Wave Maker: A Constitutional Right to Inebriation

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Friday, July 08, 2005

A Constitutional Right to Inebriation

This is an interesting development on the eve of multiple Supreme Court vacancies:

Eric Laverriere was celebrating last New Year's Eve at a friend's house in Waltham when police broke up the party. They took him into protective custody and kept him locked in a cell for nine hours until the effects of a night of beer drinking wore off....

....''One thing people should be able to do is drink in their own house," Laverriere said in a phone interview yesterday. ''That's the beauty of the land of the free."...

...Laverriere asserts in his lawsuit that he had ''a constitutional right to be drunk in private, a privacy and liberty right founded in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution."...

[at this point, you, the cynic, are saying to yourself, "this bozo must have done something to provoke the police." Let's proceed...]

Laverriere said that he drank several beers, but wasn't drunk, when officers arrived at his friend's duplex on Lyman Street about 2:30 a.m. and said someone had thrown bottles at a passing police cruiser. When everyone denied throwing bottles, Laverriere said, officers began screaming and ''becoming more threatening," prompting him to pick up a friend's digital camera and start videotaping.

Officer Jorge Orta ''came running to me, ripped the camera out of my hand and threw me down on the floor," Laverriere said in the interview, adding that he injured his shoulder and is scheduled to have surgery next month.....

Now then. A Constitutional right to get drunk in one's home without fear of arrest.

Moral: When intoxicated, don't take pictures.

Posted by: Wave Maker / 1:59 PM/ |