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DES MOINES Iowa senators sent Gov. Terry Branstad a bill Tuesday designed to balance Iowans constitutional rights at funerals or memorial services.

House File 558 expands the level of privacy granted under the Fourth Amendment to grieve for loved ones, soldiers or civilians, backers say.

The bill, which won Iowa Senate support by a 50-0 vote, would establish a 1,000-foot buffer between funerals and protesters for one hour before and after the funeral while balancing free speech rights of participants and onlookers.

The bill is a response to demonstrations by members of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan. Church members have shown up at military funerals say that God will turn his back on a nation that sanctions abortion, same-sex marriage and other abominations. The death of soldiers, according to Westboro, is Gods punishment for America abandoning him.

Families and friends who are grieving the loss of a loved one should not have to be subject to a barrage of hateful yelling and signs while theyre honoring and remembering the person they have lost, said Sen. Kevin Kinney, D-Oxford, the bills floor manager.

The bill is based on legislation that has been upheld by courts in Nebraska, Missouri and Minnesota, supporters say.

Actions such as shouting homophobic slurs and desecrating the U.S. flag at military funerals are reprehensible, said Sen. Herman Quirmbach, D-Ames, noting that he personally finds individuals who engage in such actions to be despicable. But he told his Senate colleagues its exactly for those reasons that their First Amendment rights of expression need to be zealously defended. The First Amendment isnt about protecting popular speech.

At the same time, he said, it is not just one group whose constitutional rights are at issue, noting that people who participate in a funeral or a memorial service are exercising their freedom of expression and in many cases their religious freedom while celebrating a life or mourning a loss.

When those rights collide, Quirmbach said, some distance, some separation is appropriate. The right to free speech does not include the right to shout down someone elses speech. I think that this bill provides appropriate separation so that each may be able to express their views under our Constitution.

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Iowa Senate OKs bill addressing funeral protests

CORRUPT FLORIDA COPS DONT CARE ABOUT YOURE FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS
CORRUPT FLORIDA COPS DONT CARE ABOUT YOURE FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS THE ILLEGALY AND UNCONSTITUTIONALLY ARE RECORDING YOURE CELL PHONE ...

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CORRUPT FLORIDA COPS DONT CARE ABOUT YOURE FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS - Video

Probable Cause And The Fourth Amendment

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Probable Cause And The Fourth Amendment - Video

A panel of appellate judges disagreed Thursday about whether an Arkansas prison inmate was entitled to a hearing on his complaint that a visual body-cavity inspection by prison guards violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

Two members of the three-judge panel agreed with U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr.'s decision to dismiss the handwritten, pro-se lawsuit on the grounds that the allegations "failed to rise to a constitutional violation."

But Judge Kermit Bye of Fargo, N.D., disagreed with his fellow panelists at the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, writing in a partial dissent that he thinks Marshall should have conducted a "balancing test" to weigh the need for the search against an invasion of inmate Kendrick C. Story's personal rights.

"Despite broad rights of correctional officers to search prisoners, there are limits on when strip searches are appropriate," Bye wrote, citing previous 8th Circuit rulings. In those rulings, the appellate court said district judges may consider less-invasive techniques in deciding whether a strip search was reasonable, found it relevant that a strip search was conducted in a private bathroom, and held that strip searches should be conducted as far from public view as possible without compromising security concerns, in a manner that isn't degrading or humiliating.

In his lawsuit, Story said he was returning to the Williams Correctional Facility from a school at the Pine Bluff unit on April 16, 2013, when officers at the gate told him to remove his clothes, lift his genitals, and bend over and spread his buttocks for a visual body-cavity search. He complained that the search took place in front of other inmates and in view of two security cameras, and that female guards watched through a video feed from cameras in the master control room.

Marshall dismissed the case on July 30, 2013.

U.S. Circuit Judges Steven M. Colloton of Des Moines, Iowa, and Raymond W. Gruender of St. Louis said in their majority ruling affirming the dismissal that the prison guards were entitled to qualified immunity, making it "unnecessary and inefficient" to even consider whether there was a constitutional violation.

"Qualified immunity gives government officials breathing room to make reasonable but mistaken judgments, and protects all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law," the majority opinion said, citing a 2013 ruling.

The majority also said that the U.S. Supreme Court "never has resolved whether convicted inmates retain a Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches while in custody," although it has said it didn't apply to a search of a prison cell because of "the close and continual surveillance of inmates and their cells required to ensure institutional security and internal order."

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Chicago, has said inmates retain no rights under the Fourth Amendment regarding visual inspections by guards, but the 8th Circuit has said inmates are entitled to Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches of their bodies, the majority opinion noted.

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Decision to throw out suit affirmed

In a per curiam opinion this week, Grady v. North Carolina, the U.S. Supreme Court reinforced recent 4th Amendment decisions in holding that when the government physically occupies private property for the purpose of obtaining information, it engages in a search under the 4th Amendment.

The State of North Carolina subjects certain repeat offenders to a lifetime of satellite-based monitoring (SBM) after they complete their sentences. The plaintiff, Torrey Dale Grady, argued that such a program represents a violation of his 4th Amendment rights under recent U.S. Supreme Court opinions, including a 2012 case called United States v. Jones (installing a GPS tracker on a suspects car represents a search) and a 2013 case called Florida v. Jardines (using a drug-sniffing dog on a suspects porch represents a search).

The Supreme Court agreed with Grady that such monitoring constitutes a search. In light of these decisions, it follows that a state also conducts a search when it attaches a device to a persons body, without consent, for the purpose of tracking that individuals movements.

In concluding otherwise, the North Carolina Court of Appeals apparently placed decisive weight on the fact that the States monitoring program is civil in nature. See Jones, ___ N. C. App., at ___, 750 S. E. 2d, at 886 (the instant case involves a civil SBM proceeding). It is well settled, however, that the Fourth Amendments protection extends beyond the sphere of criminal investigations, Ontario v. Quon, 560 U. S. 746, 755 (2010), and the governments purpose in collecting information does not control whether the method of collection constitutes a search. A building inspector who enters a home simply to ensure compliance with civil safety regulations has undoubtedly conducted a search under the Fourth Amendment.

The court also rejected North Carolinas somewhat strange argument that its monitoring program is not meant to collect information:

The satellite-based monitoring program shall use a system that provides all of the following: (1) Time-correlated and continuous tracking of the geographic location of the subject . (2) Reporting of subjects violations of prescriptive and proscriptive schedule or location requirements. N. C. Gen. Stat. Ann. 14208.40(c).

The States program is plainly designed to obtain information. And since it does so by physically intruding on a subjects body, it effects a Fourth Amendment search.

The Court did not, however, examine whether the program constitutes an unreasonable, and therefore unconstitutional, search. The case was remanded to a lower court to sort through that issue.

Notwithstanding the reasonability issue, this ruling reinforces a heartening trend in 4th Amendment jurisprudence away from the nebulous reasonable expectation of privacy standard and toward a more concrete common-law trespass standard, at least insofar as searches of private property are concerned.

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Supreme Court Reinforces Jones Conception of 4th Amendment