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Michael Righi’s Receipt-Check Story

This one makes me cranky: Papers Please: Arrested At Circuit City. It’s a near-carbon-copy of Hiro’s receipt-check story, except that in this case, the guy who knew his rights and stood up to the intimidation by a security guard (and then by a police officer) ended up getting arrested.

Can you say “wrongful arrest suit”? I knew that you could.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, September 2nd, 2007 at 7:04 am and is filed under the_law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Michael Righi’s Receipt-Check Story”

  1. knarlyknight Says:
    September 2nd, 2007 at 9:54 pm

    There are 368 comments to that article already at the link provided. One of the later one re-butts the rwnj attitude of “so what if we have a police state developing here, I got nothing to hide… “:

    Gen-Xer Says:

    September 3rd, 2007 at 1:32 am
    Quoting Jorge: “Dude here wasn’t accused of shoplifting, he was only asked for his receipt. (His brusque refusal to show the receipt then gave them reason to believe that he was shoplifting.”

    Oh, my good Lord. Your statement is depressing.

    If a police officer shows up at your front door and asks your permission to search your home and you refuse, should that be grounds for obtaining a search warrant?

    This is the mentality I spoke of in a post above. For some reason, a large part of American society has been conditioned to believe that ANY refusal to comply with an authority figure is an admission of guilt. It’s ludicrous.

    Probably cause be damned.
    We should be patted down after they search our shopping bags.
    But maybe I slipped a CD into my underwear…better strip search me.
    What if I swallowed something? Better x-ray me, too.
    Or maybe I just vandalized something while in the store…maybe a blood test to look for elevated adrenaline levels, eh? Might knock $.15 off the cost of that shiny new TV.
    Ya know what…just in case, let’s get a DNA swab of everyone as they enter the store. Can’t be too safe, can we?
    Polygraph might be helpful, too.

    What? That sounds intrusive? If so, WHAT ARE YOU HIDING, CRIMINAL?

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