[bmelton]

I mean to the community at large, many of whom might point at the failed war on drugs as something the government got wrong, but still want to castigate the guy "distributing meth to the children".

To capture what I meant, I should probably have said "because the guy is utterly indefensible ... in the eyes of most."

The point though is that it is those cases in which everybody (or enough of everybody) agrees that the defendant is "bad" and must be "punished" that our rights take the biggest hit, because so few object to a warrantless search executed on a guilty meth distributor, or pedophile, or terrorist, or whatever other bogeyman is accepted as belonging 100% to the out-group.