In the blog entry below this one, I touched on an incident that occurred in New Mexico which has set a fire in the blogosphere.\u00a0 That entry drew a lot of criticism from folks who want the involved officers, and their little dog too, to be hung out to dry because they took a guy to the hospital for a rectal exam because they thought he had hidden drugs up his butt.\u00a0 The examination found no drugs. The examination went to an extraordinary degree: multiple digital anal probes, multiple enemas, and finally, a colonoscopy, all without the suspect\u2019s consent.<\/p>\n
A disproportionate number of the critics were first time posters here, generally an indication that they read somewhere else that I disagreed with them, and just had to fight.\u00a0 No comments on that last blog entry here have been deleted at this writing; I encourage debate here, unlike the anti-gun blogs.\u00a0 I do, however, appreciate it if those with opposing views at least know what they\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n
Let me address some of the issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t find drugs, so they were wrong. Punish them.\u201d <\/i>Sorry, folks, that\u2019s not how it works. To make a long story short, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to be right, you have to be REASONABLE.\u201d Do a Google search for Graham v. Connor.<\/i> The suspect, with a long record of drug arrests, was known to one officer to have stuffed drugs up his butt before; the drug-sniffing dog alerted to the driver\u2019s seat where he had been sitting; and, what first alerted the officers to that area of his body, he was visibly clenching his buttocks tight.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey based it on an anonymous tip! Punish them!\u201d <\/i>No. ONE basis of multiple bases was that another officer said the suspect was known to put drugs up his butt. The fact that the officer giving that information was not named in the warrant does not make it an \u201canonymous tip,\u201d and only someone with a child-like grasp of the criminal justice system would think so. It\u2019s more like \u201ctransferred probable cause.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was anally raped by the authorities! Punish them!\u201d <\/i>Uh, no.\u00a0 Any cop with experience and good training, like any experienced medical professional who works the emergency room, knows of cases where drug suspects have hidden the dope in their body cavities and died from that act.\u00a0 It normally comes from swallowing a baggie of heroin or a balloon full of cocaine, but anally-inserted drugs can act even faster than those taken orally. If these officers AND medicos had failed to investigate this and the man died, the same anti-authoritarians would be calling for all their heads for letting him die untreated and unexamined. The cops followed the protocol: when there\u2019s a medical issue, turn it over to the medical people.\u00a0 No cop held a gun to the head of the physician who ordered the more extensive and invasive testing.\u00a0 When digital examination and X-ray were done, don\u2019t you think there was SOMETHING that made the medical professionals involved continue the testing?\u00a0 Some considerable time elapsed between the arrest and the colonoscopy: by that time, any physician would have to consider the possibility that the drugs had already been absorbed, and might reasonably do the colonoscopy to detect other signs of that having happened.<\/p>\n
I have to note that, to my knowledge, none of the bloggers who fueled the flames for outraging the public even considered any of this when they made their initial inflammatory posts.<\/p>\n
But one other hospital refused to do it! <\/i>That\u2019s the way it looks. However, I also know of one hospital whose policy is that if they have reason to believe that the conscious adult patient has swallowed poison and he refuses to be examined and treated, personnel are under orders not to examine or treat. Was that policy in place at the first hospital? I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 I do think that in any hospital with that policy, Risk Management needs to cross-pollinate with the Ethics Committee.<\/p>\n
But the warrant was from another jurisdiction, and had timed out. <\/i>If there is good reason to believe there may be life-threatening substances inside the patient\u2019s body, exigent circumstances (look it up) have kicked in. That triggers the doctrine of competing harms\/doctrine of necessity\/doctrine of two evils. (Look those up, too.) The importance of the warrant now pales.<\/p>\n
We all need to apply common sense. One commentator in the last blog entry noted the striking comparisons of this case to Florida v. Zimmerman.\u00a0 <\/i>In many respects, I have to concur. Each trope came first from plaintiff\u2019s counsel, unanswered by the defense (and the involved authorities) until much later. In this case, the defense (the police and the medicos) have not yet put their defense forward. We\u2019ve seen their warrant from before the fact of the examination, but not their reasoning for what they did next. Doctors are constantly under siege from bogus malpractice complaints, cops likewise with false excessive force allegations, and lawyers tell their defendant clients \u201cWe won\u2019t try the case in the press.\u201d\u00a0 Thus, only one side gets heard.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s laughable that the cops did that for the suspect\u2019s safety,<\/i> according to one critic. And, cops have no responsibility for our safety. <\/i>BS and more BS.\u00a0 A \u201cspecial relationship\u201d existed between the officers and the suspect the moment the investigative detention began. Once they came to believe he may have stuffed enough drugs up his butt to kill him, they had both legal and ethical duties to seek further examination.\u00a0 And if, when the docs caught the ball and did the examinations, they didn\u2019t see some reason to continue looking, why on earth would they have done so?\u00a0 Cui bono? <\/i>What would the docs who did the exams have possibly had to gain at that point, if those medical professionals DIDN\u2019T have reason to think it was necessary?<\/p>\n
The medical records and testimony will come out at trial, if not before. Don\u2019t judge based on one side, get outraged at what that one side told you, and then feel a need to defend it so you won\u2019t be embarrassed by being on the wrong side when the truth comes out.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s wait to hear from both sides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the blog entry below this one, I touched on an incident that occurred in New Mexico which has set a fire in the blogosphere.\u00a0 That entry drew a lot of criticism from folks who want the involved officers, and their little dog too, to be hung out to dry because they took a guy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2503","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}