Search warrant

The fraternity was placed on interim suspension after, quote, anonymous allegations of hazing.

And then they came and actually executed search warrants.

Now, what are you looking for? Like, what is that? What is that? Search warrant look like? What are you trying to, you know, get from that? I'm not I'm not exactly sure.

Yeah.

So anyway, this this these fraternities were put on interim suspension after, quote, anonymous allegations of hazing.

And, you know, they executed search warrants at the house.

I'm thinking to myself, what what are you putting in that search warrant? You know, because like when you're writing a search warrant, whether for a car, a house, you know, something, you're listing specific things that you're looking for.

Because you can't it's not just like an open ended thing.

Like, hey, you know what? What exactly? Well, we draw the line here.

And that's when the state's attorney said, you know what? We need a search warrant at this point, especially due to the circumstances we need to remove the dogs.

As soon as we get that all situated, that's when Shalimar and I start working logistics, especially the amount of animals that we're estimating, the team that we're going to need to do something like that is something larger magnitude.

So like we were explaining before, our tiny little shelter doesn't have the resources for something this

there's kind of an almost checklist that we have to go through.

And with these kind of large-scale situations, we obviously first and foremost need the kind of support from law enforcement of understanding and recognizing that regardless of intent, that there can be potential criminal situations happening here.

And so would we have the support of law enforcement? Would we have the support of the state's attorney as far as considering obtaining a search warrant? And then also understanding the hard question behind this of, is this criminal? And for our services, we do require that some type of criminal charge be pursued because when we see these large scale cruelty situations, we know that there's close to 100% recidivism right here.

And so we don't want this to happen again.

Correct.

So the first policy that's implicated is this rule that you can't time an action like executing a search warrant in order to influence an election.

The second policy is that if you do anything that might raise the suspicion that that's going on, you need to clear it with the public integrity section, which is a longtime component of the Department of Justice.

I should say that the Department of Justice says that they complied with that in this case.

It was a speech to an assembly of U.S. attorneys, that is to say the head federal prosecutor in various districts around the country.

the dangers associated with the extraordinary powers of American prosecutors.

And he pointed out that under our system, prosecutors have broad authority to decide whether to initiate investigations, whether to seek search warrants, whether to bring cases before the grand jury, what kinds of charges to seek.

if charges are filed, what kind of plea offer to propose to the defendant, and then what kinds of arguments the government makes in court.

And eventually they've gone, got a search warrant, search the house.

Had talked to some other people, maybe arrested them, had interviewed those people, then go on, go on to the cell phone records.

They'll do search warrants on towers, those types of things from cell towers and everything else.

And then you're back in front of the judge saying, all right, we got to arrest this guy.

So they'll have that whole list of things that had happened to done, you know, and.

And you try to go all the way towards the beginning of the search warrant so that everything after that gets thrown out, right? It's not good if they found all the bad stuff here and they broke it down here.

You know, you got to get ahead of it over there.

I found it to be really interesting where you get this GPS data and, you know, cell phones and those types of things have helped dramatically overturn a lot of search warrants.

Thanks and good morning to you and all of your illustrious listeners in the greater Boston area.

First of all, as a retired police officer of 28 plus years, all of our raids, all of our search warrants, our arrest warrants, if we could do it, were in the early morning hours.

Two reasons.

Number one, the target of the investigation is probably going to be there in bed.