An Illinois judge this week ruled that a police SWAT team was within its rights to raid the house of a man who ran a Twitter parody account based on the Peoria, Ill. mayor, according to The Guardian.
In April, four SWAT officers entered the house of Jacob Elliott’s Peoria house after the city’s mayor alerted the police to a Twitter account @peoriamayor, a fake account that depictedMayor Jim Artisas a drunk and a drug user.
During the raid, the police searched the entire house, seizing phones and computers, according to the Journal Star.
Elliott’s roommate, Jon Daniel, created the fake account, but during the search, police found marijuana in Elliott’s bedroom. Elliott was then charged with marijuana possession and possession of paraphernalia.
He sued the police, arguing that the marijuana seizure was not related to the original purpose of the raid.
The judge ruled that the police were entitled to raid the house looking for materials used to create the Twitter account under the state’s “false impersonation” law and the charges against Elliott will stand.
However, Daniel will not be charged with false impersonation. The judge ruled that in order to violate the state law, someone must falsely portray a public figure in person, not just online.
Daniel has now sued the police for violating his civil rights by raiding his house.
H/t Daily Beast
Even more evidence of living in a police state.
This shit has to stop.
So…the warrant was good because they were properly investigating a crime, but the subject of the warrant is free because no crime had been committed. I’m no legal expert, but I suspect the judge just invented a ruling to justify locking the guy up. I mean, if this wasn’t a crime, why was there even a warrant?
And of course, if the target of the Twitter account hadn’t been the mayor, none of this would have happened. This is not how laws are supposed to work.
Okay, I’m confused. Was there, or was there not, a search warrant? Because mayors don’t issue search warrants and cops can’t just bust down your door because the mayor says so.
If the mayor swore out a criminal complaint same as any other citizen can do, and then the D.A. went to a judge and showed probable cause to believe evidence of a crime could be found on the premises, then, yes, the weed bust is valid. If no such warrant was issued, then the whole thing should be tossed.
If the press is willfully omitting the warrant step because it makes the story read better, then it is willfully lying. if there was no warrant step, then the judge is incompetent, Peoria’s mayor is a petty fascist and Peoria’s cops don’t seem to realize they’re not storm troopers.
I’m really not in a position to say which of those things is true. But I will say that even if there was a warrant, sending a fucking SWAT team to execute it is purely gratuitous and dangerous.
Seems that way.
If “in order to violate the state law, someone must falsely portray a public figure in person, not just online” then there was no justification for the warrant. The defendant appears to me to have just cause to appeal the decision, and furthermore the possession charge should be stricken because it was done through an illegal search and seizure operation.
As I note below, if a warrant was issued, none of the press reports have seen fit to say so. But if one was, what the stories say is that there was, in fact, a crime on the books, but the DA determined after the fact that, oops, it looks to me now like a Twitter account doesn’t meet the elements.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like some assistant DA decided to obtain a warrant based on a dodgy interpretation of the statute rather than stand up to the mayor, or, alternately, went out and manufactured a dodgy interpretation of the statute in order to get a warrant for the mayor, but once an arrest was made and a defense lawyer got involved and pointed out that the interpretation was bogus, the DA dropped it.