Why did Jim Garrison investigate the Kennedy assassination? Mr Garrison was the district attorney (DA) for the state of New Orleans and the assassination of President Kennedy happened in Dallas, Texas. Why would a New Orleans DA be interested in this? Isn't it way out of his jurisdiction? Can any DA investigate any event in any state?
Garrison claimed that the assassination was the result of a conspiracy, involving various meetings and other overt acts that allegedly took place in New Orleans. If that were true, then the conspirators who did those things would have been guilty of criminal conspiracy under Louisiana law, and the New Orleans District Attorney would be able to prosecute that crime. The result of the investigation was an indictment and trial of Clay Shaw (he was acquitted). You can read Garrison's opening statement at http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/garrisono.htm, which includes the detailed charges and some arguments by the defense over jurisdictional issues. Note that Shaw was charged with conspiracy but not with murder. There's also a Wikipedia article, with references, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Clay_Shaw.
I think you're being confused by two separate definitions of &quot;police power.&quot; The police power under the 10th Amendment has nothing to do with &quot;the police,&quot; i.e. people with guns and badges and uniforms who make arrests. It refers to the authority of a government to make rules for the general welfare. Police power is almost always exercised by the legislature, and when the executive exercises it (e.g. by issuing regulations) it's typically operating under conditions set by the legislature. The United States has police power in a few situations: DC, federal property and territories, US-flagged ships on the high seas, etc. Outside of those situations, the United States instead has enumerated powers. Congress has a power to tax and spend to promote the general welfare, but otherwise it can only legislate to achieve one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution. Now, courts have read Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce very broadly, but there does need to be some relation to enumerated powers. You're asking about the Capitol Police, but they don't have &quot;police power&quot; in the 10th Amendment sense. They have the power to carry guns and to arrest people for crimes committed against the United States. This power is limited based on geography and/or the nature of their task; for instance, they have nationwide arrest powers &quot;[i]n the performance of their protective duties,&quot; but not when they're traveling outside DC on other official duties (e.g. to attend training). While there's no litigation I can dig up that's directly on point, courts have repeatedly ruled that Congress has the power to do some not-entirely-legislative tasks in order to protect its own functions. For instance, in Anderson v. Dunn (1821), the Supreme Court upheld an inherent power of the House to hold private citizens in contempt of Congress for disobeying its subpoenas and for the Sergeant at Arms to arrest them and bring them before the House. It seems likely Congress would also have the authority to protect its own members from physical violence. The GAO did an analysis when it was analyzing whether there was a constitutional problem with making Capitol Police IG personnel into special deputy US marshals, and it concluded that there was no issue with congressional employees exercising arrest powers in order to physically protect the legislative branch.
Is this interpretation correct? YES Encounters such as this should normally fall within the non-statutory stop &amp; account which covers police-initiated conversations with members of the public to ask general questions about their activities when there are no reasonable grounds to suspect an offence. The terminology varies from Force to Force, but can be summarised as: What are you doing? Why are you in the area? Where are you going? What are you carrying? There is no legal requirement or obligation to answer any of these questions, and the police cannot lawfully detain anyone to ask them - unlike the statutory powers under Stop &amp; Search and Arrest covered by the OP.
Most secret service details are protection for heads of government/state and thus their details would be afforded Sovereign Immunity (Such as POTUS, VPOTUS, and First and Second Families) OR Diplomatic Immunity (visiting dignitaries and leaders of other nations). Typically there are more diplomatic ways to handle the cases in the latter. In the former case, thus far, it has not been handled. During visits, the traditional Executives and Families are usually closely guarded by the Service with additional law enforcement form local jurisdictions called in to aid in the protection, usually to secure routes the Motorcade will take to a designation (I speak from personal experience, POTUS coming to town is a nightmare on traffic). If they are speeding, they are typically doing so down a completely empty highway with police escort. From this point, most under of the Service would be monitored and controlled so closely, at least one Agent would notice if any protected was committing a crime and would have to write it up in a report. There is also considerable debate in legal circles if the President and Vice President could be arrested for a crime while in office, with the general acceptance being that they could not and would need to be impeached by congress. Secret Service will continue to protect former Presidents and Vice Presidents for life, along with their spouses and children up to a certain age. With all that in mind, it would not so much be that the Secret Service would prevent arrest of an individual under their protection so much as the Secret Service would be the arresting authority. As they are law enforcement agents under the Federal Government, they can legally arrest people and then hand them to the proper law enforcement agency to effect the arrest. This would mostly happen with candidates for office OR former presidents OR family at any point in time as the scenario described is a bit harder to make a legitimate arrest. In fact, the Secret Service does have arrest authority with one of the highest conviction rates of any Law Enforcement Agency in the Country. It's just most crimes they arrest have nothing to do with threats to those under their protection. The Secret Service is also charged with investigation of counterfeiting of US currency and they are very good at it. This was actually their original sole function in the U.S. government and they still exist under the Treasury Department to this day. At this point, if you're wondering how they got the job of protecting important people in the executive branch from that, well, it's simple. At the time of his assasination, the legislation to create the USSS was on Licoln's desk. At the time of their creation, the only other Federal Police services were the U.S. Park Police, the Postal Inspection Service, and the U.S. Marshals. The first two had specific jurisdictions and the Marshals were undermanned so the USSS was tasked with investigating all sorts of financial crimes and quickly became the most successful U.S. Law Enforcement Service. They were also the first U.S. Intelligence and Counterintelligence agency (though they no longer are part of the Intelligence Community) until the FBI took on those duties. So following the Assassination of William McKinley in 1901, Congress authorized them to take up full time Presidential Protection because at the time, they were pretty much doing everything else.
