Renee McDonald Hutchins Quotes

Without the burden on the police to adhere to the requirements of the 4th Amendment, you loose the dogs.

Nearly every day on the television set the hero cop breaks into the bad guy’s house and beats a confession out of him and we cheer on the cop. Propaganda smears our clear vision. It causes us to accept the diminishment of our constitutional protections as something to be lauded — after all, the cop was protecting us.

There is no fear exception to the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

Every American, regardless of their background, has the right to live free of unwarranted government intrusion. Repealing the worst provisions of the Patriot Act will reign in this gross abuse of power and restore to everyone our basic Constitutional rights.

Since we enacted the PATRIOT Act almost three years ago, there has been tremendous public debate about its breadth and implications on due process and privacy.

Civil libertarians have raised concerns that some of the Patriot Act's provisions infringe on Constitutional rights. Those concerns are not supported by the facts.

The right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest.

In a Constitution for a free people, there can be no doubt that the meaning of ‘liberty’ must be broad indeed.

Even if a person is doing nothing wrong, in a free society, that person shouldn’t have to justify every action that government officials might view as suspicious. A key component of freedom is not having to worry about how to explain oneself all the time.

If you are an American, you can understand why people cannot go through your house and go through your files. By the same token, should they be able to go through them electronically?

Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.

It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest.

The callous use of general warrants and the disregard for the Bill of Rights must end. Forcing us to choose between our rights and our safety is a false choice and we are better than that as a nation and as a people.

How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We're supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties.

No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution. I suppose it never occurred to anyone at the time that it could be prevented.

Even though some in our government may claim that civil liberties must be compromised in order to protect the public, we must be wary of what we are giving up in the name of fighting terrorism.

To me, that means getting back to the point where our Constitution means that you don't tap people's phones and poke into their e-mail and you don't arrest people and keep them hidden for a year and a half without charging them.

There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all.

Violating the 4th Amendment guarantees against illegal searches and seizures is not the way to solve crime problems.

The term "free society" is a meaningless, empty phrase if it does not mean a society that is free from harassment from its own police.

There is no past invasion of our liberties which by its nature could not happen again. Without our constant vigilance, everything that has happened before will happen again.

You’ve got to have safeguards [on law enforcement authorities] if we’re going to continue to have the freedom we’ve had for the past 200 years.

I like my privacy as much as the next one, but I am compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific Constitutional provision.

There is no drug exception to the Constitution.

When awesome investigative power is entrusted to so many individuals, it is extremely important that they wield it with a proper regard for your constitutional rights, especially your right to privacy.