Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thaumasiotes 4303 days ago
> Quinn’s client, for example, was the victim in a domestic abuse incident. But when the police arrived, they checked her occupancy permit, which only allowed for one person to reside at the apartment. The officers then cited the woman and her boyfriend $74 each for violating the permit. When Quinn protested that the law makes no effort to distinguish visitors from unlawful residents, the municipal prosecutor stated that “nothing good happens after 10pm” when single men and women are alone together — a sentiment later echoed by the judge.

In a different case, a Tennessee judge ruled that a child had to be renamed by its parents because

(1) "Messiah" is a title, not a name,

(2) that title is held by only one person,

and (3) that person is Jesus Christ.

Obviously, that ruling was grossly unconstitutional. But local courts often have only a hazy, at best, grasp of the law. I suspect it wouldn't be hard to have the principle that a single woman is prohibited by law from entertaining male visitors after 10 pm overturned in very strong terms... if anyone who could work within the court system were ever affected by this.

It would be nice if our legal system didn't deteriorate so badly at the bottom tiers. My guess is that the staffing levels necessary to provide our current levels of "oversight" preclude the obvious approach of only hiring people who can be expected to know what they're doing.

1 comments

I wonder if there should be a rule that if the police are called out for something, they can't leverage their presence to nab somebody for a crime of lesser severity. If they get called out for domestic abuse and see a freshly-murdered body, obviously they should take care of that. But if they get called out for domestic abuse and find a minor violation of an occupancy permit, maybe they should be required to ignore it.
This doesn't work very well as a remedy for the problem "civil servants [judges/police/etc.] at low levels don't know what's legal and what's not". Police officers are even routinely given immunity for violating laws they weren't supposed to have known.
Presumably they'd at least know about that rule, which would then prevent them from busting people for trivial crap when they show up for something serious, whether or not that trivial crap is legitimate.

As for the bigger problem, if we started holding civil servants liable for damages caused by failing to do their jobs correctly, it might help.