The problem with Solution 2 is that government officials in the United States enjoy qualified immunity with respect to actions that they did while acting under color of law. It's not total immunity, but if they do things by the book, they cannot be prosecuted even if something goes wrong (even when doing things by the book, Police deal in very volatile situations and things can still go wrong because of an X factor to specific for the training manual to cover.). In other cases, it may be because multiple officers are working the scene and Office A lied to Officer B about the situation. Consider Officer A pulls over a suspect and realizes it was someone who was suspected of a crime, but couldn't prove it. He calls for back up and Officer B arrives. Upon arriving on scene, Officer A tells B to search the trunk of the car despite the fact that A had not received consent from the suspect nor has a warrant, nor cause to make a search of a trunk of a vehicle. B makes the search and finds [the bloody knife/the stash of drugs/the smoking gun/the match to a child's shoe that was missing from the kidnapping scene/ insert other incriminating evidence]. Under system (2), since it was Officer B who made the illegal search, B would be liable for it, even though Officer A lied about having legal reason for a search of the trunk space. But what's more... if the evidence is gonna be used anyway, what's to stop the cops doing it again? After all, there is very little recourse for those who are illegally searched to contest this in court (If I'm illegally searched and don't have anything on me, I have to take this to civil court, which is a different animal than Criminal Court and exposes me to broader Discovery... aka gives the cops free reign to search my property for a hell of a lot more illegal things.) or just sit back and count my 4th amendment rights (the section of the constitution protecting against unwarranted search and seizures) as worth less than the paper they're printed on. Oh, and by the way... that second word seizure... that means that they will be taking my property (or myself if they arrest me) and will not be giving it back for some time while they process it... if it's a legal to hold item (like my laptop that I do work on) that's going to make it harder for me to do my job which injures me further in lost business and income. In other cases, it could be they have a warrant for a large item (a stolen big screen tv) and while searching for it, open my sugar bowel and find evidence of a crime unrelated to theft of the television (i.e. opening a baggie of weed). This is actually an illegal search because, unless I am a wizard, a Time Lord, or Mary Poppins, there is no reason why a container smaller than a big screen TV should ever be searched when looking for a Big Screen TV and the cops should logically see this as out of bounds of the search warrant. The nature of this is damaging before the legality of the search can be determined, and because the search may have been out of scope of the warrant that was otherwise justified, the rule of making the evidence of a crime inadmissible was held in order to prevent LEOs from doing this because they could. This rule also started to take formation prior to the Revolutionary War. British Law had ruled against compelled confessions being inadmissible as evidence in 1769, a full six years before the Revolutionary war started (1775) and seven years before the publication of the Declaration of Independence (1776). Now there are some exceptions that can get the evidence brought back in, such as plain view (&quot;The suspect's vehicle is a pick up truck with an open bed, the murder weapon was lying in the bed covered in blood&quot;), inevitable discovery (&quot;We have developed evidence by other means that would have lead us to this evidence legally&quot;) and Exigent Circumstances (&quot;We believed someone inside the property was in grave danger if we did not enter the property immediately and that's when we found a cache of stolen Big Screen TVs!) and Good Faith (the Warrant was authorized for the wrong street address of the target but we found the evidence of an unrelated crime in a place the warrant authorized us to search. Everything but the goofed up address was done by the book.).
