| Trampy |
| (Pooh-Bah) |
| 02/10/04 06:40 PM |
 Re: Busted in a huge way! WARNING TO YOU ALL, PLS
|
Quote:
This thread has made me a little curious about the subject. Can you be held accountable for what is mailed to your address without any evidence to substantiate that YOU indeed sent for it ? What if someone ordered something from an IOP, moved, and then it arrived many weeks later, addressed to the physical residence of the now perplexed new resident, whose name isn't even on the letter ? ...
What if someone had a serious grudge against you and ordered something very incriminating in your name, and had it sent to your house, in order to defame you ?
... What if someone was clever enough to have items sent to their apartment addressed to a former tenant ? ... I think there are LOTS of grey areas here, and I've only scratched the surface with two minutes of thought...
Good question, but it's not a gray area. They've been getting solid convictions this way since at least 1990. This branch of search & seizure law developed in prosecuting people who were buying child pornography by mail, but by now it's been widely used for drug prosecutions. See:
http://www.totse.com/en/law/justice_for_all/anticser.html
http://www.law2.byu.edu/lawreview/archives/1999/hamm.pdf
If they want a legal case that will stand up, when they do a controlled delivery they usually come with an Anticipatory Search Warrant (ASW) that is executed according to whatever terms are stated on the warrant. Under the laws of most states, (maybe anyone) accepting the package provides the necessary amount of probable cause that a package alone did not give them to justify a house search.
Perthaps the most recent example of a ASW that was thrown out as invalid is the Hotal case, from the 9th Cicruit:
http://www.ci.keene.nh.us/police/Hotal.html, which includes a thorough gloss of ASW law up to that time.
If you're curious how much effort has sometimes been put into computer and internet forensics, read this long tale:
http://laws.lp.findlaw.com/9th/9930101.html
ASWs are legal in almost all states and are legal under federal law.
Typically they will be looking for any evidence of illegal drugs on the premises (mail order or otherwise), credit card and bank statements showing payments to OPs, and they will definitely take away your computer or an image of the hard drive to look at e-mail, address book, browser favorites, etc. If ANY of this even remotely matches up with what was in the package or where it came from ... you're sunk, because they have evidence of knowledge and intent. Now this is for a one-person residence. Things get a little tricky with the "injured spouse defense" ... say if a man was using his wife's name to order ... and you have the constitutional prohibition against forcing one spouse to testify against another ... giving a jury reasonable doubt if the lawyer(s) know what they're doing.
Which raises the question: how much does it cost to mount a criminal defense if they've arrested someone in a controlled delivery and found some incriminating evidence in a legal search? Try at LEAST $30 K.
Trampy
P.S. Back to one of the original questions ... well, if someone with a beef against someone knew they were ordering stuff and wanted to get them in trouble, what if they placed their own order in that person's name and tipped off the cops? Could they go down for it? You betcha! You may consider it wrong, but that's the way it is. People get framed all the time and have to go to prison for things they didn't do.
