News of Clark Freshman, a former UM Law colleague now teaching at UC Hastings, that appeared in the SF Weekly: Castro Pot Bust Goes Awry and a Law Professor Threatens to Sue.
If the news story is accurate, the police got a clearly invalid warrant, either through carelessness or worse (it described the house completely inaccurately). And indeed, the raid was a bust — for the police.
The SFPD and DEA found no piles of marijuana money at 243 Diamond St., one of six addresses raided simultaneously in San Francisco that morning. Instead, they found Clark Freshman, who rents the penthouse at the two-unit building. Freshman, a UC Hastings law professor and the main consultant to the television show Lie to Me, was put into handcuffs while in his bathrobe as agents searched, despite Freshman’s insistence that they had the wrong place and were breaking the law.
He’s sort of angry:
“I told them to call the judge and get their warrant updated,” he says. “They just laughed at me — I guess that’s why they’re called pigs.”
No, he’s really angry:
[Freshman] pledged to sue until “I see [the agents’] houses sold at auction and their kids’ college tuitions taken away from them. There will not be a better litigated case this century.”
I’d be spitting mad too. Not sure I’d say that about college tuitions, though. They’re sacred.
(Thanks to Michael Marshall for the story.)
Too bad he wasn’t my Crim Pro professor as well as my Civ Pro professor.
And he was a very good professor at that. Sad to see this happened to him.
Sounds like the lawmen fouled up. Indeed, dynamic raids can go badly wrong, with far worse results. If you haven’t seen the Cato Institute’s work on this, go here http://www.cato.org/raidmap/# for an amazing interactive map.
That said, calling the lawmen pigs was out of bounds for and, for a case he plans to be best litigated case of the century, frankly stupid. Law professor as litigator is usually a poor formula — it’s one thing to have a fool for a client, another to have a fool who thinks he’s a genius.
Excellent Advice.
Re-Read Robert’s comments above at least 3 times!
The term ‘pigs’ was deemed “out of bounds” by “Robert Kuntz”? YOU try getting subjected to something like this by cops displaying attitudes which earned their ilk this description and see what creative names YOU come up with.
As far as law professors not being good lawyers because they think they are “geniuses”? The thing is, many of them ARE geniuses. Geniuses with friends who are also geniuses, and EVERYBODY is skilled in the law. That’s not a good thing when you are opposite them and they’ve got the law and the facts AND the emotion on their side.
Time for the City of San Francisco to back the money truck up to this victim’s doorstep. AND for them to rid themselves of the pigs who caused this.