Dangerous Attention Whore Rozita Swinton is back on stage in court next week

One week from today, Rozita Swinton will appear (maybe) in court for the first time after her false reporting of abuse at YFZ. It continues to amaze me that with the power of the press, so little has been discovered about her. Superficial investigations have been made, superficial protests have been made about the "danger to children" (yawn) that digging into her past could cause and 3 months have passed. Two and a half since it was revealed that SHE was the caller. Rozita waived right to a hearing in one case, hired a prominent local El Paso county lawyer who got a continuance on a MISDEMEANOR charge, took a leave of absence from work and has "gone into hiding" according to some newspaper reports.

I've got circumstantial evidence that suggests she's hiding IN Colorado Springs and that she cruises this blog (and almost certainly others) with a relatively new computer keeping tabs on what she looks like in the media mirror. The only article I could find in recent weeks that even touched on what Rozita did, not who she was, is by Ronald J. Rychlak at "Inside Catholic." Ronald J. Rychlak is the associate dean and MDLA Professor of Law at the University of Mississippi School of Law and a published author.

Prof. Rychlak makes some of the ritualistic errors of repeating assumptions found in the press, promoted by the state of Texas elswhere in this article, but I found this section interesting;

"The U.S. Constitution protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures. Taking children away from their parents is a really significant seizure -- about as big as they get. So a high level of cause should have been established before the seizures took place. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

The authorities in this case took their evidence to a judge to obtain a warrant authorizing them to seize the children. Judges routinely evaluate evidence before a search or seizure takes place, and they only issue a warrant if there is "probable cause." That means that there must be enough evidence so that a reasonable person would conclude that a search would reveal evidence of a crime or that a seizure would similarly be justified by law.

As you might imagine, evidence that comes from an anonymous tip to a "hotline" is highly suspect. After all, when you don't know the speaker, it is hard to evaluate his or her honesty or basis of knowledge. Moreover, probable cause must be individualized. The search of an individual is not justified simply because there is probable cause to be suspicious of the neighborhood (or the ranch.)

Here Prof. Rychlak suggests that what happened at YFZ was a sort of door to door search of a neighborhood for drug dealers because it is known drug dealing is going on at high levels in the neighborhood. That would be like having your door broken down and your house searched at 3 a.m. with armed swat team members because police believe that there are two or three meth labs in your subdivision. You would of course be outraged if this happened. What Prof. Rychlak also does is connect the dots between the unreliable nature of such tips and the wrongness of going into whole neighborhoods conducting house to house searches based on such unreliable tips.

You don't do that because the tips are unreliable and you don't conduct neighborhood searches to find particular criminals. You knock, you ask. Small wonder that the CPS tried to get the ranch treated as "one household."

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