Posting Towards Gomorrah

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Not necessarily, on your opening question. I think the portion of Fourth Amendment doctrine you're referring to turns not on questions of geography or jurisdiction, but on the notion that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy when you enter the country, because of border checks. When you land at SFO, you are physically in San Mateo County, in the United States and within the jurisdiction of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, but if you have come from Japan you have less expectation of privacy than if you came from LA.

I think you are wrong here. My memory is vague, but there is an illegal immigrant check between San Diego and Los Angeles on interstate five. They can check any car for illegal aliens. The court upheld that right, as I remember it, because they argued that the stop was part of the border. At this point they agreed you had a reasonable expectation of privary but they said that you have no rights against searches and seizures at the border and this was part of the border. It thought it was a terrible decision because that check point was clearly not part of the border, but it was upheld by the ninth circuit. I am pretty sure it was pretty well accepted that you have no right against unreasonable searches at the border. When you enter the US at the border or anywhere else the courts have conluded you are not yet in the US and under its protections until you have been cleared by immigration and customs. Before you have been cleared by them you are not under the protection of the US constitution. That is why they can give you an anal cavity search if they want. You can not sue the border patrol ever for an unreasonable search at the border because they don't have to be reasonable. Before the US lets you enter, and come under the protection of the constitution, they can search you and do all sorts of stuff. I am pretty sure that is how the legal reasoning works.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If you are a Russian citizen and the US government seizes your fishing boat, whether or not you have a right to compensation should not depend on whether you boat was docked in Oakland, in San Francisco Bay, 10 miles off Golden Gate, 190 miles off Golden Gate, or 500 miles off Golden Gate, should it? Or whether you were on the boat at the time, or in Oakland, or in Moscow?

If the US government seizes a russian boat and searches it in international waters I don't think the Russians can take that to our courts claiming it was a violation of their due process rights.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
OK, but all of that is covered by the law of war, etc. It means that if you brought a claim in a US court, you'd lose in a high-octane New York second. If you are a POW and you bring a habeas claim, you lose, because you're a POW. But if you're just some guy from Japan, and the US government kidnaps you and refuses to release you, why should it matter whether you are in Okinawa or California?

Because you are not under the protection of the US constitution in Okinawa. If the US government seizes your property overseas you need to turn to your own government. We were not at war with Holland yet we seized their property. If the US government takes over a military base, and the local government allows the US government to throw the people off the land without and due process or compensation (this has happend in many countrys), they can't sue for that violation in US courts. This happened in the phillipines, the people sued, and I am pretty sure the US courts said the residents had no standing to sue in US courts. They were no protected by our constitution.

At the beginning of this debate I thought everyone in the debate knew this. And I could be wrong about this. If someone feels up to it they may want to check.