Letter to the Editor: Know your rights
Disclaimer: Letters to the Editor express the opinion of the writer and are not necessarily the opinion of WBIG ownership, management or staff.
From 1850 to 1950 the government slowly, over time, stopped teaching civil personal rights in the classroom, dumbing down our children and the populace. When you don’t know your rights, you lose them. Here are two civil rights every person should know. All police officers must read to you a Miranda Warning to comply with a preventive criminal procedure rule that law enforcement is required to administer to protect an individual who is in custody (definition of custody: “The care and keeping of anything; as when an article is said to be in the custody of the court. Or under lawful control,” Black’s Law Dictionary) and subject to direct questioning or its functional equivalent from a violation of his or her Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination, Miranda v. Arizona, 1966. This was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court.
The Fourth Amendment is an important inclusion in the Bill of Rights that prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures” and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. No one can search you or your property without a warrant and you do not forfeit your rights when you get in your car. The amendment was held to apply to the states as well as the federal government in Mapp v. Ohio, 1961.
Our country is in a crisis right now because the rights of many individuals are being regularly violated. A general lack of knowledge concerning our rights is largely to blame. The court system loves this. Why? Because every time they violate your rights someone is make money: the attorneys, courts, states, and the cities. All elected judges, court officials, police officers and politicians take an OATH to uphold both the US Constitution and their own state constitution, but they nevertheless legislate from a grey area known as the UCC, the Uniform Commercial Code.
Please read your Bill of Rights. Take a constitution class online. Look up Constitutional Carl Miller or Michael Badnarik on YouTube. Let’s take our country back through education.
Dorene Schutz, Wilkes-Barre
