Here’s an interesting story about a 43-year old pervert and some irate parents, from the Anchorage Daily News. Seems mommy and daddy weren’t happy that their 15-year old daughter was fed alcohol and groped.
What’s so striking here (and you’ll pardon the pun) — to me, at least — is that the perve has been charged at all, given the way the evidence against him was gathered.
Any lawyers out there wish to explain to me how this case won’t get thrown out on privacy violations? I suppose the prosecutor will argue inevitable discovery (or some such thing), but should the ends really justify the means….?
As long as the parents weren’t acting as agents of law enforcement at the time they broke into the defendant’s cabin, there’s no constitutional issue here. The fourth amendment protects against state action, not private action.
As far as I can tell from the story, the police did everything right. They obtained a warrant based on probable cause. (“Inevitable discovery” doesn’t apply; that’s a way for evidence discovered without a search warrant to be admissible. Here the police had a warrant.)
What bother me here is that the parents were breaking and entering, which is how they found incriminatory evidence. They then shared this evidence with the police, who obtained a search warrant—ostensibly on the testimony of the girl. Would a judge have issued a search warrant on the say so of one teen who wasn’t raped or molested (the perve attempted to grope her)?
You’re probably right—although what I’m seeing here is that, in effect, the parents were acting as proxies of law enforcement, for all practicable purposes, even though law enforcement didn’t ask them to act in that capacity.