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0 pointsneaden4y ago0 comments

This isn't true though. Police can search with reasonable suspicion in all kinds of circumstances, Terry v Ohio for instance allows for the police to stop and frisk someone on reasonable suspicion of them being involved in a crime and armed. I haven't seen any citation that a game warden can enter your home and search your freezer on reasonable suspicion and all you've linked in a Quora answer by some guy who's qualification is "published author" not a lawyer or a legal opinion. If a game warden has reasonable suspicion that you are committing a crime they can pretty clearly search say a cooler you have with you when fishing, trying to say this means they can enter your house and search it is an unfounded leap.

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User234y ago· 2 in thread

I get that you don’t like it. I don’t like it either, but it’s still the law in most if not all states.

I assume you don’t hunt. As I’ve said already, you don’t have to believe me. Talk to a game warden or an attorney who is familiar with conservation law and they will confirm that game wardens have expansive warrantless search powers.

bryanrasmussen4y ago

We're on the internet, if this is such a simple thing to certify by asking a lawyer or a game warden then it should be reasonably easy to provide an authoritative link.

The closest I can find is this https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/california-case-law/scotu...

To Quote: "The California Supreme Court ruled that a game warden who reasonably believes that a person has recently been fishing or hunting, but lacks reasonable suspicion that the person has violated an applicable fish or game statute or regulation, may stop the suspect's vehicle to demand the person display all fish or game the person has caught or taken."

This is obviously more power in some ways than a police officer has , but in some ways also very limited. If you can provide something more authoritative, extensive and to the point than that I think you should.

User234y ago

Here's the best I can find[1]. It very much depends on the state, but that constitutional analysis says that it's possible the relaxed search rules could even apply to individual hunters or fishers. I can't find any definitive court rulings either way on specifically searching a freezer inside a house, but in other cases the courts have generally been deferential to the state's interest in protecting its wildlife. Plenty of hunters have experienced such searches, so it's a real problem.

Why then have these interior searches never been challenged? One reason might be that these abuses virtually exclusively affect low income suburban and rural white men. They don't have the resources to take a case to the SCOTUS. The prestige media is uninterested in advocating for them and the ACLU and other pro bono law firms don't prioritize that demographic either. Given the choice of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars out of pocket to litigate or pleading to a misdemeanor and paying a $1,000 fine, so far everyone has chosen the latter.

[1] https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl....

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