The importance of habeas corpus

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 31 August 2008 03:01PM CST

Section: Law

Tipping the scales of justiceThe six citizens arrested during the preemptive police raids prior to the Republican National Convention are all being held in the Ramsey County jail, without charge, under “probable cause holds.” Authorities have 36 hours to charge them or let them go. Because it’s a holiday weekend, they can be held until Wednesday afternoon. Which is probably the point of this entire exercise—get them off the streets so they can’t exercise their First Amendment rights and keep them from encouraging others to do the same. Here’s a clue: anarchists don’t have or follow leaders, so that’s just another entire level on which the preemptive police action is wrong.

Probable cause holds are generally used to detain suspects while additional evidence is gathered. The problem in this case is that the results of the underlying search warrants are pitifully weak, at best, indicating that the warrants should never have been issued. With at least one member of each of the Saint Paul and Minneapolis city councils crying foul, one would assume that there will be some sort of investigation surrounding the issuing of the warrants, the evidence—or lack thereof—upon which they were based, and perhaps even the judge(s) who issued them.

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