RESISTING ARREST LAWS NEED TO BE CHANGED

The law on resisting arrest should be changed.  The law is that even if the arrest is unlawful, a person can still be found guilty of resisting arrest.  Here is a link to a video on YouTube where a police officer, without any provocation, attacked a person and then charged the person with resisting arrest.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUkiyBVytRQ   The person on the bicycle, who was attacked by the police officer, was charged with resisting arrest.  If you think that is an isolated incident, then search “police brutality” or “police excessive force” on YouTube.  It may take an entire day to watch all the videos on YouTube involving excessive force.  In the vast majority of cases, the “suspect” is charged with the crime of resisting arrest.  In Illinois, juries are instructed that even if the arrest was unlawful, the defendant cannot resist the unlawful activity of arresting officer.  So, in other words, the defendant must acquiesce or cooperate without protest with the violation of his civil rights. If a man were to do nothing more than push away a police officer who is unlawfully beating him, then the man has committed the crime of resisting arrest.  Obviously juries cannot be told that a person has the right to resist an unlawful arrest.  If that were the law, then criminals would have an excuse to fight with police officers and they would avoid prosecution by merely stating that they believed the arrest was unconstitutional.  Still, the current jury instruction results in a person having to go along with a violation of their rights, which seems equally flawed in logic.  Perhaps a better solution would be to not have a jury instruction at all.  Juries should be able to acquit a person when the only thing that person did was to not cooperate enough with a police officer who was engaged in unlawful activity.

You Can Be Arrested For Not Wearing a Seat Belt

Can the police arrest someone for a mere traffic violation, handcuff the person, and take them to the police station?  Unfortunately, yes, according to the United State’s Supreme Court.  In 2001, the Supreme Court decided the case of Atwater v. City of Lago Vista, 532 U.S. 318, 354, 121 S. Ct. 1536, 149 L.Ed.2d 549 (2001).  In that case, a woman was stopped in Texas for a seat belt violation.  In Texas, seat belt violations are misdemeanors, according to the Atwater decision.  In Illinois, most traffic offenses, excluding things like DUI and driving on a suspended or revoked driver’s license, are petty offenses as opposed to misdemeanors.  Ms. Atwater sued the City of Lago Vista, alleging that her fourth amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures (arrest) had been violated because her only crime was not wearing a seat belt.  The City of Lago Vista admitted that under Texas law this was a non-jailable offense.  The Supreme Court ruled that even with non-jailable offenses, a police officer can arrest someone for minor traffic offense, even if the state law does not authorize incarceration (jail) for the offense violated. 

Does this apply to Illinois since this was a misdemeanor in Texas and merely a petty offense in Illinois?  While I am unaware of any cases extending the holding to petty offenses, my guess would be that the court would reach the same result in an Illinois case as in the Atwater case.  Whether the offense is called a petty offense or a misdemeanor may not matter because the Court in the Atwater case was not troubled by the fact that this was a non-jailable offense.

This holding gives police officers more authority to take away someone’s liberty than a judge in a court and there would be no recourse for the person whose freedom has been taken away.  While police officers are usually well trained, that is not always the case.  In fact, in Illinois, there is a statute which allows municipalities to hire police officers without completing a required number of hours of training so long as the person completes that training within a certain number of days after being hired.  Judges, on the other hand, have a bachelor’s degree, a juris doctorate (the degree lawyers most obtain), and usually have worked several years in the practice of the law before becoming a judge.  With this holding, a police officer who has not even completed the minimum number of hours to be a police officer, seems to have greater authority to deprive someone of their liberty than a judge.  While you may think that this is a tempest in a teapot because no police officer would do such a thing, I remind you the police for the City of Lago Vista arrested Ms. Atwater when she had done nothing more than not wear her seatbelt.  If it happened there, it could happen here. 
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