I was told that DAs and other prosecutors are typically prohibited from engaging in volunteer, pro bono work You have not really understood the linked answer and are oversimplifying its analysis. I'll restate the analysis in a different way in this answer in the hope of providing greater clarity. The key to understanding that question is that the question presented there was: &quot;Are DAs and other prosecutors prohibited from being defense attorneys, such as in a pro bono fashion?&quot; Having a prosecutor do criminal defense work presents conflicts that other types of pro bono work frequently would not. Does this mean that public attorneys can engage in pro bono work in Texas? If so, are there strings attached? For example, would a public attorney be able to represent their friends and family so long as they don't charge for the work? These questions don't have a single global answer and must be analyzed on a case by case basis. It depends upon whether the pro bono work constitutes a conflict of interest with the public attorneys' regular work (i.e. what kind of legal work is done pro bono and for whom) and it depends upon the policies of the lawyer's particular employer. There are two distinct questions presented, neither of which are materially different in Texas than they were in the previous question. One is when doing so would violate the professional ethical obligations of a lawyer, which is what the Texas Bar Association statement is talking about. The other is whether it is permissible in a manner consistent with the contractual employer-employee relationship of any particular Texas attorney working on a full time salaried basis for a particular employer. This is a subject upon which the Texas Bar Association statement is silent. Professional Ethics Considerations As noted above, one question is whether pro bono work by a prosecutor in the specific subject matter of criminal defense would constitute a conflict of interest. The answer to that question is &quot;usually yes&quot; for the reasons explained in the linked question. One can also easily imagine other circumstances where pro bono work could pit a salaried government lawyer against his employer, such as a state attorney general's office lawyer doing pro bono civil rights litigation against the state government. But, not all pro bono legal work constitutes a conflict of interest. For example, a prosecutor doing pro bono work helping low income people prepare documents naming legal guardians for their children in the event that they predecease their children (the very first pro bono case I took on as a Colorado attorney) would be very unlikely to be conflict of interest for the prosecutor, even though a pro bono criminal defense case in the county where the prosecutor practices would be an obvious and direct unethical conflict of interest. Similarly, judges frequently do pro bono work, where authorized to do so by the court systems in which they work, in the areas of legal education for non-lawyers (like High School Mock Trial competitions or lectures to school students) and by providing mediation services to indigent parties outside the judicial district where they practice, that are specifically calculated to avoid conflicts of interests, or appearance of bias or impropriety. Employment Relationship Considerations The second issue is whether &quot;public attorneys can engage in pro bono work in Texas?&quot; in a case with a subject matter that does not otherwise present a conflict of interest. Public sector attorneys are not prohibited from doing so as a matter of professional ethics. But, that isn't the only consideration. The other consideration is whether doing that pro bono work violates the employment policies of a public sector employer of a lawyer in the usual case when a public sector lawyer is employed on a salaried basis for the full efforts or something similar, of the lawyer. This is basically an issue of contract law, not of professional ethics. The way this is usually dealt with in private law practice when a salaried attorney works for a law firm is that the private salaried lawyer needs to obtain law firm permission to do pro bono work and that pro bono work is often structured so that the pro bono client's lawyer is the law firm itself and the lawyer in that firm doing the actual pro bono work is often just one agent of the firm as a whole that actual represents the pro bono client. Frequently, salaried lawyers in private law firms have quotas of billable hours which they have to meet as a condition of employment each year at the law firm, and frequently a private law firm's pro bono program allows the salaried lawyer to count hours working for the law firm's pro bono clients towards that annual billable hour quota. Incidentally, there is nothing magic in the absence of a conflict of interest, about limiting &quot;moonlighting work&quot; to unpaid pro bono work. For example, many U.S. law schools expressly authorize salaried full time law professors who are admitted to the practice of law to have a paid private practice up to a certain number of hours per year as a fringe benefit in addition to the salary, akin to the common practice of allowing professors to retain for themselves textbook royalties for textbooks written while the professors were being paid a salary to do scholarly work including writing textbooks. The pro bono program structure used in private law firms for their salaried employers isn't as workable for a salaried attorney working full time for a governmental employer. This is because allowing a government salaried employee to work for free for a private citizen on something that doesn't involve public business of the government would functionally be an indirect appropriation of legal salary funds from the governmental entity to the pro bono client without receiving authorization from the elected representatives of the government in question. So, in the public sector, a more common arrangement would be to provide that every salaried public sector lawyer working for that government is permitted to do up to X billable hours of pro bono work per year for their own, personal moonlighting private practice clients as a fringe benefit of employment, much like paid time off, if it is permitted at all. And, other public sector employers, which are not so generous, simply prohibit their salaried attorney employees from doing pro bono work at all in order to avoid having to deal with and think about the issue. This doesn't arise very often in the case of lawyers hired by small local governments or on a contract basis by a larger government for a particular specialized task, as they have their own practices and have not agreed to provide substantially all of their professional legal work to their employer the way that a salaried lawyer would. So they are more akin to private sector law firm lawyers who simply have an additional set of conflict of interest considerations as a result of having a particular local government as an employer.
