Interesting Colorado Supreme Court ruling on searches

[Judge Roy Bean]

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/ ... _high_cou/

I wonder how far this can be stretched.

[notorial dissent]

What basically happened was that the local DA decided to go on a fishing expedition of a local tax preparer who handles a primarily minority clientele. The problem was that he didn’t really have anything to go on, other than that the business catered to minority clients who obviously all had to be illegals and breaking the law, and instead of looking at specific individuals or cases he decided to grab all the tax records there, since they were obviously just lying around, and go through them to see if he could find anything he could charge someone with.

For some reason this did not go over well with either the business owner or any of the courts it landed in, something about proper search warrants and actual probable cause, which strangely the DA didn’t seem to be able to come up with, and the courts didn’t seem to take to his “I’m sure there is someone here using a false SSN, if you’ll just give me the leeway to trample search and seizure, probably cause, and so on,” excuse too well, and told him rather emphatically “NO”. After which a great deal of whining and complaining was heard from that quarter, about how they were interfering with his attempts to enforce the law.