Same Song, Second Verse

ERIC NICHOLS

I just read some newspaper articles about Michael Emack's appeal.  Emack is serving a seven-year sentence for having a teenage plural wife.  He pleaded no contest (perhaps in order to avoid a bad trial).  His appeal appears to have made its way to the Texas district appeals court (this week) faster than the other convicts' appeals because in his case there was no trial record to review.

The appeal centers on the assertion that the April 2008 YFZ Ranch raid was improperly conducted - that the search warrant must be suppressed because it was improperly executed.  In a Salt Lake Tribune article, prosecutor Eric Nichols said the raid was - 

 . . . .  'reasonable in the approximately 1,600-acre ranch, which has no street names or house numbers. 

“You have a situation in which there are no street names, no house numbers,” he said. “It was reasonable under those circumstances for those officers to ... look for her wherever she might be found.”' 

I'm no lawyer, but I wonder how powerful that argument would be for the Supreme Court.  Nichols seems to want to impale himself on the same old sword.  I read the pleadings prepared in the suppression hearing before Barbarous Warthog, and it is evident to me that the State of Texas botched several key steps in the raid - they violated several key Constitutional principles.  Their conduct was so cavalier - they didn't really care.  There was simply no excuse for not using the readily available technology to find the location of the phone that Rosacea Swinetown was using to make her hoax calls.  I don't care whether the Sheriff was "convinced" that something weird was going on in the ranch.  Why do we even bother to have a Fourth Amendment?  Why have rules about proper searches and seizures? 

I wonder if this district court is the same one that returned the confiscated children back in 2008.  That was the court that scoffed at the whole "single household" argument.  When the state frantically scrambled to prevent the return of the children by complaining to the Texas Supreme Court, the court roundly upheld the lower court's insistence that the state had acted improperly.  

I guess I have a hard time thinking that a court which ruled so adamantly that the communal, "single-household" rationalization was spurious would suddenly contradict itself and condone such an argument in connection with the search.

I think, however, that when the situation involves polygamists, fairness sometimes goes out the window.  A successful suppression of the search would be a monumental embarrassment (all over again) for Texas.  Surely MANY public officials don't want the convictions overturned, when they would rather see all polygamists imprisoned for life (AND keep their precious JOBS !!!).

I prefer to remain optimistic that the district court will soberly agree that the whole raid was long orchestrated and was in extreme bad faith.  What is more fascinating is the possibility that Warren Jeffs could have his charges dropped as a result of the suppression.  Is that why Utah is clinging so desperately to the hope of a re-trial in the Elissa Wall phantasy rape case?  Does Utah secretly believe that the search is doomed to be overturned?

Somebody (probably Snortlick) must have riled Texas up to going after the Frankenstein polygs.  Maybe Texas got too caught up in the drunken, torches-and-pitchforks hunt for the peculiar, and lost command of its senses.

We shall see.
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