23 June 2006

Scalia turned my research completely on its head

So says a a leading criminologist, in response to SCOTUS Justice Scalia's justification in the Hudson ruling for the judiciary not enforcing the "knock and announce rule".
In an interview with Radley Blako, published in The Agitatior, Criminology Prof. Sam Walker (UN-Omaha), who serves on the Panel on Policing of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, states "Scalia turned my research completely on its head. My point was that these reforms came about because the courts, specifically the Warren Court, forced the police to institute better procedures with judicial oversight. Scalia now wants to take that oversight away."

Picking up on Professor Walker's concern, Ed Brayton, Dispatches From the Culture Wars, observes the following:

The irony of this is that Scalia, by his own declaration a textualist and an originalist, would be the first one to criticize reliance on social science research to justify a court ruling. Yet not only does he use such research to justify his ruling here, he does so sloppily and inaccurately. If he did not agree with the outcome of the decision, if it was written by someone other than him using the same reasoning for a goal he didn't agree with, Scalia would be the first one out front blistering this decision as exactly the kind of unprincipled, undisciplined judicial reasoning that one would expect from those horrible liberals who ignore sound judicial interpretation in favor of injecting their own social science driven biases into the law.

Americans being setup for the full blown police state.

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