AP: High-tech 'pot factories' popping up in suburban homes

gregh — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 13:43:24 -0500

This story could be a promotion of Showtime's "Weeds," if it had mentioned the series. My guess is the DEA isn't too keen on promoting a show that has a DEA agent ignoring the creation of one of these growhouses.

High-tech 'pot factories' popping up in suburban homes:

Like the others, the home on Elk Grove's Mainline Drive had been converted to what law enforcement officials call a hothouse, with 1,000-watt lights for growing and irrigation networks feeding high-tech hydroponic growing systems.

Walls and ceilings were smashed to allow for complex ventilation and air filtration systems that vented the telltale odor through the attic. A web of extension cords and makeshift electric panels illegally tapped into the outside grid to avoid detection and save thousands of dollars in power bills.
. . .
Until now, West Coast law enforcement agencies have been more concerned about large-scale outdoor marijuana gardens, which often are planted on public forests or park land by violent Mexican drug cartels. Those operations have caused increasing concern in recent years because they severely degrade the environment and pose a danger to people who wander across them.

The Drug Enforcement Agency reported a 50 percent increase in indoor farms last year, Taylor said. Those operations have several advantages: They can't be spotted by an airplane or hunter, and the plants also can be grown year-round.

There are other advantages. Beyond not being able to constitutionally observe under either the open fields doctrine or those allowing observation of a property's curtilage from the air or other publicly accessible viewing locations, there's another big one. In Kyllo v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that observing hotspots of a house by way of sense-enhancing devices such as thermal imaging equipment was an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. As a result, if you can keep power consumption low (and in the Central Valley, the best way to do so would be to install solar panels, I imagine) so you stay off the grid, without being able to meet the requirements of a warrant, law enforcement can't even observe the exterior of a home to see if it's emanating unusual amounts of heat.

I suspect that today, with more ready availability of thermal imaging equipment, they might find differently. Of course, who can ever tell. Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is all over the map, and you find yourself having to keep track of all of these random, disjointed rules.

Does Escobedo ring a bell?

gregh — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 13:01:24 -0500

I don't know how this post slipped away from me. Perhaps it was just a busy time of the semester. Such time periods do tend to arise.

Anyhow, I love the Dirty Harry movies, even The Dead Pool. Truth be told, Sudden Impact is by far my least favorite, despite its introduction of what is arguably Harry's most famous catch-phrase.

However, one of my long-time favorite exchanges came in the original:
District Attorney Rothko: Where the hell does it say that you've got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel? Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment. What I'm saying is that man had rights.
Harry Callahan: Well, I'm all broken up over that man's rights!

Of course, most people know about the reading of our rights that Miranda has wrought; as a long-time watcher of "Cops", I've seen the readings in action. What I didn't know was how they came about, and I didn't really know what Escobedo had to do with anything. In Criminal Procedure this past semester, I finally found out. It was exciting.

Miranda, as it happens, has provided us with a wonderfully complex series of decisions. As the (Rehnquist) Court repeatedly emphasized, Miranda is a prophylactic. The Miranda warnings themselves are not Constitutional requirements. Instead, the Court requires their reading to protect Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. That is to say, failure to read Miranda warnings itself isn't a violation of a Constitutional right; however, such a failure will make it very difficult for the state to use a confession or other evidence gained from a custodial interrogation.

And Escobedo? Well, Escobedo really just laid the groundwork for Miranda, as part of a series of cases showing police abuse of power.

What brought on writing this? For the second time in as many weeks, posts at BMWSportTouring.com have brought up the notion of random police stops of motorcycles, and there's a constant refrain that "if you haven't done anything wrong, why worry about the police performing a stop?" In this most recent stop, it sounds as if it's a Constitutional checkpoint stop, a la Prouse. But in the first one we heard about, an open-road stop to check documentation, it sounded much more questionable. And my point? The reason we constrain police is because when we haven't in the past, they've betrayed our trust.

Otherwise Occupied - criminal_procedure

AP: High-tech 'pot factories' popping up in suburban homes

Does Escobedo ring a bell?