That is not a valid assumption. Many states have laws that let you presume someone is a threat to your life if they forcibly enter your house. Simple trespass on your land does not let you reasonably presume someone is a murderer. An autonomous killer drone is not a comparison you want to make: those may be illegal entirely, and are likely to seriously hurt any claim of justifiable force. “You forfeit your right to live when you set foot on my property” is not justifiable. If the dogs are trained to be a hazard to the community, that’s an argument in favor of having them confiscated and destroyed. Dogs are not people. Under normal circumstances, they cannot be protected under self-defense or the defense of others. Those doctrines only apply when a person is in danger. Deadly force is sometimes allowed to protect property, but this tends to be strictly limited. To start with, you can only ever use force to prevent illegal damage to property. If your concern is “this animal control officer will destroy my dogs within the scope of their duty,” that’s not protecting against an illegal use of force. Deadly force in defense of property is also normally limited to particular crimes that are inherently dangerous, like arson, robbery, or burglary. Even in Texas, simple theft only justifies deadly force during the nighttime. Deadly force is also not justifiable if there were reasonable other options. Shooting an animal control officer is unlikely to be the only way to temporarily stop them from destroying a dog. Threatening violence in order to influence a judge’s decision is terrorism. This hypothetical man is a terrorist. He may well find himself on death row for murder, but he’s also going to face separate charges for terrorism.
Self-Defense Law In A Nutshell Self-defense (or defense of others) with deadly force is generally authorized when a reasonable person would believe that the use of death force is necessary to prevent death or serious bodily harm to a person (i.e. there aren't non-deadly options that can accomplish this end) and a reasonable person would believe that the use of force will prevent death or serious bodily harm to a person, subject to exceptions that would not apply to a private individual using deadly force in a stampede situation. Incidentally, every state and every country absolves someone of liability for homicide when deadly force is used in self-defense, or in the defense of others (not necessarily family), although the exact details of when this is justified varies slightly. For example, in D.C. v. Heller, the right to self-defense is considered a natural or universal right. The analysis would be somewhat different if the shooter were in law enforcement, and would be different again in the case of a shooter who was in the military with more or less clear orders. But, that legal standard doesn't get you to an answer. The Complex Phenomena Called Stampedes The analysis would be extremely fact rich, in the sense of exactly who one would attempt to shoot, what that would be likely to accomplish, and what other alternatives would be available. And, to do that, you also need to understand the phenomena of deadly stampedes which are complex and often somewhat counter-intuitive phenomena. While there are circumstances where it could be legal self-defense or defense of others to shoot a stampeding individual to save someone's life, there are also many stampede circumstances where a use of force would not be justified. In practice, most stampedes, as a matter of physics, can only be stopped by removing a crush of bodies from the rear, where they do not know that they are causing a deadly stampede, while those at the front who end up directly harming others are frequently physically incapable of stopping. Essentially, in a typical stampede that causes death, the problem is an inability of the people at the front to communicate to the people at the back to slow down. And, when a stampede is caused by a genuine threat to the people at the back like a fire or a terrorist, there is nothing that would persuade the people at the back to slow down anyway. So, usually, shooting to kill someone at the front of a stampede would not achieve the intended result of protecting someone in its path. The person shot would either continue to surge forward while dead under the crush of bodies behind them, or would have their dead body trampled over by the next person in line who also has no physical ability to do anything other than to surge forward. So, usually, using deadly force to shoot someone at the front of a stampede will be futile and only cause an unnecessary death. Given that using deadly force in a stampede, if directly at people in the front, is almost always futile, the question for the judge or jury deciding the case becomes whether a reasonable person would know that at the time, which would have to be decided a case by case basis. Sometimes it is obvious from someone in a vantage point to shoot at the front of a stampede that this would be futile and sometimes it isn't. This question would be highly fact specific and depend a lot upon exactly what information about the situation was available to the person shooting a person in the stampede. The situation where deadly force might not be futile would be one in which there is no actual life threatening harm that people are fleeing in which the deadly force is directed at the people in the back who are driving the stampede (even though they don't know it), to shock them into ceasing to do so. But, in that situation, if the shooting is done by someone who understands the situation well enough to know that this is what is actually necessary, that person also may be capable of firing warning shots or shooting to injure with the same effect, so justification might also be in doubt. Protecting Targets of Mobs v. Protecting Targets of Stampedes A similar situation where the use of deadly force might be justified is something visually similar to a stampede, but quite different in what would work factually. This is a mob that is about to attack someone, possibly armed with pitchforks or knives or clubs or broken bottles or a noose. In the case of a mob, the use of deadly force to protect someone threatened by the mob would almost always be a justified use of force in self-defense or the defense of others, because shooting someone in the front is likely to be both necessary and effective.