Well actually that is how the court system works.
Many people don't even have standing unless they are accused of violating some law, or otherwise can show a specific loss.
Rather than explain standing, I will say that criminal cases are primarily what set case law.
<snipped for brevity, but well worth reading>
Great commentary, Zoogster. I'd like to take it a step further, though:
Zoogster is absolutely right in that law is largely defined through the trial of criminals, not upstanding law-abiding citizens. Consequently, the people who are fighting for the rights of all men are people to whom we're generally not sympathetic, whom we really
want to see in jail. Our basic sense of justice and fair play causes us to
want to see the guy go down, so we're less inclined to be sympathetic when their rights are violated in some way.
Such is the nature of the beast.
It's more insidious than that, though: at this point, we have so many laws that everybody is guilty of breaking one or another at some point. Laws are often sufficiently redundant that prosecutors can turn a single act into multiple violations, charging a defendant with all of them ("charge stacking"). Not only does this mean potentially huge jail terms, and a very difficult legal defense, but it ratchets up that natural psychological pressure to see him as a "bad guy." Consider the following two accusations:
A: Charged with armed robbery
B: Charged with armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, brandishing, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, abduction, wearing a mask in the commission of a felony,
Which one just feels "worse?" A might be mistakenly identified, but B has half-a-dozen charges against him! That's not a mistake, it's a pattern! He's a dirtbag, a serious offender--lock him up!
'Course, they were exactly the same act.
Yes, I'm going somewhere with this. By passing overlapping laws that encourage charge stacking, we bias the system to hold an even lower opinion of the accused. The lower our opinion of the accused (who, remember, is the advocate who defines the limits of our rights), the less sympathy we have to the violation of
his rights, and thus the less we want to protect him--him who is, of course, all of us. The judge, being human, decides that in light of the "increasing professionalism" of our police force,* suing the officer or department is a more appropriate remedy than excluding the illegally-garnered evidence, and we all lose a little bit of freedom.
See where I'm going?
Of course, Joe Dirtbag gets on the news as having been convicted of half-a-dozen crimes, followed by an editorial about the city's crime wave (even though the actual crime rate is down these days), and the legislators do the only thing they know how to do: pass more laws. Next time, we charge him with
eight violations. Oh, and the state has a little bit less of a restriction on how it pursues the accused, and we have a little bit less recourse when our rights are violated.
Here's an interesting story for you:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/013008dnmetexonerate.35f8af6.html
Al Goodyear† is thought to have sexually assaulted at least sixty (60!) women during his lifetime. Steven Philips served many years for crimes that Al committed; he plead guilty out of fear that his two previous acquittals would cause him to get more time in jail when he was ultimately (falsely) convicted--after all, he's already gotten away with it twice! (Or maybe he really
was innocent--but are you going to take the word of somebody who was shady enough to have been picked up and charged twice?) We talk of technicalities, of "getting off" because somebody didn't dot his i's, but this is what we are really trying to protect against: convicting the innocent because somebody "knew" who did it and decided to get the "right" result.
Or maybe not.
Meanwhile, there was a case before the Supreme Court‡ last term in which prosecutors are sought to deny the defense the right to examine DNA evidence that everybody (including the prosecutor) agreed would absolutely prove guilt or innocence. The Federal government filed an amicus curiae brief supporting...the prosecutors. After all, who wants a rapist to go free? The court held 5-4 that the evidence could be withheld.
Remember, between letting the guilty go free and convicting the innocent, convicting the innocent is always the greater crime. It's so simple that it evades most people, but it's true. When we convict somebody, we close the case and move on. If we convict the wrong man,
we stop looking for the right one! It's not an either-or situation, but a lesser-included-offense: convicting the innocent
necessarily implies that the guilty will also avoid responsibility for the crime. It's not choose A or B, it's choose A or
A and B.
So be very, very careful when you look for somebody to be "tough on crime," to get the "right" result even if it means "bending" the rules a little bit. It's your rights at risk too, not just his.
* Not cop-bashing, Supreme Court bashing. See
Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U. S. 586 (2006)
† He went by Al. I heard the story from my dad, who was friends with him thirty-odd years ago. On a wild hair, dad thought to plug his name into Google and was stunned by what he found.
‡
District Attorney's Office for the Third Judicial District, et al. v. Osborne, another excellent example of our rights being defined by someone who is, by all appearances, a real dirtbag.
http://reason.com/archives/2009/03/02/does-the-constitution-grant-a
