The return of The Outrage? Alabama qualifies.

I've been thinking about resurrecting "Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages," a popular feature of my old cable access show. Part of the reason is this would be in line for recognition:

On March 17, the Alabama Supreme Court effectively ruled that everyone in Alabama - residents and visitors alike - must carry  personal identification with them at all times even though there is no law requiring it.

This came as the result of a suit filed by Michael Jennings, a Black pastor who was arrested in May 2022 by Childersburg police while watering his neighbor’s flowers after a woman called 911 about a "young Black male" on the property.

When the cops came, Jennings identified himself as “Pastor Jennings,” said he lived across the street, and that he was caring for his neighbor’s yard while they were vacationing.

Apparently still suspicious that this Black man (Did I mention Jennings is Black?) seen in police body camera videos standing in a driveway holding a garden hose and spraying glowers was up to something nefarious, the cops demanded he produce identification.

He refused, saying he'd done nothing wrong.

So the cops arrested him for "obstructing a government operation." The charge was later dismissed, and he sued the city and the officers in federal court for false arrest.

Federal District Judge R. David Proctor dismissed the claim but in what could well be thought a surprise twist, the reliably right-wing 11th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision, finding that the cops did not have sufficient cause for an arrest.

Here's where it becomes an Outrage.

Proctor took it on himself to ask the Alabama Supreme Court to weigh in - much like Daddy says "no," so you run to Mommy to see if you can get a different answer. 

Well, the Mommy court ruled 6-3 that the state’s “stop-and-identify” law “does not,” wrote Justice William Sellers for the majority, “exclude from its purview a request” - “request” being legalese for “do it or else” - “for physical identification when a suspect provides an incomplete or unsatisfactory response to an officer’s demand” for ID. Meaning the demand for physical ID was legit and so was the arrest.

Okay, but who gets to decide when a “suspect” had offered an “incomplete or unsatisfactory response?” Who gets to decide if that response is incomplete or unsatisfactory enough to justify a demand for physical ID? Why, the cop, of course. The very person towards who you were not overtly subservient gets to decide if you’ve been cooperative enough or not.

What’s more, Sellers’ opinion referred to “Terry stops,” named for the 1968 SCOTUS case Terry v. Ohio, in which the Supremes said cops only need reasonable suspicion to stop and question someone, “reasonable suspicion” meaning they could specify an “articulable reason” - no hunches or feelings, but a reason they could actually state - for suspecting the person stopped is, or is about to be, engaged in criminal activity. Apparently in Alabama a Black man watering flowers (Did I mention Jennings is Black?) constitutes reasonable suspicion of criminal intent.

The ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Woods Foundation, and the Cato Institute and filed amicus briefs in support of Jennings, to no avail. Matthew Cavedon of the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice accurately described the decision as a “significant expansion of government power over people.”

Which it is. Applied to the real world, this gives cops, at least (for now) in Alabama, the effective power to stop anyone on the flimsiest of pretexts and demand physical ID anytime they want to and to arrest you if you won’t produce it - or if you can’t because you’re not carrying any because there is no law requiring you to. Put another way, the cops can demand physical proof of ID because the law doesn’t say they can’t.

Which seems to be the standard rule which is being applied here: Cops can do whatever the laws don't say they can't, a principle predating and extending well beyond the injustice to Jennings, who is just another example of the long history of abuse we have wrapped in that standard.

And it properly can be said of both the particular wrong to Jennings and the collective long train of wrongs done to a long train of people under that principle: It is an Outrage.