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| Victims of an American death squad: Ex-Marine murder victim Jose Guerena with his wife and sons. |
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution (emphasis added)
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land…. No person shall be disturbed in his private affairs, or his home invaded, without authority of law.
Sections 3 and 8 of the “Declaration of Rights” from the Arizona State Constitution’s “Declaration of Rights”
People seeking to defend the manifestly indefensible often sabotage themselves by disclosing critical details that undermine their argument. Mike Storie, the police union lawyer representing the SWAT operators who murdered Jose Guerena in his home on May 5, did this during his May 19 press conference in an attempt to assign all of the blame for Jose’s death on the victim and his terrorized wife.
As reported by the Arizona Star, Storie insisted that if the Guerena family had permitted the armed intruders into their home, those inside “probably … wouldn’t have been arrested.” This is because the “warrant was not directed at any particular person, and Guerena’s home was not mentioned, but it was targeting whoever might be inside the residence….”
That is to say that this was not a legitimate search warrant, under the requirements imposed by the Fourth Amendment (and expressly incorporated in Arizona law through the state constitution). The instrument used as supposed justification for the armed assault was akin to the “writs of assistance” used by British soldiers during the years leading up to the American colonial rebellion.
As Judge Andrew Napolitano summarizes, writs of assistance were “self-written search warrants” that “enabled [British] soldiers and government agents to enter any private building or dwelling and search for whatever they had authorized themselves to search for.” In this way, occupation forces could invade any home or business they chose, confiscate any item they suspected might be contraband, and haul away in irons anybody who attracted their malevolent attention.
The only material difference I can identify between that tyrannical practice and SWAT raids of the kind that resulted in the murder of Jose Guerena is the fact that British Redcoats were considerably more restrained in their behavior.
Writs of assistance were conspicuous among the grievances that led the colonial Patriots to rebel against the British government, and they were the direct inspiration for the Fourth Amendment, a provision that as of May 16 is de jure dead letter in the American Imperium.
On that date, two rulings were announced — one by the Indiana State Supreme Court, the other by the U.S. Supreme Court — that formally vitiated constitutional impediments to warrantless intrusions by police.
Those rulings simply formalized the state of affairs that has long existed in the United States; after all, owing the fraudulent, murderous enterprise called the “war on drugs,” the Fourth Amendment has had no tangible relationship to public policy for decades. Nonetheless, that Amendment remains on the books as part of the “supreme law” — which means that the raid on the Guerena home was, in a literal, legally binding sense, a home invasion robbery.
Michael Storie is a living illustration of the fact that there is no “mob lawyer” more drenched in disrepute than a barrister who prostitutes himself in the service of a police union.
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