enough.”

Some excellent and insightful comments from Ken White, writing at the Popehat blog, writing about the anal rape of an innocent 62-year old man by law enforcement officials and medical professionals that took place in New Mexico earlier this year:

What’s terrifying is that though the warrant is extraordinarily flimsy, there’s a decent chance a judge might find it sufficient. That’s because the judiciary has been steadily ground down by decades of law-and-order thin-blue-line rhetoric and by the purported imperatives of the Great War on Drugs, and judges routinely shrug and accept transparently bogus police speculation and awful warrants.

What’s terrifying is that a judge who has bought the government’s narrative may decide that the amount of drugs that can be hidden in a man’s rectum justifies detaining him, X-raying him, repeatedly digitally probing him, and despite a total lack of indication he is carrying drugs, sedating him and subjecting him to a colonoscopy.

What’s terrifying is that the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is only as strong as judges allow it to be — and, by extension, only as strong as We the People insist that it must be. We the People are easily frightened into agreeing that the promise of safety outweighs the Fourth Amendment.

I’m not afraid because police officers violated David Eckert’s constitutional rights by raping and torturing him because they thought he might have a trivial amount of drugs. I’m afraid that they might not have violated his rights as defined by the courts, because we have allowed those rights to wither away out of fear and indifference.

The government will continue to act like that until we decide, collectively, that a government that would rape and torture a man to find a fistful of drugs is not worthy of our allegiance, obedience, or respect. The government will continue to act like that until we say “enough.”