I Am Not a Lawyer

First, we have Lanier v. City of Woodburn, in which the Ninth says it’s unconstitutional (under both the federal constitution and the constitution of the state of Oregon) to drug-test a woman who wanted to be a part-time page at a city-owned library in Oregon. They didn’t have any special reason to suspect her of being on drugs and it wasn’t an especially sensitive position (according to the court), it was just a policy. So they fail — except that the justices made it explict that their decision only applies to Lanier, and the city’s drug policy isn’t facially unconstitutional, so it stands.

Then we have one that caught my eye because the dissent was much longer than the opinion, Porter et al. v. Bowen. The majority just says that the court voted on whether to rehear the case en banc, but it failed. The dissent, by contrast (and by Judge Kleinfeld) starts out with facts: “This case is about whether the First Amendment protects from prosecution people who buy votes.” As it turns out, this grows out of the vote-swapping arrangements you may remember from the 2000 presidential election. There were a couple of Web sites set up to facilitate this. The California Secretary of State, who at the time was Bill Jones, sent one of them a letter threatening criminal prosecution. So both stopped matching people, but then they turned around and sued the Secretary of State, claiming their First Amendment rights were violated by the threat of prosecution. (And some other stuff, but that’s the claim that survived.)

The dissenters (Kleinfeld is joined by Judges O’Scannlain and Bea) seem to disagree primarily, and strongly, with the majority because they believe exchanging promises to vote in a certain way is vote-buying. “There is not much precedent on point, because few have had the chutzpah to argue that buying promises to vote for someone, or arranging for them, would be constitutionally protected.” I assume that the majority doesn’t see it that way, but they didn’t say much in this decision. The previous panel decision, which is packed with interesting stuff, is here.

I was also amused to notice that apparently, asset forfeiture cases pit the government against objects: United States of America v. $493,850.00 in U.S. Currency and One 1993 Ford F-350 Truck. It’s actually against two men who were stopped while driving through Arizona, raised the suspicions of the law enforcement officer (sadly, the opinion doesn’t provide much detail), who then ran a drug-sniffing dog around their truck. The dog smelled drugs, so the patrolman took their truck and their large wad of cash. The men were eventally accused of cocaine trafficking, so a magistrate court said the government can keep their stuff, and the Ninth affirmed.